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.

Apocalypses For Everyone! Age of Ultron Motion Comic Trailer Released

I don’t know if you’ve heard, but there has been a minor snow event that has affected the Greater Boston area over the past day and a half or so. Some refer to this event as Nemo, but the locals have taken to calling it a minor apocalypse.

As such, we are engaged with the normal activities of digging out from more than two feet of snow. Those activities being comprised of mainly cursing the Home Office building management for taking a whole two hours during blizzard conditions to come dig us out, while frantically compulsively our beers to make sure we can survive for 24 more hours, and finding to our horror that the count seems to drop by one every ten to fifteen minutes.

Therefore we don’t have a lot of time for comics writing today, but we do have one item: Marvel has released a motion comics trailer for their spring event crossover, Age of Ultron, the main ten-issue series of which is being written by Brian Michael Bendis and drawn by Bryan Hitch, Brandon Peterson and Carlos Pacheco. Supposedly Hitch has done the bulk of the art for the project, and he swears that his pencils are all completed and submitted… and we will know if he is telling the truth if issue 10 comes out sometime in 2015.

Either way, you can check out the trailer after the jump… and if you’ll excuse me, I need to put together a “Free snow, just haul away” ad on Craig’s List, and make some more beer safe for the neighbor kids by turning it into pee.

The War At Home: Avengers #32 Review

When I was but a lad, back in the dark and mystical age modern man knows only as the mysterious “Me Decade“, when collars were wide, all toys were choking hazards, and “flame retardant” was but a French phrase for, “If your moronic child lights a match, his polyester pants will go up like Nagasaki,” a four-year war took place in New England. It was a brutal, nonsensical conflict that pitted not only brother against brother but universe against universe. It featured bloody battles such as Superheroes versus Shogun Warriors. Imperial Stormtroopers against Micronauts. Cylon Centurions battling The Six Million Dollar Man. And one time, the entire Rebel Alliance X-Wing fleet versus Barbie, when General Debbie Stinkypants from the Nation State of Three Doors Down refused to respect hostilities and maintain neutrality, leading not only to Barbie’s summary decapitation under the accepted Rules of Engagement, to a brutal and crippling outbreak of incurable cooties to all combatants.

This war, known only as the Battle Of Every Action Figure In My Toy Box Against Every Action Figure In Every Other Neighborhood Kid’s Toy Box, waged continuously from about 1975 until Janine Wilson started sprouting boobs and my fellow combatants and I started focusing on diplomacy and foreign affairs. But in the intervening years, I have learned that this war was waged in every neighborhood in America during that time. It is a war that left many scars – for me, the worst was when Janine said, “Why would I care what an Acroyear is? Anyway, you smell like an armpit. C’mon Debbie; let’s go listen to the Flashdance soundtrack again and moon over older, Junior High School boys!” – but at least my war is over. For some poor bastards, the fighting has never stopped, leaving them broken, unable to maintain standard, acceptable gainful employment, and looking for the enemy around every corner.

Brian Michael Bendis is one of those shattered warriors, still fighting battles in a long-forgotten war. His latest conflict? The Avengers Vs. The Micronauts. He’s put the action figures on the battlefield in Avengers #32, and while it’s too early to tell if it will be good, the fact that he’s fighting the battle is exciting to someone who served on the same army in the 70s (I was with the 77th Awesome Division out of Massachusetts. Motto: “No, you wet the bed!”).

Back To Square One: Avengers #31 Review

Brian Michael Bendis is soon leaving the Avengers titles after extended runs writing them going back around eight years. That’s a lot of story, including an immeasurable amount of character development, plot twists, and universe building. Most of it good and compelling, some of it not, but no matter what you think of the years of storytelling, you have to admit that it’s had an impact.

Or at least you have to admit that it had an impact. Because regardless of tenure or reach, Bendis does not own the Avengers. And now that he is moving on to Marvel’s X-Men titles, it is now apparently time to take some of the most impactful events of his time at the wheel… and roll them back to the 2003 status quo, just in time for the next guy to take over, do some stuff, and inevitably roll that back when a new person wants to play with the old toys.

In short, welcome to Avengers #31, the first part of the End Times storyline, and what appears to be the final retcon of a couple of the remaining epic events of Bendis’s Avengers story. He appears to be taking this final opportunity to glue the heads back on the last couple of action figures he mangled while he had custody of the toy box… and while it is giving me a temporary feeling of, “Goddammit, again?”, it is probably a wise long-term choice for Marvel… and one that could wind up being satisfying if executed well, if yet another example of showing that, in the comics world, Thomas Wayne, Martha Wayne and Uncle Ben are the unluckiest sons of bitches in the world.