Call Me Snakeeye: Age of Ultron #1 Review

Look, let’s get the obvious out of the way right out of the gate: Age of Ultron #1 is what happens when you take The Terminator and Escape From New York, throw in a dash of John Carpenter’s The Thing and mix in Alan Moore’s Captain Britain for comics flavor, and chuck in a couple of superheroes.

You have seen flying killer robots ruthlessly enforcing order over the ruins of New York City while the citizens scuttle under cover and sell each other out for the favor of authority. You have seen isolated and paranoid people willing to turn each other out because there is a chance that they have been possessed by an infiltrator wearing their faces. And you have seen superheroes working from the shadows against an incredibly powerful authority figure while the general populace either cowers or appeases the dictatorial force. Frankly, given artist Bryan Hitch’s penchant for photorealism in his faces, I kept expecting to turn the page and see Mel Gibson in the background, telling Hawkeye that he can drive that truck. Or maybe Linda Hamilton, circa 1984, getting soft-focused railed by some filthy animal from the far future. For which I am available for photo-reference, Bryan. But I digress.

The point is, Age of Ultron #1 is not the place to go is you’re looking for ground-breaking, perception-altering science fiction. But it also doesn’t make any bones about that fact; of any book I’ve read in the recent past, this is one that wears its influences on its sleeve. And the good news is, I like The Terminator, Escape From New York and The Thing, so a story that’s obviously influenced by them isn’t gonna be a deal breaker… provided the story is rock-solid and entertaining.

So therein lies the question: is it entertaining?

Well kids, something bad has happened, because we open directly into New York in ruins with some kind of giant, floating robotic nipple casting a shadow over the skyline. People are running drugs and, apparently, white slavery on the streets, and Hawkeye is trying to infiltrate a particular operation, using a style that Rob Liefeld might call “X-Treme” but which I like to call “lethal.” As he makes his way toward the masterminds (although, being The Owl and Hammerhead, the word “mastermind” might be a tad charitable), Hawkeye rescues Spider-Man, who had been captured and tuned up pretty good, proving apparently that one underestimates The Owl and Hammerhead at their peril… although it’s just so damn easy to do. Anyway, suddenly Ultrons appear on the horizon, attacking the building while Hawkeye and Spider-Man manage to escape and make their way back to the S.H.I.E.L.D. Helicarrier… which has crashed onto Central Park. However, it acts as the new version of Avengers Mansion, cleverly making use of salvaged tech and hiding in the first place any killer robot with half a brain would look (I’m kidding; even a fucking Roomba would know to look there first). However, Hawkeye and Spider-Man don’t get a hero’s welcome, getting accosted by the remaining Avengers, examined for signs of any kind of implants from Ultron, and generally treated like Judas goats and traitorous scumbags. In short: The Avengers are hiding out and trying to survive until someone comes up with a plan to strike back… but that plan is, shall we say, slow in coming.

Okay: if you’re a fan of post-apocalyptic fiction, there is a reasonable amount to like here. All the tropes are here: a shattered environment, hoodlums roaming the streets, ruling by the gun, with drugs and subjugation of the weak rampant. We see corruption and preying on the weak on every level, from street scumbags feeding on the normals, and everyone running scared from the Ultrons. Writer Brian Michael Bendis does solid work showing a level of palpable and permeating despair at almost every level.

Bendis and Hitch demonstrate this most effectively with Hawkeye, both in his behavior and in the visuals surrounding him. It’s not anything as simple or crass as decking him out in Mad Max rags – Hawkeye is wearing the Hawkeye uniform – but it’s in his willingness to use lethal force. Hawkeye isn’t using trick arrows or any trappings of a standard archery-based superhero – the one “trick” arrow he uses is nothing but a couple of grenades he duct tapes to an arrow on the fly – and, thanks to the visuals, we can see and understand that Hawkeye is using just regular arrows… and by the looks of them, they’re hand carved. Think about that for a second: Hawkeye, an Avenger, is stone-cold whacking people with arrows so handmade they just look like sharpened sticks. If there is a single element that hammers home the dire situation that Age of Ultron is meant to be, it’s Hawkeye.

The tricky part, however, is what I mentioned right at the top: there are multiple elements in this story where you can see a bright, clean line from Age of Ultron to the stories that inspired them. Flying killer robots who want only to subjugate the human race, if not outright eliminate them? That’s The Terminator and The Matrix. New York City in ruins, apparently abandoned by any semblance of law and order, with criminals and scumbags running the streets? Escape From New York, Land of The Dead and damn near every other zombie flick ever made. A pack of protagonists who are paranoid that, if any of them go out of sight, they might be compromised by this exterior force that could destroy them all? That’s The Thing and Alien all over. Now, this is not the end of the world; after all, John Carpenter’s The Thing was clearly influenced by Alien to start with… just as Alien was influenced by the original Howard Hawks’s original The Thing From Another World. Hell, if it weren’t for William Gibson’s Neuromancer and Grant Morrison’s The Invisibles, the Wachowskis would still be directing little heist films. But the fact of the matter is, any genre fan is gonna see the connections between Age of Ultron and its inspirations, and frankly? It’s a little distracting.

Okay, let’s talk about the visuals, and I will start with this: Goddamn you Bendis, would you stop asking your artists to do double-paged spreads? Sure, I see double-page spreads in other comics, but I see them over and over in Bendis comics: pages where the first panel gutter falls on or near the binding, making it difficult to determine at a glance whether it’s a page-by-page layout or a double. And it might give the artist space to create beautiful visuals, but it makes the reader have to stop in his or her tracks and figure out how to read the Goddamned thing. It is a storytelling snafu of the worst order to create a situation where the reader has to figure out how to read your story, and it happens no less than twice in this issue. Quick rule of thumb: if the first panel of the page doesn’t clearly cross the book’s binding? You have created a confusing situation for the reader, and shot yourself in the foot for no reason at all.

Okay, now that we have that out of the was, let’s address the actual art: There is no denying that Hitch does realism almost better than anyone else. He works in a fine line and creates expressive faces and realistic anatomy. Not only that, the man packs his panels wth detail; there isn’t a panel in this book where there isn’t a concrete and established background, with enough detail to make everything look like it’s happening in a real, actual place. However, where that becomes a little difficult is in the pacing; this book is packed with small panels to give the whole story an action movie, slam-bang pace… but these are panels jammed with detail and, sometimes, with a blur effect to demonstrate the vibrations of approaching Ultrons, which means that there are times where the page feels dense, and sometimes hard to decipher exactly what you’re seeing at first glance. That’s not much of a negative; detail that makes you linger on a panel isn’t a bad thing, but it does slow the reader down in places where the panel design clearly means to keep them ticking along.

There’s a lot to like in Age of Ultron #1. Storywise and visually, it sets up a pretty believable post-apocalyptic New York, dropping us straight into the action and creating enough mystery to make me want to come back to see how things exactly reached this point. There are enough elements here to make us understand just how dire the situation is, and as setup for an epic battle to come, it does what it needs to do. With that said: if you’re any kind of a genre fan (and let’s face it, you are. You didn’t find a comics Web site about a book you need to go to a comic store to buy because you came here by accident while looking for pornography), you will see every influence behind this story shining out from the gutters. It’s an interesting start, but hopefully the future issues bring the story in a more unpredictable direction.

Because with God as my witness, if I hear about a probe from Venus, or some kind of escaped virus from a government facility, I am gonna lose my shit… particularly if I hear about them in a difficult-to-read double-paged spread.