Comic Reviews: Age of Ultron/Infinity

It's been exactly 2 months since my last post, so to make up for that I will be reviewing two of Marvel's last big events.  But before I do I feel  should explain what I consider "Big Events", a big event has it's own series and multiple tie-ins, where as a small event is contained within a single book or even two, and a limited series is a series that has no tie-ins.  So for today I have two big events, one I really enjoyed, and one I felt was just filler.

Age of Ultron

       Age of Ultron has a pretty basic premise; Ulton, a psychotic robot built by Hank Pym, has finally upgraded beyond what the Avengers could handle.  Honestly considering how obvious of a plot that is, I'm surprised this wasn't written by Mark Millar.  The story takes place in a distopia where Ultron drones go around killing anyone and everyone they can while fighting off a meager resistance.  In a last ditch effort Wolverine and Susan Storm go back in time to kill the one man responsible...Hank Pym.  The story has a few twists I don't want to give away so that's all I'm going to say about the plot, basically imagine the Terminator with super heroes.

       This event is my favorite since the Dark Reign, the villain selection, the distopic setting, even the tie-ins are well done.  Personally I'm a sucker for distopia stories, and what sets this one apart is that everything the heroes try ends up making things even worse, and when they do find the best possible scenario all of reality ends up broken.

        Ultron has rocketed to the top of my favorite villains list in recent years because every time he shows up in comics, cartoons, and soon movies; he is a force to be reckoned with.  But it's more than the shear power he possesses that makes him a great villain, it's also the backstory and reasoning behind his actions.  Ultron was originally created by Hank Pym, one of the original Avengers, as a side project with artificial intelligence.  However Ultron decided humans were disgusting creatures unfit to even exist and he went very evil very fast.  In the years following Ultron did what all technology does, he upgraded, each time becoming stronger and eliminating a weakness he once had.  He also created a "family" for himself as well, but they for some reason always end up siding with humanity. 

       The pacing of this event is handled very well, most comic book events in recent years always seem a bit rushed at the end, as if the writers suddenly realized they now only had 5 pages for a big showdown they have been teasing for months.  Here we get a few issues/tie-ins where we are introduced to the series and everyone is looking for the original Ultron, then an issue where Wolverine and Susan Storm go back in time to prevent Ultron from ever existing.  After that we get a few more issues/tie-ins where we see that without Ultron creating his family, certain events play out completely different and the world sucks even more than before.  Then we get act 3, where they figure out a way to make it all work out for the best, then we get a final ending where all of the fallout is explained in detail rather than teased.

       The aftermath of this event is the introduction of a new character from another universe now being stranded in Marvel's mainstream universe, and the most powerful villain in the mainstream universe being thrown into the Ultimate universe and creating a major event there as well (more on that later).  The new Avengers movie is now Avengers: Age of Ultron, and even the first What-if series since Siege came out a few years ago.  But possibly the greatest of all things to come out of this event is the possible permanent death in comics in a long time, or at least it's set up that way, but since it was a popular character that may change.

All in all I thoroughly enjoyed this series, and if you ever get the chance I highly recommend you read it as well.  If you enjoy comics or want to get into them, this series manages to hold your hand just enough make this a great jumping on point.  I give the series an A, and again I highly recomend you read it.

 Infinity

       Infinity is a whole different story, to put things bluntly it's a mess.  Up until very recently the assumption was Thanos would be the villain in The Avengers 2, and Marvel themselves even seem to have believed building this guy up comics for years with a secret origin, his return, and especially this event in particular.  

       The story here is there is an attack on a planet that is allied with the Avengers so they leave to help.  Thanos decides to use the opportunity to attack Earth and hunt down one person, his child.  Already the problem should be apparent: there is simply too much going on here.  A 6 part series involving Thanos, a villain Marvel has been building up for years,  is almost entirely told in tie-in.  The majority of the main series is the massive war the Avengers are fighting with to protect their intergalactic allies, which if kept separate could have been an amazing series.  Back on Earth the B-list heroes are fighting off an invasion of their own on the form of Thanos.

       To it's credit the event had the potential to be really good, but the marketing was a little too good and the event itself couldn't live up to the hype it created.  Personally I feel if the Space war and the Thanos attack were two different events then they would be two great small events, or even simply formatting the series different to where the Thanos event we were promised took more of a spotlight and the Avengers absence was a tie-in.  The true mistake of the series is this guy.

       This is Thane, the son of Thanos.  Thane is the reason Thanos comes to Earth, to kill the last of his children.  Where to begin, first if Thanos knew he had a child on Earth, and he wants to kill all of his children, why did this never come up in the decades of prior encounters.  Next is his origin story, he is an Inhuman without Inhuman powers, until Black Bolt sets off a blast that gives all those with Inhuman DNA powers, Thane's appearance is a result of this blast and because of his father...quite the coincidence huh?  His powers then happen to be exactly what Thanos has been trying to achieve for years, and he deprives the readers of the final showdown that has been building up ever since the Avengers movie.

       I believe the true purpose of this event was to set up the Marvel Universe for what I like to call "long events", events that aren't really events but simply are a period of time that resulted from one, like the Dark Reign or the Heroic Age, so it is for these reasons I feel that Infinity only deserves a C, because it felt like it should have been more than it was and can even be skipped.