acknowledged in a 2008 interview that he was working to repair his reputation in this regard, explained that the long delays in between issues of The Ultimates, was due to the birth of his child, two house moves, and an office move, though Hitch also conceded that the page count of his art exceeded what was indicated in Millar's scripts, saying, "Mark would write a twenty two page comic and I would take it to thirty eight pages." So burnt out did Hitch feel after the "hard slog" of The Ultimates that it took a considerable effort on Millar's part to convince him to return for the sequel. In the case of Heaven's Ladder, however, DC Comics, which was less supportive of his tardiness than Marvel, scheduled the book according to the day he signed the contract for it, and began advertising it when he still had four or five more issues of The Authority to do. Hitch related: "I pointed this out, and they said, 'Oh, don’t worry, we'll correct it in-house and adjust the later delivery dates and the ship dates’, but they didn’t do that! So suddenly this book was five months late when I started it, and they’d already started advertising the book and soliciting it. And this was only half of the bad experience. It was 72 pages of artwork which was 50% more work than normal since you drew the pages bigger – which inevitably DC didn’t pay us for: they paid us normal rates. Paul and I lost money doing it; we practically went bankrupt, because we were trying to do this good job and use the space on the pages better since they could be done larger. Otherwise, we could have just done a normal comic book: What was the point of the extra format?" Hitch found his work drawing Millar's run on Fantastic Four, to be a better experience. He made a point of drawing on illustration board roughly twice the size of the Marvel standard, which allowed him to complete the artwork faster. Hitch provided cover artwork for the November 2006 issue of the British film magazine Empire, for a cover feature on comic book movies. He was a character design artist for the Ultimate Avengers and Ultimate Avengers 2 animated films. He was a character design artist for the video game Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction. He was brought aboard