Marvel’s Reborn: Ultimate Impact #1 arrives as one of the most ambitious crossover launching pads of 2026 — a book that juggles three distinct worlds, half a dozen new characters, a cosmic death cult, and a teenage Spider-Man who simply cannot catch a break before sunrise. Written by Chris Condon (of Ultimate Wolverine fame) and illustrated by the incomparable Stefano Caselli, this first issue moves with the confidence of a story that knows exactly what it wants to be: a slow-burn powder keg with a very short fuse.
The Negative Zone Is Not a Safe Place
The comic opens not in Brooklyn or Manhattan, but somewhere far older and far darker. The Negative Zone. Universe-6160. The sky bleeds red. Torches line stone corridors. Alien warriors crouch before a throne carved from darkness. And at the centre of it all stands a figure who has clearly been waiting a very long time for this moment.
This is Hostilicus the Devastator — and from the very first line of his internal monologue, you understand you are dealing with a true believer.
The opening pages are structured as a war sermon, Hostilicus addressing his congregation of warriors with the rehearsed, hypnotic rhythm of a cult leader. Why do we fight, brothers and sisters? We fight to remember. Why do we kill? We kill for Great Annihilus. Why do we win? Because we are Warriors of Annihilus. The responses come back from the crowd like a litany — Yes. Yes. We are relentless. We are ruthless. It is chilling precisely because the cadence is so familiar. This is not mindless fanaticism. This is organised devotion.
Hostilicus speaks of the cosmos as it was and as it shall be again — a universe swept clean of false prophets, particularly the faction he calls Blastaar’s Children, who have staked their claim on this ever-constricting dimension. He positions himself and his followers as holy soldiers preparing the way for the Second Coming of Annihilus, their true lord god of the Negative Zone.
But Hostilicus is not merely a preacher. He is a survivor. He recounts — with barely concealed pride — how a dangerous outsider slipped through the dimensional barriers into the Negative Zone. Mar-Vell, the rogue one. A traveller from another reality who arrived uninvited and had to be dealt with. Hostilicus defeated him personally. He broke Mar-Vell’s back like a child’s knife and cast him back into the darkness from whence he came.
And he kept Mar-Vell’s Nega-Bands as a souvenir.
The second part of this Negative Zone sequence expands outward into a breathtaking double-page spread: the Forever Battle. The Warriors of Annihilus crash headlong into their enemies across a blood-orange sky, spears flying, bodies colliding, fire erupting from the ground. Caselli’s art is at its most operatic here — the battle has the epic scale of a fantasy siege and the personal, gritty detail of a street fight happening at the same time. Hostilicus watches from a vantage point, coolly assessing. He has unlocked the secrets of his enemies. He knows how they fight, how they serve Lord Annihilus in the Forever Battle. Soon, we will be victorious. This, Hostilicus the Devastator believes.
It is a masterful cold open. We don’t yet know how the Negative Zone connects to Miles Morales and a scattered handful of mysterious boxes — but writer Chris Condon makes absolutely certain we feel its menace before we’ve met our hero.
Miles Morales Has Not Slept Enough
Cut sharply to: Brooklyn. New York. Universe-616.
An alarm clock is shrieking. A young man is very much asleep.
Miles Morales — our Spider-Man — narrates through his private journal, addressing it the way teenagers talk to the void when there’s truly no one else to listen. He was out late fighting crime, like Spider-People do. He thought he’d get a few minutes of sleep, like normal people do. Sleep had other plans.
The reason he can’t rest: Origin Boxes. These are the Maker’s most dangerous artifacts — catalysts capable of creating superheroes from scratch. The Maker, a villainous Reed Richards from Earth-6160, used them to engineer super-powered individuals in a world that had been deliberately stripped of heroes. Miles travelled to that alternate universe, witnessed the fallout firsthand, and returned to Universe-616 carrying several Origin Boxes with the intention of getting them into the hands of Earth’s mightiest heroes before anyone dangerous could claim them.
His contact Misty Knight told him the plan: hand them to their world’s Iron Man. That means Tony Stark. And Tony Stark has been calling.
Missed calls: five.
Miles slept through all of them — including the morning of their scheduled meeting, which was set at an ungodly early hour. He bolts out of bed, into his suit, and leaps out the window into the pre-dawn streets of Brooklyn, already composing the most awkward voicemail in superhero history in his head.
The Spot Drops In
Miles is mid-swing through New York’s awakening streets, leaving Tony a rambling message — “Heeeeeeey Tony, what’s up, I’m just, uh, calling you back, not running super late, definitely didn’t sleep through my alarm and five phone calls” — when his Spider-Sense goes absolutely haywire.
He barely has time to register it before — SWOCK — something hits him like a freight train. He tumbles hard to the street below. Winded, disoriented, already in trouble.
Standing before him in the alley, white-skinned and covered in black void-holes that seem to lead nowhere and everywhere at once, is The Spot.
Miles’ internal monologue immediately flags something important: I just fought this guy’s counterpart back on that other Earth. This can’t be a coincidence. Can it? And The Spot confirms it with easy, almost apologetic conversational tone: “Sorry to drop in and dash, Spider-Man… but my current employer asked me to grab this for him.” He’s after the web sac. Someone has hired him specifically to steal the Origin Boxes.
Miles isn’t having it. He snaps back into action immediately, firing webs — THWIPTHWIP — and closing the distance. “Don’t take what’s not yours, bro!”
Spot responds by launching a concentrated portal sphere directly at Miles, who narrowly twists away — “Hnn–” — before returning the attack with a powerful swing that sends Spot stumbling. For a brief moment, it looks like Miles has the upper hand. Spot scrambles, cries out “N-no–!”, and Miles thinks he’s secured the sac.
But Spot gives him a cold, knowing smile from across the alley. “Don’t be so sure about that.”
A Fight on Two Fronts
The battle escalates fast. Miles commits to what he internally calls a full-court press — keeping constant pressure on Spot, giving him no breathing room, no time to activate more portals. Miles dives on him hard — WHAM — driving him into a wall. “Dude, I do not want to beat you up again!”
Spot, genuinely confused, fires back: “What?! When did we–?”
And Miles catches himself. Right. This is not the same Spot. Different universe, different man, same power set. He makes a note: “Okay, this is definitely not the same Spot I ran into in the other universe… which means…”
Which means Miles has time. Not much — but enough. He hammers Spot again. KRAK. Spot stumbles, catches himself on a fire escape railing. Miles pushes harder, unleashes his bio-electric power in a focused burst directly into Spot’s body. The electricity crackles through him in a blinding yellow pulse — ZZZAAAAT — and Spot seizes up, screaming: “AHH–!”
Miles stands over him. “It’s called a venom sting! Now just do me a favor and stay down!”
Spot collapses against the wall, shaking, sparking. For a full beat, it’s over. Miles lets himself exhale.
Then Spot looks up with a grin, and everything goes wrong.
Into the Between-Space
“See, Spider-Man, it’s you who doesn’t understand…” Spot says, almost gently. “What you can’t see… might just slip right through your fingers.”
A portal opens beneath Spot — and he drops through it, taking the web sac with him. Miles lunges, grabs the sac, refuses to let go — and gets pulled through the portal himself.
They fall into the void between spaces. FWOOOOSH.
The dimension between Spot’s portals is rendered in cold, surreal blue — like being submerged at the bottom of a deep swimming pool while the world above continues without you. Miles immediately registers how wrong everything feels here: “This dimension is like being dropped into a swimming pool filled with honey. It’s like—”
He can barely move. His limbs are sluggish. His reflexes, normally superhuman, feel like they’re running through static.
Spot has no such problem. He wrenches the web sac free of Miles’ grip with a triumphant shout: “Ha-ha! GOT IT! And took down a Spider too!” He moves with easy confidence in his own dimensional space, already turning toward an exit portal, the precious sac tucked under his arm.
Miles refuses to give up. Fighting through the resistance of the between-space, he fires a web line — THWIP — and snags the sac from a distance. Spot spins around furious. “Not gonna work this time!”
Miles grits his teeth and calls his second trick: “You liked my venom sting? Wait’ll you check out my venom sword!” He charges the web line with his full bio-electric charge — BBBZZZZZZZZ — sending a wave of crackling energy surging toward Spot along the web. The electricity tears through the between-space like a blade.
But Spot catches the line. And something unexpected happens.
The Reaction
Miles pulls hard on the electrified web, yanking Spot toward him. “Gimme the sac, Spot!” Spot struggles, twisting — “Gah–!” — but neither of them can break free. The electricity is still running. The web is still live. And in the weird physics of Spot’s pocket dimension, something starts to build.
“Nn– Spot! I can’t pull it loose! What’s happening?!”
The energy feedback between Miles’ venom blast and Spot’s portal-space creates a cascading reaction — “I d-d-d-don’t kn-n-no-ow… s-s-some s-sort of–“ — and then the whole dimension detonates.
“–REACTION–!”
BZZZZZZZZZAAAAAAT.
They are blasted out of Spot’s between-space and back into the real world with the force of a small explosion. A massive shockwave tears through a New York street as both figures come screaming through a rip in the air above the road. Pedestrians dive out of the way. Car windows shatter. KROOOOOOM.
Miles hits a brick wall at speed. KRDAAAAAAK. He punches through the masonry and lands in a shower of rubble, dazed, gasping.
Spot hits a parked car across the street. KRRNCH. The vehicle crumples around him.
The street is chaos. Rain has begun to fall. People stare.
Miles pulls himself upright from the rubble, suit torn and sparking, head spinning. “OhHhhhhh…” He drags his hand across his mask. On the other side of the street, what’s left of Spot — already beginning to dissolve, his body losing coherence — struggles in the wreckage of the car.
Miles reaches out. “No…” But Spot is already going. His form liquefies and runs like water into the gaps in the pavement, seeping away through a drain, through a puddle, through nothing and everything.
“Gone.”
Miles kneels in the rain on an empty street, hand outstretched toward where the web sac used to be, staring at his open, empty palm.
“Spot… what did you do?”
The Origin Boxes are loose in New York City. And somewhere out there, someone with enough resources to hire The Spot as a courier now has at least some of them.
Jersey City Has a New Hero (Whether He Wants It or Not)
Running parallel to the Miles storyline, the issue introduces its second major character in a quiet, well-observed scene set in Jersey City, New Jersey. It is early morning. Coffee pours into a mug. A man stands in a small, lived-in kitchen — broad-shouldered, scarred around the eyes, moving with the careful economy of someone who once used his body as a weapon and still hasn’t fully stopped.
His young daughter appears at the bedroom doorway, phone in hand, school bag ready, already several steps ahead of him in the morning routine. She tells him he’s going to be late. He tells her she needs to get to Miss Rachel’s before school. The domesticity is instantly warm and entirely believable.
Then she says: “Daddy, come look. You’re famous.”
She shows him a video on her phone. It’s him — outside a deli on Communipaw Avenue, carrying an elderly woman who had apparently fallen in the street. He helped her without thinking, the way people sometimes do when everything else drops away, and someone filmed it. The clip has 1.2 million likes. The internet has named him “Wonder Man.” The comment section has decided he is, simply, a superhero.
The man stares at the video. “And… what am I looking at?”
His daughter: “You. Internet famous. They’re calling you ‘Wonder Man.’ Heh. Like you’re some super hero.”
His partner, watching from the doorway with a cup of coffee and a smile: “He is a super hero. Yeah. But it’s cuter when it’s you.”
The man — still unnamed in this issue — is mortified and a little alarmed. He takes the phone gently from his daughter. “The new Wonder Man says it’s time to put the phone down. I hear it’s goin’… viral.” His daughter groans. His partner laughs. He heads out into the early morning, a regular person who just wants to go to work.
He will not stay regular for long. When the Origin Boxes scatter, one will find him.
The Media, the Money, and the Quiet Corruption
In Midtown Manhattan, inside the glass-walled offices of Boothe Media, we meet Paulina: a young journalist with yellow-tinted glasses, dark circles under her eyes, and a video editing timeline open at an hour when most of the building is dark. She’s been up all night.
She’s finishing a piece on a city council member named Donaldson. The piece contains specific allegations about his past behavior. And her boss — the company founder, Orson Boothe — has sent an email. The email is simple, polite, and absolute: Please remove all mentions of Donaldson’s past behavior from the piece. He has been a vocal supporter of this company and this city, and we cannot be making unsubstantiated claims about his supposed behavior. This is nonnegotiable. The piece will run without the claims or it doesn’t run.
Paulina reads it. She leans back. She reads it again. She puts her face on the keyboard and makes a sound that the letterer wisely does not try to transcribe.
Her colleague on the phone asks what the email said. “Yeah… Wouldn’t want the world to know we have a creep on the city council, would we?”
What follows is one of the most quietly devastating sequences in the issue. The thing you gotta ask yourself, Paulina, isn’t how you can sleep at night. It’s how you pay your rent. She hovers over the timeline. She looks at the footage. She closes her eyes. Then: KLIK. The offending sections are deleted. The story runs clean. The truth stays buried.
No villain in a cape. Just a journalist who needed this job more than she needed this fight. Paulina will get her Origin Box later in the issue. Given the anger clearly simmering beneath her surface, that seems like it could go very interesting places.
Orson Boothe and the Investor Who Isn’t
Briefly we see Orson Boothe himself, and he is not who the email made him seem. He’s not a cold, calculating media mogul. He is a man in deep financial trouble, chasing a lifeline down a hallway at an unreasonable hour of the morning.
His target is Claudia Burton, a potential investor. He corners her in a lobby in Lower Manhattan before she’s even reached her office, bearing a coffee as a peace offering and wearing the expression of a man who has been told no several times already and is hoping this time will be different.
It is not different. Claudia is precise and completely unmoved. She tells him his assumption of her investment is a fiction he has constructed for himself. She is considering other alternatives. When Orson, in a moment of desperate panic, grabs her arm — “Just give me a–“ — security materialises instantly and removes him from the building.
But on his way out, something glints in Orson’s hand. A small red crystal. Something sharp and alien-looking, something that clearly wasn’t meant to be taken out in public. And his eyes, in the final panel of his scene, carry a faint red glow. Whatever Orson Boothe has gotten himself involved with, it is considerably bigger and stranger than a cash flow problem.
The Origin Boxes Find Their People
And then it happens. With the web sac lost and Spot gone, the issue delivers one of its most inventive and quietly ominous pages: a tight grid showing multiple people across New York City simultaneously receiving an Origin Box through a small, humming purple portal. The portals arrive with a sound effect both absurd and perfect — POIT — like a gentle knock at a door you didn’t know existed.
The construction worker at the docks spins to find a box at his feet. Paulina, still at her workstation in Midtown, stares as a portal opens directly in front of her face and deposits something strange into her hands. Max and Lola — the two teenagers in Central Park who have been lying on a hillside debating infinity and other dimensions all night — find a box appearing right beside them on the grass. And Orson Boothe, standing alone on a high balcony at sunrise with the whole skyline spread before him, finds one landing quietly on the railing beside him.
The next pages show each person reacting. Some open their boxes immediately. Some reach in with trembling hands. The contents are different for each person — a glowing red orb, a red crystal shard, a sealed metallic vial with something luminous inside. Artifacts that feel ancient and specific at the same time, as though they were always going to end up in precisely these hands.
And then — for the construction worker — something activates without warning. His box clicks open with sharp mechanical precision. Pink laser light detonates across his hands and arms. A massive surge of white-hot energy tears through him — CHOOOOOOOOM — and he is consumed by it, screaming, arms thrown wide, the whole dock blazing with light. The panel beneath it shows nothing but red clouds and brightness. And in the final panel of that sequence, staring out from within the burning crimson haze, are two white eyes — calm, luminous, and entirely inhuman.
Something has arrived. Something is beginning.
Victory in the Dark
The final page of Chapter One pulls us back to where we started.
The Negative Zone. The battle is over. The enemies are fallen. And Hostilicus the Devastator stands atop the heap of defeated bodies, one clawed arm thrust skyward, holding a skull aloft like a trophy for the watching cosmos.
“–VICTORY!”
The page is divided into three tall vertical panels — a triptych of triumph. First: the fist, the skull, the spiked armour on his forearm. Second: the full figure, standing above the fallen, against a red sky lit by dying suns. Third: the face — close, scarred, white-haired, grinning with that one red cybernetic eye glowing like a lit coal.
The caption declares it for all the Negative Zone to hear:
“Victory for the true Lord God of the Negative Zone! Victory for his followers, victory for — THE CULT OF ANNIHILUS!”
END CHAPTER ONE.
