Brian Michael Bendis’ timeline-spanning event comes to close! How did it hold up? Is it a satisfying conclusion? Was it all worth it? Well…
Written by Brian Michael Bendis
Illustrated by Alex Maleev, Bryan Hitch, Butch Guice, Brandon Peterson, Carlos Pacheco, David Maquez, Joe Quesada et al.
THE FINALE!
The biggest secret in comics will be revealed to you! An ending so confidential…even the artists of this book don’t know what lies on the final pages…! A surprise so big that comic book legend Joe Quesada himself returns to the pages of Marvel Comics to draw a sequence that people will be talking about for years.
Well, here it is. We here at Multiversity Comics have been… rather harsh on “Age Of Ultron” to say the least, but with the final issue finally here, it’s time to look back at the series as a whole and ask: was it all worth it? Issue 10 of “Age Of Ultron” brings to a close Brian Bendis’ epic event for 2013 that is sure to reshape the face of the Marvel Universe for years to come, but when you break it down just how good was this series as an event? Bendis is ever joined here by a plethora of artists from Marvel’s staple including, but not limited to, Alex Maleev, Bryan Hitch and even Joe Quesada himself to bring about the close of the event of the year. Until “Infinity” rolls around, that is.
It’s the final showdown with Ultron. Bodies are strewn on the ground and it’s the latch ditch effort for the few remaining heroes to scrape together the effort to defeat Ultron once and for all. No, hold on, I’m thinking of how this event started. No, here we catch up with Hank Pym after the events of the last issue receiving a message from… well, that would be telling and having to then stop Ultron from creating the future that was shown at the open of the series. The majority of the issue then becomes are retelling of Bendis and Hitch’s “Avengers” #12.1 from 2011 which served, largely, as a prelude to the event. This issue reuses a number of pages from that issue with the addition of Hank Pym’s intervention (in narration captions so that nothing had to be redrawn) which leads to the new events because of the time travel that occurred in earlier issues. Thanks to Pym’s intervention, the events of “Avengers” #12.1 change and become the new final confrontation between the Avengers and Ultron in an attempt to stop the future from the start of the series from occurring.
That’s probably the best idea this series has had and seeing events that have already played out one way change because of the series use of time travel was a nice touch. Going back and reading “Avengers” #12.1, it’s easy to see how Bendis managed to reuse relettered pages from that to tweak the events of that issue in order to lead to new pages from Bryan Hitch which become the final battle between Ultron and the Avengers. After nine issues of time travel that largely seemed to either change nothing or change everything, it was nice to see it downplayed and for the change to be subtle. However, while the idea presented in this issue was nice change of pace, that action wasn’t so much. In fact, for what was meant to be a universe shattering event, the conclusion is rather underwhelming and basically boils down to turning Ultron off and back on again. After seeing the destruction of the world non-stop for five issues straight, for it all to boil down to what felt like such a weak fight against Ultron, it all felt rather pointless, unfortunately.
While Bendis’ conclusion to the event was unfortunately really weak, the art is probably where this issue stands out most. The issue opens with Alex Maleev who always puts out excellent work when working with Bendis from past experience and here is no different, even if he is stuck with the more quiet opening pages. Then, the series brings back Bryan Hitch, first by reusing pages from “Avengers” #12.1 and then with new pages as the time travel causes events to change. Hitch’s pages take up the majority of the book and work just as well as they did at the start of the series. Hitch really gets huge action and works well enough here when he’s allowed to let loose, even if the Bendis’ writing lets him down somewhat.
Then we come to what was touted as the big twist of the book. Joe Quesada’s secret final pages and the appearance of Angela. Which is literally all it is. It’s a two-page spread of her just standing there in space and then a teaser for her appearance in “Guardians Of The Galaxy”. Underwhelming? Yeah, you could say that. For all of Marvel’s press surrounding Angela’s involvement in the finale, for her to have literally no involvement (she only appears in the final pages after Ultron is defeated) is more than a little disappointing. In fact, the entire conclusion to the series is disappointing. After Ultron is defeated, the issue then becomes nothing but a series of cliffhangers and teasers for upcoming books that are set to handle the fallout of the event like “Hunger”. There’s little closure here other than the knowledge that they did actually win against Ultron this time. This whole event felt like it ran out of steam before it could even get going.
Final Verdict: 5.0 – A middle of the road score for a middle of the road comic. Here’s hoping what this leads to is better.
