A Whimpering Bang: Age of Ultron #10 Review / Postmortem

Editor’s Note: The trick of it was, when Ultron tried to defend himself, it triggered a self replicating spoiler…

A few weeks ago, I asked what the point of Age of Ultron was, and now we know: it was to sell more comics.

Seriously: the best thing I can figure is that we comic readers spent a minimum of several months and 40 dollars to entice us to see Miles Morales fight Galactus, and to see Neil Gaiman’s Angela character from Spawn join the Guardians of The Galaxy. Not to see these things in Age of Ultron, mind you, but to tease you to buy them in other upcoming comic books. Seriously: both the Galactus and the Angela reveals in this issue were immediately followed by full page ads telling you in which future comic books you could find those parts of the ongoing story.

So the mission statement of Age of Ultron seems, ultimately, to have been: “set up a way to do weird shit that will sell comic books in the third financial quarter.” Because now that it is all said and done, we are left with a story that had no identifiable protagonist, no identifiable antagonist, no real character motivations other than “make stuff normal again,” and no consequences beyond the fact that Marvel can do weird, dimensional crossover shit now that will likely sell more comics. It’s like there was a Marvel Creator’s Retreat where someone said, “Okay, everyone yell out the weirdest crap you’d write if time, space, dimension or publisher trademark were no object! Okay, Bendis: you’re only writing 76 titles right now, so go off and make this happen! You’ve got ten issues, so take this methamphetamine extract, this DVD of Primer, and get it done!”

Well, it is done. And all I can say is that if big, weird reveals were the point of this big mess? That last reveal should Goddamned well have been Marvelman.

Hank Pym has reached forward (or maybe backwards) across time to send a message to… Hank Pym. Hank tells Hank that Ultron is about to rise again, and gives Hank a virus that can be uploaded to Ultron at just the right time that will destroy it forever. So just as a team of Avengers awaken the robot, Pym has Iron Man send the code into it (proving that Ultron must have a Bluetooth dongle… and if that was Ultron’s junior high school nickname, no wonder he went evil), and sure enough: Ultron gets the ol’ Blue Screen of Death (which is why I am developing my killer revenge android in Python on Linux), and everything is back to normal. And then time explodes. And the explosion changes… well, not a hell of a lot, really, except for the odd anomaly, caused by the well-known scientific theory known as the Quesada-Alonso Line Crossover Sales Synergy Effect.

So I have asked this before, but now that we are finished it is a good time to ask it again: who was the protagonist of Age of Ultron? I just walked away from the keyboard to really think about that for a few minutes, and I simply can’t come up with one who really fits the definition of “chief actor.” There isn’t one; for a while it’s Wolverine, but that Wolverine’s dead by now. Arguably it’s The Invisible Woman, but she just sort of tags along with Wolverine in his adventures through time, with her only active act in this issue to be to drop the message with Pym. Maybe it’s Pym, but if so, which one? The one from the past who built Ultron’s backdoor (“Look, Honey! I’m building a backdoor into my man-shaped robot! Hey, where you going?”) and sent the virus through time? Or the one from the present, who takes the word of a video of himself, delivered by an unknown party to him, when he himself was replaced by a fucking Skrull not five years ago? Jesus, give me six hours with the Adobe suite of video editing software, and I could produce a video of Hank Pym fucking a donkey; using a video as motivation to send untested code to Iron Man’s armor isn’t heroism, it’s potential involuntary manslaughter, if not the illegal use of a weapon of mass destruction.

By the same tack: who is the antagonist? It should be Ultron… but we don’t even see that bastard until this issue, and he dies like a pig in a chute within 11 pages. And frankly, for about half of this miniseries, Ultron doesn’t even exist, because he has never been created. So the best thing I can figure is that the antagonist is time travel itself… but without time travel the story wouldn’t even exist, and a plot point is a shitty villain. So maybe this is supposed to be one of those Frankenstein-style, “There Are Some Things Man Is Not Meant To Know” stories – after all, there’s a Frankenstein-style monster (at least for eleven pages of this ten-issue miniseries), and the actions of the people in the story bring forth an honest-to-God angry angel – but I’m finding it hard to swallow that Science is the bad guy in a publishing line featuring Hank Pym and Tony Stark. And if Science is the villain, Bendis and Marvel have asked a hell of a lot of us readers to stick around for ten issues to find that out.

Look: I am ultimately disappointed by Age of Ultron because by this point, it feels like it was nothing but a bunch of shit that happened to allow Marvel to cross characters from different lines together. And frankly, Bendis himself accomplished exactly the same thing in about four pages at the start of last year’s Spider-Men #1 without charging us $40 for what is amounting to nothing but setup. Hell, Jack Kirby could’ve gotten Galactus into the Ultimate Universe in about three panels with a little Kirby Krackle thrown in for no extra charge. But here, we got ten issues of stuff happening with no single character to follow other than Wolverine, who was so overcome with grief in being a part of the goings-on that, in the ninth issue, he literally said he would rather die than be a part of it anymore.

And it was all for what? To bring Angela into the Marvel Universe? Who gives a shit? Angela is a 20-year-old character from a comic book that sells about 16,000 copies a month. Angela is notable for being created by Neil Gaiman – who I’m pretty sure isn’t gonna be writing the character in her initial Marvel appearances – and for being a bargaining chip to get ownership of Miracleman / Marvelman from Todd McFarlane. Nobody was sitting around twitching like they need to piss waiting for the triumphant return of Angela, okay? Marvelman, on the other hand, is something we’ve been waiting to really see from Marvel since 2009’s announcement at SDCC that Marvel had the rights. If the final page of this book had been of Marvelman, drawn by Mark Buckingham rather than Joe Quesada and backed by a full-page add for a Marvelman book written by Neil Gaiman, I might have a different feeling about Age of Ultron than I do now.

And what I feel now is, really, nothing but disappointment. Age of Ultron was a series of events featuring a series of characters, ending with a return to the status quo but with the promise of more comics you can buy. Everything it accomplishes could have been done in the first couple of pages of the stories that it teases. But still, it accomplished its intended purpose.

It got $40 out of me.