Marvel Pick Of The Week - April 1, 2015 [SPOILERS]

Pick Of The Week:

Avengers: Rage Of Ultron OGN by Rick Remender and Jerome Opena

With villainous android Ultron taking on the ever-profitable Avengers in next month’s big-screen outing, it’s only natural that the comic racks will be filled with his creepy metal smile. This is a good thing – Ultron is a great character who generally lends menace to iconic story lines. The thumbnail sketch is that founding Avenger Hank Pym built an artificial intelligence named Ultron, and that turned against humanity and built intangible android The Vision to attack the Avengers, and that turned against his “father” and became one of the team’s most popular heroes. Ultron generally fights the Avengers to a standstill, they rally, he narrowly escapes, and he returns in a few years claiming to have upgraded.

Remender’s original graphic novel begins with a story of the 80’s incarnation of the team fighting Ultron in New York and shooting him off into space, then jumping to the malevolent machine’s return in the present day. As fights go, it’s pretty standard stuff. Heroes hit robots. Robots hit heroes. Robots infect heroes with nanotechnology that turns them into robots who hit other heroes. (I know, I know, but that really is a standard story.) The story ends with a heroic sacrifice, and I’m already seeing online speculation that this is in-continuity, meaning the character’s dead for real. I have reservations about this. If we are supposed to believe this story, we have to pretend like every Ultron appearance since Beast was on the team never happened, and that means I wouldn’t get to read the Avengers West Coast story where he makes a robot bride based on Hawkeye’s ex-wife and the Scarlet Witch takes her out by flying a jet into her at full speed. And that story was awesome, and I won’t pretend it didn’t happen. But it wouldn’t be the first time Rick Remender created a massive continuity change without proof of reading much source material, and at a certain point, we readers have to choose between continuity or creative exploration. I’m willing to say that Ultron left a backup hard drive somewhere that activated into the monster I feared in most modern stories.

Two things make this story rise above the usual Ultron stories. The first is the horror. Ultron is usually scary, and we’ve all gotten chills listening to James Spader singing the Pinocchio song in the trailer, but Remender has proven himself in the horror genre with such titles as Night Mary, and this book does not disappoint. I gasped when Ultron hissed from off-panel, “Earlier, you pondered if there is a God,” then steps out of the smoke announcing, “There is now.” I should not have read that after dinner.

But the other part, and the reason I made this book my pick of the week, was the depth to which Remender explored the psyche of Hank Pym. This is a man who has never had biological children, and he and his robot son have tried to kill each other since the first day they met, and the writer balances comfortably between both of those ideas. Pym loves Ultron. Pym believes Ultron should be dead. It is possible to have both of these ideas, and the book generalizes this to apply to any parent who is disappointed by a child but recognizes the hubris in this. We raise our children to be like us, then hate when they reflect our worst nature. As the story develops, Pym’s guilt leads to dangerous extremes, and he’s clearly gone too far, but Remender has earned the development by showing key steps, and if anyone’s going to be a little dangerous, it’s Hank Pym. (I wonder if the movies will reference that Ant-Man got kicked off the Avengers for beating his wife and that even though every Hank Pym title since then has tried to rehab the image, readers can’t disconnect the character from the sin.) This is a book of startling psychological maturity, and it’s taking the familiar Avengers generational drama to a new clarity.

This book excites, surprises, and wounds the reader. I hope the movie maintains the complexity of Remender’s preview material.

Honorable Mentions:

Spider-Gwen 3, because no one is doing action art the way Rodriguez is doing action art.

Rocket Raccoon 10, because Groot has some suggestions for how we as a nation respond to Indiana’s latest political decisions.

Avengers Millenium 1, because I don’t know about New York, but Five Guys makes the best burgers in my state, and it’s always nice to know which superheroes you can reliably take to lunch. Call me, Spidey.

Avengers Ultron Forever 1, because when you’re an Avenger, sometimes the baby you just saw gets older and turns into Captain America and you guys meet up in some pocket timeline and you just have to keep it together because Avengers just do that.

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Marvel Pick Of The Week – April 1, 2015 [SPOILERS]

By Matt Conner | Apr 1, 2015

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