Brian Michael Bendis and Bryan Hitch are currently detailing a pretty solid disaster epic with Age of Ultron. It could unspool, depending on how they eventually decide to tie it into the main Marvel Universe, but right now it feels like a ‘potential future’ sort of story rather than the new status quo for the 616, and in that context, it’s pretty damn compelling.
The first issue showed us the devastation of New York City and the extremes that once-proud superheroes have been pushed to – such as Hawkeye murdering people in an effort to rescue Spider-Man from the clutches of The Owl, who was apparently planning to try and sell the wall-crawler to Ultron. In Age of Ultron #2, we open with San Francisco being equally devastated, with Moon Knight and a disfigured Black Widow finding an old Nick Fury safehouse there, and given Fury’s old-school no-tech style, they believe it’s one place Ultron can’t find. Then, we shift to Spider-Man – who seems very much Peter Parker and very much not Dr. Octopus – telling the story of how he was put out of commission just as the end of the world was beginning. Through his flashbacks, we see that some kind of gigantic mechanical… thing (it could be a big tank-thing, or it could be a Godzilla-sized Ultron foot, or something else entirely) seemingly either phased through Manhattan to destroy it, or just plowed through it to level it. It’s a little difficult to discern what exactly is going on, but given that Spidey doesn’t know either, perhaps we’re not meant to as yet. Finally, the indefatigable nature of Peter Parker shines through, as he tries to pep talk the defatigated heroes into doing something besides ‘survive,’ and Captain America, who looked completely demoralized and broken like his shield at the end of last issue, rises to his feet and declares that he finally has a plan.
It’s mostly an expository issue, but it doesn’t feel all that heavy on it, since we still don’t really know what happened. Spidey’s flashbacks are dialogue-free, so we’re still mostly about setting the tone, which Hitch does extremely well. If we learned anything about his run with Ultimate Comics, it’s that Hitch renders the catastrophic extremely well. The misery is unrelenting. Black Widow is fully prepared to die, but only after shoving “a nuclear warhead up that robot’s ass.” Tech-master Tony Stark has accepted that the most they can do is survive. Cap standing up is the only reason to have any kind of hope, but the despair remains oppressive in that new-school Battlestar Galactica kind of way.
We tend to like these kinds of stories that start with ‘the heroes have lost and lost hard, and this is how they figure out how to win again.’ We didn’t particularly enjoy it in Dark Reign, which dominated everything and went on for an interminably long time, but in its own self-contained, quickly-released book like Age of Ultron, it’s much more palatable and much more interesting. This is the first event book in quite some time that I’ve actually enjoyed.
So far. As my esteemed colleague Iann Robinson is fond of saying, it could still shit the bed at any time.
