Popverse's top stories

• Disney and Universal's new lawsuit against Midjourney is shockingly blunt, calling the genAI company a "bottomless pit of plagerism"
• MEMBERS ONLY: Popeye, Scooby Doo, and Speed Racer walked (and drove) so that How to Train Your Dragon could fly [For Your Consideration]
• The Rock's Black Adam action figure wasn't "ripped" enough for his tastes, so he had Todd McFarlane fix it before it was released

With Marvel Comics' current hit title Ultimate Spider-Man, the indomitable Peter Parker is able to get the one thing he's wanted for decades but was never able to get - a loving wife and a loving child in a stable (but not perfect) home life. In the story, it's pitted as an alternate universe that diverges from the Spider-Man we have known for the past 80+ years - the one who wanted all those things, but the old Parker luck got in the way. But for Donny Cates, that old Parker luck got in the way of him writing this story, as he was Marvel's originally planned writer for it all.

In May after months of speculation, Ultimate Spider-Man writer Jonathan Hickman confirmed for the first time that Cates was the original writer of the series, but due to outside events, he was called in to replace him. Cates himself spoke to Popverse about it, saying the issue was a tragic car accident which left him unable to work for the past two years, and now he's coming to spell out what his plans were for the series - plans that made their way into the eventual published version.

Ultimate Spider-Man by Donny Cates, according to Donny Cates

"My entire pitch for [Ultimate Spider-Man] was that people want him to be married, to have kids. Do it for them! What are we doing here? There’s an entire contingent of people screaming for him and Mary," Cates tells Popverse's Dave Buesing. "It's like we have a Chili's, you have people screaming for ice cream. 'No, fuck you, we don't have ice cream.' 'Sell ice cream! What the fuck's wrong with you?'"

As Cates tells Popverse, pitching a married Peter Parker with a child wasn't hard - in his mind, fans were ready. The writer points to the core group of readers of the original Ultimate Spider-Man from the early '00s, who are now 20+ years older and are fully-fledged adults. And for those people, Spider-Man as Marvel Comics was presenting him in the main comic books wasn't a Spider-Man they could connect with as much as they could when they were younger.

"The thing is that people who read those original Ultimate Spider-Man books are now my age, right? And Spider-Man’s not really a cipher for us anymore," The 40-year-old writer says. "Because we've all got jobs and kids and stuff like that. And the idea of great responsibility is way different than Peter's life."

Cates then pinpoints the heart of it, going back to Stan Lee's motto "With great power comes great responsibility." As an adult, married father, the new Ultimate Spider-Man has a whole new level of responsibility, on top of everything that he had as a teenage superhero.

"So you have to see what's harder? To be Spider-Man with these ideas of responsibility when you have no one at home waiting for you?" says Cates. "It's hard when there's a lot; it takes more of a hero, but he does it even though he has these things at home, to me."

Cates calls the MCU Spider-Man actor Tom Holland "a kid", and says the Spider-Man in the mainline Spider-Man books is "perpetually a kid." With his plans for a rebooted Ultimate Spider-Man, he was pitching the Spider-Man he as a Spider-Man fan wanted.

"...Spider-Man has always been there for me. And I pitched it because I wanted to have a Spider-Man for me," he says. "So I said, 'The ultimate Spider-Man for us would look like us; a little gray in the beard, has to go to the store and get stuff for the kids.' I was like, 'That's what people would respond to now because we grew up and didn't have a Peter for us anymore.'"

How his Ultimate Spider-Man pitch was about "unraveling" Marvel's origins and reluctance

Cates says that in many ways, his pitch for Ultimate Spider-Man and the overall Ultimate Marvel reboot was "unraveling Marvel's origins" and giving these characters "the choice of being who they're gonna be. Rather than these things happening to them."

Cates calls this "the ultimate choice" -- fitting for a pitch about rebooting the Ultimate Marvel line, and one he saw as a bit meta considering the company's avoidance of showing the main Peter Parker as a husband and father.

"I think it's a powerful distinction, and it becomes the ultimate choice," says Cates. "And it's all obviously anchored by Peter. And the idea is that Marvel doesn't want to give him kids and a wife because the character is evergreen. The character has always gotta be the model of who it is."

Cates understands the company's reticence to making the main Spider-Man a full-fledged adult - he's clearly thought through it all, and had conversations with the people inside Marvel for their reasoning.

"Eventually, when you give him the wife and kids, eventually what's gonna happen is either he's gonna have adult kids and you have a grandfather as Spider-Man, or he's gonna lose a child, or he's gonna get a divorce," explains Cates. "That's their reasoning. That taints Spider-Man over time."

But Cates' argument is that life changes such as this, when done right, have been key parts of the character's eventual legacy - and characters like this are sometimes treated as too fragile by their owners.

"My argument would be he killed Gwen Stacy like a year into it. He broke that bitches’ neck. He's okay. He's been divorced. All these things have already happened," says Cates. "The way that I think of these characters is that you don't honor these characters by treating them as fragile. I think it's our job as the inheritors of the legacy of these characters to try to break them as hard as you can. And it's only in doing that that they will show you how strong they are."

Cates points to the Spider-Man Clone Saga, Return of Superman, and Secret Empire as a testament to the resiliency of these landmark characters - and questions why Spider-Man having a child is any different.

"Look, every character survived the '90s. They can't be broke. If we didn't fuck up fucking Mullet Superman dying, coming back… and I mean Cap was a Nazi, and Peter can’t have a kid? What are we doing?" says Cates. "Just say you don't wanna do [it,] that's fine."

But what he pitched for Ultimate Spider-Man, and now what's being done by others in the subsequent new series, gives the character "a whole new set of beautiful choices."

"... Peter has these things that he's gonna lose as opposed to not getting them, so that he doesn't have to lose them," Cates says. "At a certain point, he becomes selfish in that is really beautiful because he should be selfish to a certain point..."

You can read Popverse's full interview with Donny Cates here.

Get ready for what's next with our guide to upcoming comics, how to buy comics at a comic shop, and our guide to Free Comic Book Day 2025.