The Ultimate Universe... It can be looked upon in one of two ways.

The first - as an attempt to make high quality comics that are easily accessible to new comers to comics, not requiring a vast amount of reading of back issues to understands characters, events and so on.

The second - a cheap way of pumping more money out of the same characters, stories - with the added bonus that the comics can now be hipper and edgier!

As with most things, the truth doubtless lies somewhere in between... but the fact remains that as a concept, it has been popular... but it seems that in many ways it has already betrayed the ideals of its inception.

The Ultimate Universe (UU) started out as a "back to basics" style. Character origins were to come from more realistic sources than radiation, magic rings or such. They would come from genetic engineering and other more probable causes. No aliens or other worldly beings... at least, this was the idea behind Ultimate Spiderman and for the most part, it worked.

Naturally though, all good things must come to an end and the success of Ultimate Spiderman spawned many more titles... including but not limited to: The Ultimates, Ultimate X-Men and Ultimate Fantastic Four - to name a few. All of which did their part to erode the (relative) realism of the UU. This isn't to say the UU doesn't have enjoyable stories... it does but for a while, it was refreshing to have heroes who weren't slipping off to other dimensions or battling foes from other worlds

It's worth asking if - with the massive success of Heroes - the powers that be at Marvel are kicking themselves. While the Ultimate Universe - at its beginnings - was still very much a classic comic book universe, the parallels are obvious. It was far less contrived than the mainstream DC or Marvel universes... that's not to say that this approach hasn't been attempted before... it has... it's simply never met with such success as Heroes.