Review: Avengers: Rage of Ultron

Avengers: Rage of Ultron is, by my count, the fourth in Marvel’s new-ish series of original graphic novels, and the third that I’ve read.

Its timing and its title are both reflective of the publisher’s desire to have a book on the stands ready and waiting for anyone curious about the characters and interested in spending money on comics featuring them after seeing Avengers: Age of Ultron. That likely also explains the Avengers line-up drawn on the cover; while all of those characters along the bottom do appear in the book, only The Vision plays a major role. The others? Confined to a 23-page an opening scene set “Years Ago,” while the rest of the book is set “Today.”

It’s not a bad idea, really. Marvel doesn’t have anything that resembles the movie Avengers too closely in print, and the Age of Ultron series that the film took its sub-title from has more in common with the Terminator franchise than the Avengers films. And this book, written by Rick Remender and drawn by Jerome Opena, Pepe Larraz and Mark Morales, is certainly competently made. As a regular reader, if not exactly a fan of or expert on, any of these characters or creators, I found the book engaging and enjoyable.

I wonder how new-reader friendly it actually is, though. Of the two Marvel OGNs I’ve previously read, Avengers: Endless Wartime and X-Men: No More Humans, this hews a lot closer to the latter than the former, in terms of how confident Remender is that readers will be up-to-date on the week-to-week goings-on of the Marvel Universe.

I, for example, knew enough that I could easily make heads and tails of many of the changes that took place between “Years Ago” and “Today” in the Avengers: Former Falcon Sam Wilson is now Captain America, Thor is now a woman, Sabretooth is an Avenger and Hank Pym is back to using the name “Giant-Man” while dressed in a costume that makes him look like a big red ant.

But I still had no idea who the hell “The Descendents” were, although they appear to be robots of some sort that look extremely human, right down to the fact that the one codenamed “Fater” looked old and had wrinkly flesh. They all had odd names that made them sound like millennial superheroes: The Urn, The Swine, The Origins and The Ideal.

Oh, and Starfox is in this too…so, if you are picking this up on a whim after seeing Age of Ultron, maybe you want to read it near a computer with  its browser aimed at Wikipedia…?

There’s a nice introduction by Kurt Busiek, who remains one of the better writers to ever tackle The Avengers in my estimation, and it goes a long way towards explaining what makes Ultron such a great villain for the team, and an all-around appealing character (Me? I think it’s the jack o’lantern face, which was part of the reason I think the film’s design was a bit of a letdown). Perhaps inadvertently, Busiek also explains the tangled web of relationships involving Ultron and the various Avengers, most particularly his father Hank Pym and his son, The Vision. These relationships are quite important to the proceedings, although Remender doesn't devote much attention to making sure the reader knows much about them.

The story opens with an old-school line-up of Avengers fighting a more-or-less classic-looking Ultron, who is attacking New York City while trying to take control of America’s nuclear weapons to do his world destroying thing (I gotta admit, I really liked the homemade meteor idea from the movie; has any supervillain tried to create that precise extinction event in such a mannter before…?).

A geography-addled Captain America, Iron Man, Thor, Beast, Hawkeye, Scarlet Witch, Vision, Wasp and Hank Pym (then going by Yellowjacket) are The Avengers, and in a battle the length of a regular issue of a comic book, they manage to defeat Ultron….mostly thanks to Pym.

Then we pick up in modern times, and we find out where Ultron—or at least that version of Ultron—landed after Pym and company shot him into outerspace.

The current Avengers line-up? The Captain America Forrmerly Known As The Falcon, Thor (the lady version), The Wasp, Scarlet Witch, Quicksilver, Spider-Man, Sabretooth, The Vision in his latest ugly redesign and, of course, Pym.

Tensions are already high among The Avengers, as Pym and The Vision have been arguing about whether or not robots and various forms of artificial intelligence are really alive or not, and thus whether shutting them down is killing them or not. Pym does most of the narration in the book (although it opens with Ultron narrating before the narrators switch, oddly enough; I found myself reading Ultron’s narration in James Spader’s voice…that’s gonna stick with me for a while, I think).

There’s a lot of agonizing in Pym’s narration, and his interactions with The Vision, Ultron and his ex-wife The Wasp. It’s extremely melodramatic, to the point that it’s almost tedious.

As for the specific conflict driving the narrative, Ultron landed on Titan, home of Thanos (a no-show) and Starfox, which must be some kinda robot moon or something…? Or else it has the means for Ultron to turn into into a Cybertron-looking world, with his giant face on it. He moves it the many lightyears into Earth’s orbit pretty quickly, and then begins to assimilate people, as robotic lifeforms tend to do in TV, film and comic books, I guess.

Pym has the means for shutting Ultron down, the same robot-turner-off thing he used earlier and that The Avengers were not too happy about his using, as it “kills” robots, and so the team has to take on Ultron while trying to decide whether to simply “kill” Ultron with the device, or if they can figure out a way to stop him without resorting to kinda sorta lethal-ish force.

Remender, who has been writing the Avengers franchise’s C-Title for a while (Uncanny Avengers, a recent plotline from which recently took over much of Marvel’s publishing line for the event series Axis), does a fine job of using Jonathan Hickman-like stakes in the conflict.

The longer The Avengers wait to push the robot-killing button, the more time Ultron has to turn their teammates and innocent civilians into automatons, so that the potential death toll in the lose/lose scenario just gets worse and worse. Push it immediately, and dozens die. Wait a few minutes, hundreds die. Wait too long, millions die. Then billions.

Ultron gradually picks the Avengers line-up off, one-by-one, until it’s just Captain Falcmerica, Pym and The Vision debating on whether to kill him or try something riskier, with a weird, unexpected assist coming from Starfox, the love-powered Titan (A character, I almost said, who I don’t expect to ever see in a Marvel Studios movie…but then, a few years ago I would have said the same thing about The Vision and every single character in The Guardians of The Galaxy, so what do I know?)

In addition to being remarkably tied to the current status quo of the Marvel Universe, with no real effort put into introducing the characters and concepts to new readers, the book is seemingly quite relevant to the comics line…or at least as much as any coic book can be at this point, with a cosmic re-set button of some sort expected to arrive at the climax of Marvel’s current event series Secret Wars.

Ultron kinda sorta dies in a temporary way, and it takes the sacrifice of an Avenger to do it—the last page makes it perfectly clear that neither are dead, but the scene has the sort of finality that suggests Remender is officially putting two particular toys from the Avengers playset away for the foreseeable future.

The artwork is quite a bit rougher than in the other OGNs of the line. Opena has done a lot of work with Remender before, on the Uncanny X-Force title, and they work well together. Opena’s artwork tends to be dynamic and his characters expressive in an occasionally exaggerated way that fits the histrionics so many of the characters go through in this story.

That said, much of the action is confusing where it should be clear, as there’s only rarely a strong sense of where the various players are in relation to one another in the big battle scenes (Particularly in the “Then” team’s battle with Ultron). Several sequences I needed to re-read repeatedly until I could figure out what was happening, and it was usually the dialogue that explained it, not the imagery.

If you only read modern superhero comics, this probably isn’t even something you’ll notice, but man, if you jump back and forth from high-quality action manga to these sorts of decent-but-not-greate superhero comics, it’s glaring.

Opena and his collaborators are pretty weird with tears, too, and there were at least two scenes where the same image is used repeatedly in consecutive panels, manipulated to suggest a camera slowly zooming in on the subject. The effect is lost, however, because the bigger the art gets, the less distinct it looks, and the more its composite lines become visible, drawing attention to the fact that the art is being recycled.

Again, it’s not a sin, but it knocks a reader out of the moment, calling attention to the technique and making said reader question Opena’s motivations (If you’re already committed to drawing 112 pages, are those extra four panels really going to break your hand?).

It’s not perfect then, and maybe further away from perfect that it is close to it, but if one walks out of the theater wanting to read a comic book in which the Avengers fight Ultron, there aren’t exactly a lot of easy-to-find books that fit that particular bill. A reader could certainly do worse.

**********************

….Like Age of Ultron and Age of Ultron Companion or The Mighty Avengers Vol 1: The Ultron Imperative, for example. Marvel seems to have put out  some Ultron-specific collections to get ready for the movie,  like Avemgers: Ultron Unbound and while there are good comics in some of Marvel's recent collections with the word "Ultron" in the title, they're not exactly the ideal comics to hand a would-be comics reader who knows nothing about the medium, but liked what they saw on the silver screen, you know?

Review: Uncanny X-Force: The Dark Angel Saga Book 2

The "Dark Angel Saga" that began in the previous volume, much of which was spent with the members of the title team who weren't Angel journeying to the alternate world that "Age of Apocalypse" was set on in order to get some techno-magic Life Seed with which they hope to cure their ally Angel/Archangel/Warren Worthington, who had "ascended" to become the new Apocalypse.

If none of that means anything to you, this particular collection of the series—the fourth volume, although Marvel's pretty terrible at labeling these things—isn't the place to start, but Rick Remender and company's Uncanny X-Force actually is a rather strong comic book series, and I'd recommend it as a superhero action/adventure narrative that manages to wrestle with questions of morality and ethics while, having its cake and eating it too, constantly showing its various take-no-prisoners, more-violent-than-most-mutant anti-heroes waging violent and bloody battles.

After the mostly successful campaign in Age of Apocalypse-Land, our heroes Wolverine, Fantomex, Deadpool and Psylocke (all wearing matching black and gray uniforms, except for Psylocke) return to their headquarters in order to purge Archangel of Apocalypse, but find the Apocalypsified Archangel there waiting for them, along with his own super-team (Dark Beast, Genocide and current Horsemen War and Famine). After a brief melee, Archangel captures his lover Psylocke, who he wants to stick a Death Seed in and make into his bride or whatever, but the rest of the team escapes.

Much of the book's remaining 110 pages are so are devoted to the conflict between Archangel as the New Apocalypse and his followers, who include the Earth-AOA emigrees Iceman and The Blob among the previously mentioned characters, as well as the rather substantial cult of followers built up around Apocalypse (of which I was ignorant of before reading this series; as I've said before, most of my X-Men knowledge comes from the 1990s cartoon, rather than the comics that cartoonw as based on).

Archangel and Psylocke are engaged in a battle of rhetoric, as he tries to convince her to willingly submit to the Seed and join him and she tries to convince Warren Worthington to fight back and regain control of himself from his other personality (They also physically fight another off and on, as well). And the rest of X-Force fight their way into and through Apocalyse-Angel's forces, with Fantomex relying on a series of escalating attacks in an attempt to bring his former teammate down (First, he journeys back to the world of AOA in order to bring that world's X-Men here to help them, then he releases the clone of Apocalypse he's been growing and teaching via a virtual reality world since the end of the first volume of the series, Genesis—who will play a pretty substantial role in Jason Aaron's excellent Wolverine and The X-Men comic).

The good guys win, naturally, but at a pretty great cost. Psylocke does have to kill her lover Archangel, but, this being comics, he only kinda sorta dies—he is reborn immediately, but with no memory of his previous life at all.

It's a pretty propulsive read, all action and arguments, with a few jokes (Thanks, Deadpool!) and several rather inspired scenes of crazy fantasy. "Saga" is a pretty big word, one that's gotten smaller thanks to over use in super-comics, but this multi-part storyline, which Remender's been building to through the whole series so far, but which takes up about half of the previous trade and all of this one, really earns the word. "Epic" might have worked too, but would sound like a little much in the title of the book.

The final issue collected herein is a breath-catching, status quo re-jigger, between-arcs issue, drawn by Robbi Rodriguez in a cartoony, angular style that is in sharp contrast to every issue of Uncanny X-Force that's preceded it.

Rodriguez

In that issue, Wolverine comes clean to Beast and Kitty Pryde about the heretofore secret existence of X-Force (which was meant to be a black-ops assassination squad kept secret from everyone but its members), and asks them to enroll both Genesis and the new, amnesiac Angel in the Jean Grey School. And one of the AOA visitors opts to stay behind, that world's Nightcrawler, who looks just like the late, Earth-616 Nightcrawler, save for a dumb tattoo of some kind (he's also a coldhearted killer). He opts to stay behind in order to hunt down and kill any of the escaped bad guys from his dimension still hiding in Uncanny X-Force's dimension.

Jerome Opena draws the bulk of the pages in this book. All of 'em, in fact, save for Rodriguez's final issue and a series of scenes that take place on the psychic plane in the penultimate issue (which Esad Ribic draws). He does his usual fine job, selling even the most garish and fussy of the characters' costumes (Psyclocke, Archangel, everyone from AOA), and really doing a rather fantastic job on many of the action scenes, especially those involving Archangel, who kills with a swipe of his wings (In general, Opena communicates the violence of such acts through Archangel's expressions even mores so then the way in which he draws the flashing, slashing wings which, when attacking, are composed as much motion lines as they are anything else).

Opena

I liked how he drew Archangel's wings at rest, too; when he's not flying or chopping people up with his wings, he keeps them folded and limp behind him, forming a long, flowing cape of metallic knife feathers.

And speaking of drawings I liked, here's the cover for Uncanny X-Force #19, drawn by Raphael Grampa:

Review: The Vengeance of The Moon Knight Vol. 1: Shock and Awe

As I've recently been reading some Gregg Hurwitz Batman comics that have ranged in quality from not-too-terrible to too terrible, I thought maybe I should look at some other comics Hurwitz has written. Maybe it's not Hurwitz, I thought. Maybe it's not even me, I thought further. Maybe it's Batman.

So I went looking for some other comic books Hurwitz, whose day job is apparently a fairly successful writer of prose mysteries or thrillers, and found this collection of one of the recent-ish attempts at a new Moon Knight ongoing, a 2009 series entitled Vengeance of The Moon Knight. Not the vengeance of Moon Knight, damn it, or a Moon Knight, but The Moon Knight. There's only one Moon Knight! And this is his vengeance!

(For those of you who are not super well-versed in superheroes, Moon Knight is a very rich, obviously quite eccentric man who wears a cape, mask and costume to fight urban crime; he compensates for his lack of super-powers with superb fighting ability and a variety of elaborate and expensive gadgets, vehicles and weapons designed around his chosen nocturnal theme. So he's basically Batman, but instead of dressing like a bat, he dresses like the moon. A crescent moon, of course, not a full moon—that would just be silly.)

This fifth try at an ongoing Moon Knight series followed the 30-issue 2006 attempt, simply titled Moon Knight, which had a rather similar creative team: It's writer, Charlie Huston, also had a day job writing not-comic books, and its artist David Finch (who Hurwitz worked on Batman: The Dark Knight with) has a great deal in common with Vengeance of The... artist Jerome Opena. This Hurwitz/Opena effort only lasted a little more than half as long as the Huston/Finch one (18 issues), but it did outlast the sixth volume, by artist Alex Mallev and writer BRIAN MICHAEL FUCKING BENDIS, by six issues. So maybe Moon Knight's just not cut out for an ongoing monthly series any more? (Marvel's set to launch volume seven, by Warren Ellis and Declan Shalvey, any day now, as part of their "All-New Marvel NOW!" branding initiative).

It is not a very good book, but it's not all Hurwitz's fault. The scripts are functional, and at this earlier point in his career the man obviously has the writing of comic books down pat in a way that eludes some professional writers-who-are-new-to-writing-comics for a while.

The main problem with the story side of this particular book seems to be that it is so heavily reliant on The Moon Knight's byzantine origin and continuity (I was mostly kidding when I compared him to Batman, who he is quite derivative of; one notable difference is that Batman's a pretty straightforward, easy-to-get character, whereas Moon Knight has a large supporting cast of characters who aren't as iconic and instantly distinguishable as "sassy British butler" and "smart-mouthed teenage sidekick").

The Moon Knight Marc Spector has returned to New York after being elsewhere (he mentions the West Coast, although this pre-dates his relocation to the West Coast in his next, Bendis-written monthly), now intent on being a proper superhero, and not killing or mutilating his enemies the way he used to (Oh, that's another thing that separates him from Batman; Moon Knight is really for-real insane, with, like, multiple personalities and hallucinations and suchlike. I guess he cut the face off of his archenemy at some point in the past. I know The Joker recently had his face cut off, but it wasn't Batman who cut it off; a third party cut off The Joker's face.).

No one believes in The Moon Knight though, and they're unsure if he's a villain or a Punisher-like anti-hero or what.

He foils a robbery with several million dollars worth of weird vehicles and weapons, including a white motorcycle that emerges from a white meteor that crashes into the street, a white moon-shaped flying device and a pair of pistols that shoots bolos.

The Sentry, Marvel's Superman analogue that, like the Batman analogue whose book this is, has severe mental problems, shows up to to tell The Moon Knight he's watching him (Jeph Loeb beat Hurwtiz to the Moon Knight/Sentry team-up by about ten months, during his Hulk run, in which he had Moon Knight, Sentry and Ms. Marvel team-up against Red Hulk and Wendigos in an issue entitled "World's Finest").

Norman Osborn, The Hood and some other villains menace The Moon Knight, going so far as to to hire a Scarecrow to break everyone out of Arkham Ravencroft Asylum, lobotomize all the inmates with an ice pick  and unleash them on the city, lead by the magically resurrected archenemy of The Moon Knight, the one who had his face cut off in the past.

Spider-Man shows up—Hurwitz writes a nice scene where a chatty Spider-Man talks a criminal's ear off while he's swinging him to the police station, like an over-eager taxi driver who keeps turning around to talk to you while driving—to let The Moon Knight know that he doesn't believe in The Moon Knight either.

Meanwhile, The Moon Kngiht's craziness now manifests itself as the bird-skull headed Egyptian god Khonshu who, I don't really want to get into all that, but Khonshu is the god of vengeance and the moon that is kind of key to The Moon Knight's origin. Hurwitz touches on it here. And Moon Knight's supporting cast—ex-girlfriend, butler, ex-Moon Copter pilot, etc—show up, talking about past events from past comic books, each of them poorly introduced by Opena.

I think Opena's art might actually be a bigger problem with this book than the scripting, something that surprised me, given that Opena has done other (later) work I really rather liked, and he's not David Finch, who I did compare him to some paragraphs back.

What Opena shares with Finch is a rather dark, gritty style, with lots of blacks and lots of lines; there's not a lot of actual grit—I didn't get much of a sense of texture from the work—but the illusion of grit. This may be because Opena was trying to emulate Finch's work on the previous Moon Knight series a bit, or it may be simply because Opena felt the material called for it.

It's not that clear, though. It's rather frustrating in that this isn't Batman, so better introductions to the characters—I don't know what The Moon Knight looks like when he's not wearing his costume, as Marc Spector's face is always in shadow or tilted away or nondescript and devoid of individual characteristic or expression. I know he has brown hair, but that's about it. If he beat me up and stole my copy of The Vengeance of Moon Knight Vol. 1: Shock and Awe—No, wait, that's a library book!—I wouldn't know what to tell the police sketch artist. "He had brown hair, Officer, so I know it definitely wasn't Bruce Wayne."

All of the characters are drawn like that. Frenchie, the ex-pilot, looks a little like Silver Age Tony Stark. The girl is a girl. Spider-Man, The Sentry, The Hood, The Scarecrow—their costumes tell me who they are. Osborn has that Osborn hair (to be fair to Opena, during this period of Marvel Comics' output, Norman Osborn was in every single issue of every single comic, and no two artists drew him anything alike; you just knew it was Osborn because he had that hair that looks so damn weird when drawn in a modern, realistic style, and he was wearing a suit and yelling and people were calling him "Osborn" in the dialogue).

Similarly, a lot of the vehicles and Moon stuff aren't really introduced visually. The first time I see Moon Knight walk into the new Moon Cave or whatever he calls it, I'd kinda like to see all his Moon shit, not just the corner of a Moon Copter or Moon Plane or whatever that big, silver, curved thing just off-panel is supposed to be.

And then there's the action, which doesn't flow, and is confusing and hard to read. There's a brutal fight between Moon Knight and his foe, the undead Bushman, at the climax, and it's the sort of fight scene one needs to read repeatedly to make sense of. Little crescent moon-shaped shuriken or darts appear in Bushman's forehead without Moon Knight ever actually throwing them at him, then they disappear—Opena having forgotten to draw them or the colorist having colored over them—and then two of them are back. Like that.

But hey, let's not blame everything on the creators. Another problem with the book may have been the premise. Set during the post-Secret Invasion, pre-Siege period branded "Dark Reign," when Norman "Green Goblin" Osborn was the Boss Of The Superheroes, and his Dark Avengers (and other villains) were regarded as heroes and the real heroes all regarded as villains, a large part of this book seems to be the marriage of The Moon Knight's personal struggles with killing—his past, pre-The Moon Knight history as a paid assassin, his connection to a god of vengeance, his The Moon Knighting that killed people—to the up-is-down, down-is-up world of "Dark Reign," when villains are heroes and heroes are villains. As an anti-hero, what's that make The Moon Knight now? An anti-villain?

The status quo the book launched in was a temporary one, and perhaps it was just too closely tied to it...I'd have to read the rest of the series to know for sure, but reading these early issues collected in this trade, much of the plot seemed very dated. In fact, the entire conflict outside of The Moon Knight's head is Osborn and his lieutenant and his lieutenant's lieutenants efforts to stop Moon Knight from setting up shop as an honest-to-goodness superhero in New York City during the "Dark Reign."