It was well-known that the Ultimate Marvel reality gave dark twists to familiar Marvel heroes, and for some reason, this darkness typically took the form of cannibalism.
Cannibalism was frequently used as a weapon in the 1610 reality, which attempted to update the classic 616 Marvel universe, as evidenced by such moments as Blob’s “Tastes like chicken” sequence in the Ultimatum event and Magneto’s casual remark about eating on human flesh.
Only two cannibals in the Marvel AU stood out as particularly wicked. Both Ultimate Hulk and Ultimate Venom have killed a lot of people in their various rampages, but who of the Ultimate Marvel monsters has killed the most people overall?
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Both protagonists have had their backstories rewritten multiple times. In the original Marvel mythos, Venom was an alien symbiote, but in the year 1610, the character was reimagined as a bio-weapon designed to combat cancer.
After uniting with Spider-Man, the inky suit of armor developed a ravenous taste for power, and every user since then has felt its relentless pursuit. Whether it was a gamma-bomb gone bad or Bruce Banner’s failed super soldier experiments that turned him into a raging mass of id with few moral qualms, bio-weaponry was always a part of the Hulk’s backstory.
Cannibalism is a common symptom of moral decay within the bounds of the Ultimate Universe. The Hulk’s rampage in The Ultimates is widely regarded as the first example of this tendency, as he successfully overcomes the villain Herr Kleiser’s enhanced healing factor by eating him up and swallowing him one mouthful at a time.
Even though Ultimate Hulk’s threats to eat anyone who got in his way were technically not cannibalism because Herr Kleiser was an extraterrestrial and not a human, those threats were made on numerous occasions. He broke out of his cell in Ultimate War and devoured six nurses; in Ultimate Fallout, he confesses to Jean Grey that he had finished off his last therapist.
The Hulk’s man-eating tendencies were mostly kept to threats and off-screen occurrences, but Venom didn’t hold back at all. Immediately after Eddie Brock joined with the symbiote, it devoured a random bystander in Ultimate Spider-Man #37. Between issues #123 and #125, he went on a cannibalistic eating binge, devouring at least seven human beings and a horse.
This puts him squarely in the cannibalistic upper echelon, even above the Hulk’s proven cannibalistic meals. In Ultimate Comics Spider-Man, when Eddie was no longer his host, Venom ate countless New Yorkers to restore his vigor, adding to his body count while doing so.
Of course, that’s only taking into account the tally of victims where it pertains to these murderers’ cravings. Venom is no match for Ultimate Hulk, who arguably lacks even more self-control than his 616 incarnations when the stakes are set at a more abstract level.
After the Hulk’s massive rampage in The Ultimates, in which over 600 people were killed, Banner suffered a moral crisis but ultimately came to embrace his evil side and despise humanity. During his time spent in the shadows with the Maker, the Hulk posed a global threat as villains plotted a new version of the world that was beyond the nastiness of even Venom.
When a beloved character gets reimagined, it’s always exciting to observe how the new version differs from the original. The Ultimate versions of these characters introduced a wide variety of new features and, in the process, set in motion certain unsettling tendencies. There have been rumblings about the resurrection of the Ultimate universe and the darker versions of some of Marvel’s most popular heroes ever since Cataclysm, even though the series has largely remained dormant since then.
