Age of Ultron

I'm not going to let what happened change the value of my life. 

And shame on the rest of you. Shame on you for giving up.

After reviewing two fantastically written and drawn series, it is time to pivot to one that was universally less well made. 2013's Age of Ultron (no, not the movie) is, to say the least, confusing. It's a post-apocalyptic tale made at the wrong time, with seemingly no place or purpose in the overextending Marvel Universe. The character decisions are bizarre, the art is all over the place, and the stakes are raised extremely high right from the get-go and then gradually made non-existent as decision after ridiculous writing decision ruined any kind of credibility the story was hoping to achieve.


The Brian Michael Bendis take on Avengers deconstructed the heroes to their lowest points, stripped them of all support and forced them to face a hostile world and make it learn to love them again. It was a dark time that forced many characters to really question their own identities and purposes as heroes. He followed this up with the Heroic Age, a lighter, more traditional take on the Marvel property where the heroes faced larger threats and classic villains. The two eras contrasted one another well: the secretive age of political entanglement and public distrust and the open age of being the common man's protector. Age of Ultron is the spiritual epilogue to all of this, the elseworlds take on the Avengers that asks the question: What would happen if they lost? If they, for once, completely failed to save the day and those who lived had to face the consequences of said failures head-on.

Age of Ultron opens here. Ultron is not a looming threat, he is already here, and the first two pages of the first issue make it apparent any chance of stopping him has long passed. New York City is glassed, a desolate wasteland with very little life of any kind. Parts of it have been terraformed into glistening robotic structures, massive behemoths that vastly overshadow even the tallest of man-made buildings that had once stood there before. Humanity has entered the post-apocalyptic phase.

The surviving heroes struggle to comprehend this reality. Captain America is a shell of his former self, guilt-stricken and indecisive. Iron Man is scared, preferring to banish survivors from their encampment entirely rather than risk Ultron tracing them back. The two usual leaders have been broken by the world around them, and as the others turn to them to guidance, they falter. They second guess themselves into poorly constructed hail-mary plans that end of getting too many people killed. Maybe this is the idea, to show the impacts of severe trauma and how one would respond to the world suddenly ending around them, or maybe it is just out of character behavior.

Ultron, the figurehead of the series, is not devoid of the questionable decision making. He wants to eradicate all life but leaves pockets of it functioning normally until he decides to just kill them too, for reasons never explained. The residents of Austin, Texas were just going about their day-to-days when the rest of the United States was completely gone. Perhaps they were accepting that at this point they had nowhere to go; chasing normalcy in the face of impending death.

Bendis, for all the wonders he worked with character development and crossover buildup in the 2000s, struggles here. The direction of the run appears meaningless and lacks any kind of focus, and several characters seem to stop in to do little more than take a bow and leave again. The first issue follows Hawkeye as he rescues Spider-Man, an exciting standalone yet absolutely pointless addition to the overarching plot, as both characters do not play any kind of relevant role after that and do not appear again after the fifth issue. The series then takes asides to Black Widow and Red Hulk, who are elsewhere in the United States, to show how they responded to the robotic onslaught before removing all three groups and plopping them in the Savage Land.

The jumping around between three different stories was a premise built up in the first three issues but ultimately abandoned, as only the New York group did anything of remote consequence before all three rendezvoused anyway. The pacing only goes downhill from there. Large-scale sidepieces will take up the duration of one or two entire issues before being revealed to have either been a failure or inconsequential to the heroes' efforts. It all makes no sense.

What follows is even more curious. The Ultron storyline is completely abandoned thanks to the use of time travel. Time travel can occasionally be used well (Avengers: Endgame or Back to the Future), but can also become a writing crutch that either offers a 'get out of jail free' card to a seemingly inescapable situation or allows for unlimited do-overs if one fails at their mission, which removes any stakes. For example, observe what has happened to the Terminator franchise after the first two movies. Bendis is meta about his usage, asking the reader if time truly is something that can be manipulated at a whim. Generally, there will be consequences.

So basically the 10-issue series with 'Ultron' in the title spends issues four through nine barely focusing on him. Instead, Bendis takes a detour to a parallel timeline, where the situation is similarly bleak. The Defenders are the premiere team here and consist of classic Avengers whose stories have been altered. A mash-up of different Marvel icons can be intriguing, but it has to be handled correctly. Infinity Wars did this somewhat well with their infinity warps, but this was because there was backstory and reason to care about the characters who had just been created. Age of Ultron offered neither, instead dropping the readers into a brand new world and asking for investment. It is hard, however, to find interest in an Earth at war between de-facto Dictator Tony Stark and Morgan Le Fay, who had last been seen being disposed of by the Dark Avengers. Of all the villains to pair with Ultron to add gravitas to the struggling story, she was a rather bizarre choice.

The reason this new world is created, and perhaps the closest thing to a central purpose behind the story, has to do with Hank Pym. Pym was one of the less popular Marvel characters throughout the long history of the company, largely due to an older run where he was physically abusive towards Janet Van Dyne. For some reason, Marvel has been trying hard to redeem the character since the early 2000s onwards. Secret Empire would do this outright, with Pym (who, somewhat coincidentally by this point, had merged his conscious with Ultron), lashing out around a dinner table and basically directly begging the reader to move on from one mistake he made so long ago. Age of Ultron is more subtle about showing his impact on the Marvel universe and how radically different things would become if he were not there.

Maybe Pym deserves more respect. He was a founding Avenger, an instrumental member in several potentially world-changing events, and a genius whose groundbreaking research saved many lives. At the same time, he created Ultron and has struggled with mental issues, which has made him paranoid and occasionally violent, hence the abuse. He is a complex character, genuinely trying to do the right thing but oftentimes being his own worse enemy, and the public, both real and fictional, tends to hold him accountable for his mistakes rather than praise him for his successes. Whether or not Pym's public reception is deserved is a promising discussion of morals, but to be explored there has to be reader interest. Spending a ten-issue series marketed as a war against Ultron to instead debate the philosophy of an unpopular character comes across as cheap.

Really, when it comes down to it, Age of Ultron struggled to find an identity. It starts off as a post-apocalyptic takedown of the Avengers, struggles with the pacing, and transitions to an examination of the prominence of Hank Pym. It looks like it was hastily written and possibly even had a mid-story directional pivot, but Marvel has publicly said the story was completely written well before production, to reduce the possibility of delays and negate the need for extended tie-ins. This is an applaudable tactic, but it did not work in the slightest for Age of Ultron.

The writing is uneven and the art is little better. Bryan Hitch creates blocky facial expressions and messy, brown panels of destruction that lack detail for the first five issues before he disappears from the story and is replaced by Brandon Peterson, who does little better.

Overall, Age of Ultron took an interesting premise and bungled it. Ultron is an engaging villain and the struggle of man versus machine makes for good popcorn storytelling, but in this case, it can be and has been told better in other Marvel runs. Steer clear.