Grandpa Flashpoint: Age of Ultron #8 Review

We can’t bust heads like we used to, but we have our ways. One trick is to tell them stories that don’t go anywhere. Like the time I took the ferry to Shelbyville. I needed a new heel for my shoe so I decided to go to Morganville, which is what they called Shelbyville in those days. So I tied an onion to my belt, which was the style at the time. Now to take the ferry cost a nickel, and in those days, nickels had pictures of bumblebees on them. Give me five bees for a quarter you’d say. Now where were we? Oh yeah: the important thing was that I had an onion on my belt, which was the style at the time. They didn’t have white onions because of the war. The only thing you could get was those big yellow ones.

-Grandpa Simpson

What, exactly, is Age of Ultron about? This is a serious question.

We started out with a pretty straightforward end-of-the-world story with a bunch of killer robots that came literally out of nowhere and fucked up New York City. Then it was about infighting between superheroes, desperate last chances, and time travel. Okay, great. Now it’s about the Butterfly Effect, divergent timelines, and an alternate version of Marvel’s history where Hank Pym never existed, The Avengers broke up, and the world is under seige by Morgana Le Fey (“I toldja that Le Feys would be the end of America!” “Shut up, Dad!”). We’ve still got two issues left in Age of Ultron not counting crossover issues, which means we still have plenty of time for this series to tack in yet another direction, perhaps one about Friendship being Magic.

I’m not saying that Age of Ultron isn’t interesting; I was a rabid reader of What If? back when I was a kid, so I am a sucker for alternate versions of Marvel history, but I’m just not getting what writer Brian Michael Bendis is going for here. We’ve got a robot apocalypse that came out of left field, and that isn’t being addressed in other titles except in one-off “AU” issues that drop the character into the Ultron scenario for twenty pages before returning to the status quo in the next issue. And now, in issue 8, we are completely out of that apocalypse into an entirely different apocalypse that occurs when Hank Pym doesn’t exist – again, while none of this seems to be affecting the Marvel Universe as a whole. And all the while, we’ve got guys like Marvel Editor Tom Brevoort swearing that what happens in this book will have an effect on the greater 616, when it doesn’t seem to be having any effect right fucking now.

So what’s the endgame here? Is it to irrevokably change the nature of the Marvel Universe based on an apocalyptic event that led to some ill-advised time travel and cold-blooded murder? Is it to accentuate the importance of Ant Man to the Marvel Universe in time for the Edgar Wright movie in a couple of years? Is it to placate Bendis’s urge to apparently write the Marvel version of what might have happened if Arnold had blown Eddie Furlong out of his fucking socks the way we all wanted him to after two hours of bad acting in Terminator 2?

These are the questions I had when I finished Age of Ultron #8, a comic book that is cool if you like alternate versions of Marvel history, but which is yet another chapter of a story that seems to be bouncing from bad day to bad day without actually going anywhere in particular yet, and which, at this point in the story, just doesn’t feel like it matters.

Wolverine and The Invisible Woman have been captured by Tony Stark after going back in time to kill Hank Pym to prevent the creation of Ultron, and returning to a future where that act made The Avengers never exist, allowed Morgana Le Fey to become ascendant without that team to stop her, and made Tony Stark into a fascist douchenozzle. While Stark interrogates Wolverine, asking why Wolverine resorted to murder when he could have warned Pym, or approached Stark himself to try and introduce failsafes into Ultron, or doing almost anything but a quick shiv to the neck, Stark sends Professor X and Emma Frost to send away The Defenders as if they were second-rate losers… which they kinda always have been. We learn that Morgana Le Fey put the world into chaos in something called the Latveria / Asgard War – a war that killed Thor and left Stark literally torn in half – and that The Defenders are tired of Tony Stark’s bullshit, which they demonstrate by knocking Emma out and storming Stark’s Helicarrier. Just as things are about to come to blows, including Stark murdering The Invisible Woman, Le Fey attacks with a pile of things that look the results of the special, sticky hug that happen when a Doctor Doom and a Loki love each other very much, and then there is violence.

What works best in this issue is the alternate history aspect of what might have happened in a Marvel Universe where Hank Pym wasn’t around to use his big brain on problems and smack the crap out of Janet Van Dyne. It’s interesting to see some of these things, but it mostly works in a very Fantasy Football / Strat-O-Matic kinda way; if you really know the history of the Marvel Universe dating back to the late 1950s, you can piece together how the lack of a Hank Pym could lead to these kind of events. That’s where the meat of the story is; if you know that Le Fey captured Scarlet Witch and used her to try and invade Asgard only to be stopped by The Avengers, you can see how Le Fey got where she is when there aren’t any Avengers – particularly no Wonder Man, since he probably stays a douchebag without The Avengers to redeem him, and no Vision, since Vision was created by Ultron using Wonder Man’s personality imprint…

But the problem is: I didn’t know that. That story happened fifteen years ago, when I had a limited comics budget and no real interest in following Marvel Comics for a couple of years (hi, Clone Saga!). I had to Google to figure out what might be going on, and frankly: Bendis had to know even people like me might have to do that, since he posted a list of changes to the 616 when Hank Pym wasn’t around on his blog. So the real meat of this story – diving into the minutae of Marvel’s history – works best only in an inside baseball kinda way from the start.

And even if you have the background to appreciate the goings-on under the hood here, I just can’t imagine that it’s gonna continue long enough to really become satisfying. After all, we are in the eighth issue of this series, which means things need to wrap in just two more, and I can’t imagine that Marvel is gonna let what happens in Age of Ultron linger past its conclusion. Because let’s face it: DC did something very similar with Flashpoint just two years ago, and considering whatever sales spike they got from blowing up their own universe fucked off a long time ago, I can’t imagine Marvel sticking with this past the tenth issue, particularly not when they’ve got their Thanos crossover event, Infinity, teeded off to start in August. So whatever nifty speculative joy one might get from seeing how the 616 would be different with one relatively minor player eliminated is limited by time, and the knowledge – whether right ot wrong – that no matter what Brevoort says, this just doesn’t matter. So while it might be fun to see the wide-reaching effects of Pym’s absence (Black Goliath just calls himself Goliath! The Scarlet Witch marries Kim Kardashian for 72 days! The glory hole at Rest Stop 7 on the Garden State Parkway goes unmanned!), it would take a hell of a lot more than three or four issues, which almost certainly will contain a do-over, to really get into the guts of it.

And none of these observations about the minutae of the alternate history, or about the publishing realities that surround this story, have a lot to do with this actual individual comic book. But it matters; it affects the reader’s ability to really dig what’s happening in this other reality, and the limited timeframe of the miniseries means that we have two stories choked by the calendar. After all, in this eighth issue of Age of Ultron… where the fuck is Ultron? We’ve seen two apocalypses, had minimal explanations, and haven’t even seen the bad guy who is named in the title once yet. It feels like we’re going from story to story to story, and I don’t know what we’re supposed to be pulling for here.

After all, let’s stop and really think for a seecond: who is the antagonist of this story? Is it Ultron? It is Wolverine for killing Hank Pym? Alternate reality Tony Stark? Someone we haven’t even seen yet who turned Ultron back on? Same question reversed: who is the protagonist? Seriously: who is the main character of this book? In Flashpoint it was Flash, but here? It is Wolverine and The Invisible Woman? Maybe, but they didn’t step up for about four issues. The first issue indicated Captain America by way of his final page splash indicating the world was waiting for him to step up, but he’s gone with history. Is it Ultron? If it is: where the fuck is he?

Jesus, I’ve gone far afield here in a review about a single comic book, that has good and exciting art by Brandon Peterson (and even skips the dreaded Bendis two-page spread with the panels falling on the book’s spine so you don’t know how to read the damn thing) and advances what story there is as well as can be expected. But it turns out that this was the issue where I finally stopped to think about Age of Ultron enough to figure out why I’ve been feeling sort of unengaged and let down by the story. And it’s because it is all over the place. A bunch of things have happened to a bunch of people, leading to a bunch of other things happening to a bunch of other people, with the promise of a bunch more things happening before everything returns to normal. There’s just no focus here.

The best I can figure is that the hero of this story isn’t a character: it’s the Marvel Universe and its history itself. It isn’t a person under siege, it’s a continuity, and that’s just not exciting. At least in Flashpoint we knew that everything really was gonna blow up when it was all said and done. Here? Well, we know that Marvel’s continuity is gonna carry on just fine by itself. We’ve got a bunch of story points that feel destined to return to its own beginning, going nowhere, with a hero that can’t lose.

There’s still two issues to go in Age of Ultron, so there’s still a chance for something to really happen to elevate this miniseries. But for now? It’s a bust. Which is what we called a failure. Give me a comic book with a hero and a bag guy that isn’t a failure, we used to say. Which was the style at the time.