Editor's Note: Ultimate Spider-Man #132 arrives in stores tomorrow, May 13.

We haven't seen a new issue of Ultimate Spider-Man since February. Usually, a delay of two-and-a-half months would lead to a certain amount of criticism for the creators involved, but this time I don't think that the blame can be placed on the shoulders of Brian Michael Bendis or Stuart Immonen. Both writer and artist have proven themselves to be fast and reliable in the past, with this book in particular boasting an impressive average of more than 15 issues per year since its launch in October 2000. No, the reason for this delay is the increasingly late shipping of Jeph Loeb and David Finch's Ultimatum miniseries, the plot of which underpins Bendis and Immonen's current story.

Putting concerns about the timeliness of the issue aside, it's a pretty good story in its own right. Bendis has wisely avoided any close links between his story and the plot of Ultimatum, taking the basic premise of that series' first issue -- that Manhattan has been devastated by Magneto's gigantic tidal wave -- and channelling it into his book as a worst case scenario for Spider-Man. The connection between the two stories is no more intricate than that. We're not getting several issues of Spidey getting sucked into mutant politics and crossover team-ups: we're just seeing him do what he does best as a New York superhero.

In addition to the Ultimatum Wave and the presence of the Ultimate Hulk, Bendis introduces yet another problem for Peter Parker to deal with here, in the form of an invasion of demons from the Dark Dimension who have been freed from Dr. Strange's house as a result of damage caused by Magneto's attack. This gives penciller Stuart Immonen the chance to cut loose with some nightmarish visions for both Spider-Man and the Hulk, with Bendis coming up with some disturbing hallucinatory imagery for his collaborator to illustrate. Immonen also does well with the larger images of mass destruction, and I love his twisted take on one of the opening pages of Amazing Fantasy #15, which makes for an amusing (but thankfully short-lived) dream sequence.

Despite all of these fantastical trappings, Bendis never loses sight of Spider-Man's status as the everyman of the Marvel Universe. The way in which the conveyor belt of disasters is filtered through Spidey's grounded inner monologue serves to make it feel like another really, really bad day at the office for Peter Parker, making the emotional content of the issue ring true even though the challenges faced by Spidey are even more outlandish and extreme than usual. Indeed, the combination of this issue's cliffhanger ending and the symbolic cover of the next issue makes me wonder whether the Ultimate Universe might have done the unthinkable to Marvel's flagship character. I just hope we don't have too long to wait before we find out.

It's not a perfect issue: despite enjoying the story, I still can't help but feel that I would have been happier without any direct links between Ultimate Spider-Man and Ultimatum at all, but Bendis makes the best of the hand he's been dealt. There are one or two places where the character interactions feel a little forced (such as the antagonism between Kitty and Mary Jane), and there's a sense that the writer is throwing everything but the kitchen sink into his story in order to raise the stakes as high as possible for Spidey, without creating particularly coherent links between every element of the story (for example, I'm still not sure why the Hulk is still hanging around). However, that jumbled, chaotic feel does work in the story's favour, reinforcing the idea that this is a catastrophe on an unprecedented scale for the Ultimate Universe.

The past few issues of Ultimate Spider-Man have been a great example of a writer taking an idea that he has been asked to incorporate for editorial reasons and turning it into something that not only feels as though it belongs in his book, but works better there than it does anywhere else. My advice? Ignore the main Ultimatum series and its tie-ins, and treat this book as the main event instead.

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