The Ultimate Spider-Man cartoon, scheduled to debut on Disney XD in fall 2011, already boasts Brian Michael Bendis (writer of all 145 issues and counting of both iterations of the Ultimate Spider-Man comic book) as a writer and producer, plus the “Man of Action” team of Joe Kelly, Joe Casey, Steven Seagle and Duncan Rouleau on board as writers and executive producers.
As if things could get any more appealing, today MTV’s Splash Page blog broke news that perennial fan-favorite writer Paul Dini will also be on the show’s creative team. The very same Paul Dini that was an integral part of Batman: The Animated Series, considered by many to be the pinnacle of superhero animation. (Not to mention his work on Superman, Justice League and Lost.) No one would blame you for getting excited right now.
The Splash Page interview with Dini also gives the most details that have thus far been released on the show — Dini says “We’re going to change a few things — nothing too dramatically,” and that “there are elements that are going to come directly from the comics, and there are elements that are just going to take it into an entirely new and different direction.” Read it in full here.
August 4th, 2010 at 7:29 pm
holy crap, this series is gonna be a creative juggernaut!
August 4th, 2010 at 8:41 pm
Man, this sounds encouraging! Now if only they could get Bruce Timm in on this. Talk about your pinnacle! Not that it’ll happen, but still! At least a man can dream, can’t he?
August 4th, 2010 at 10:33 pm
Oh no. How can DC let Paul join the dark side. Well, Hope this will bring the best out of both company then. Marvel has been sucks the whole time on their animation department. With Paul working with Marvel, I hope this is just going to benefit all of us. Hope DC will ramp up their gear to make sure they are still no.1 on animation side.
August 4th, 2010 at 11:46 pm
@Jesse
Dini has had barely anything to do with the animation side of DC since BTAS ended like 11 years ago.
August 5th, 2010 at 1:38 am
they’ve tried to do a spiderman cartoon at least 8 times over the last 15 years. I don’t have high hopes for the longevity of this.
August 5th, 2010 at 5:23 am
Why does Marvel need a guy that mainly writes mediocre DC books on a animated series of them? Dont get it
August 5th, 2010 at 6:04 am
It sounds great…but I just don’t see how they will top the incrediblt awesomeness that was “Spectacular Spider-Man”. That show had it all….action, heart, and drama. Here’s hoping that USM can be even half that good…and that they reign in some of the Bendis-itis that plagued the comic in later issues.
August 5th, 2010 at 6:34 am
Let’s see…Ultimate Spider-man was a watered down re-imagined Spider-man and an animated series based on that comic will be a watered down version of that. And it’s going to be written by comic writers?! OOOOOOOOO!!! Spider-man comics have been crap for like two decades. So let’s get the writers that produced that crap to create a crap animated series.
August 5th, 2010 at 8:50 am
Agree with Shinlyle – Spectacular Spiderman was fantastic, maybe the best marvel animated series ever and the only one that could compete with the Timm-verse (Wolverine and the X-Men and Iron Man were both pretty good, too, though). They’ll be lucky if Ult. Spiderman is half as good.
August 5th, 2010 at 9:50 am
I wish they would just bring back BTAS and let Dini do that again.
August 5th, 2010 at 11:26 am
Glad Dini’s on this project. Animated Spidey will never die, I guess.
August 5th, 2010 at 4:00 pm
Marvel has shot Spider-man in the foot everytime for the past five years or so. The ‘amazing’ is beyond terrible and the ‘Ultimate’ books sounds like they took a great thing and destroyed that, too. It sounds like the same thing with this last cartoon.
How could they take the best comic book character of all time and just screw with him every year so his book is incomprehensible and the stuff that does work is destroyed?
There were people who said that Spider-man died at Amazing Spider-man #545. They were right.
August 6th, 2010 at 12:51 am
Man are people still complaining about BND. Get over it and enjoy the book cause its not a bad one.
August 6th, 2010 at 6:22 am
As exciting as this is, it leaves a terrible taste in the mouth that Marvel animation ground the bones of ‘Spectacular’ to make their bread. The animation equivalent of if in 2007, WB announced they were canning ‘The Dark Knight’ but hiring Joss Whedon to do a new ‘Batman’ reboot. Uh, yay?
August 6th, 2010 at 10:09 am
Fear not Jesse, Bruce Timm is the guy DC needs to pay to keep at Warner’s Animation. He’s been running the show there along with Dini since BTAS and down through JLU and animated movies.