The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1679: The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl #5, July 2015

As we wind down the first story arc, today's issue gives us an idea of how well known our unbeatable heroine actually is in the Marvel U.

The short answer: not very. While trapped in the head of the Statue of Liberty, Nancy, who by this time has figured out that she's living with a superhero, listens to obviously fabricated tales of her new roomie. The stories are excellent, completely inaccurate to Doreen's style and adventures, and touch on some older eras of comics. There's the obligatory Dark Knight nod, some Golden-Age stuff, a nod to the crazy narratives of the 90s, all while Nancy is trying to explain that this is simply not how Squirrel Girl rolls.

Erica Henderson put so much awesomeness into this series. When I first picked it up, I wasn't sure about her far more stylized representation of the Marvel U, but now I can't imagine the series with any other art. SG has definitely been depicted as a typical superhero, prominently in the Bendis/Deodato era of the series. And while she translates well into that world, I much prefer seeing other Marvel heroes translated to hers. The cartoony style does nothing to diminish the excitement that we associate with the Marvel U. What it does do is shine a sunnier light on that world. Squirrel Girl's world is still filled with planetary invasions and interdimensional gods, but that doesn't necessarily make it a grim world. In fact, that might be one of Doreen's most important powers: her sense of optimism. She never lets a situation get the best of her, and that's just one of the lessons that I think we can all take away from this series.

Have I mentioned that, at all? That this series actually does some really important work in teaching us, specifically in teaching us how to be nice to one another.? Well it does, and that's yet another reason that you should be reading it. All of it.

"Anyway, one time a crazy professor secretly stole her blood and used it to make a clone of her!"

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1678: The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl #4, June 2015

Finally, Galactus.

All I will say is that this comic does not play out the way you think it's going to, it sets the tone for the entire series that follows it, and features one of my favourite pages of a Marvel comic ever (it's the 8th page of actual comics).

 A cool feature of Squirrel Girl is the bottom of the page commentary, sometimes from Doreen herself, sometimes from writer Ryan North, and sometimes from a narrator voice that is somewhere between the two. In the very first issue, the font is so dim that it's a bit hard to read. But the colour is corrected in the rest of the series and offers a hilarious counterpoint to the action on each page. It's simply another of the features of this series that makes it stand out from the rest of the spandex comics on the shelves.

I've been trying to think of another comic that has a similar aesthetic to USG, but there really aren't that many. Perhaps Keith Giffen's criminally cut short Vext comes closest, a tale that is firmly attached to the shared narrative construct within which it happens, but not to the traditional ways of telling stories in that construct. Squirrel Girl acknowledges that it's surrounded by the Marvel U, but refuses to tell the usual kinds of stories we might expect from that fictional milieu.

"I like you, Squirrel Girl. You don't fear me. In all my travels, you are the first to approach me...as a peer."

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1677: The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl #3, May 2015

You know how sometimes you're on your way to stop Galactus from devouring your planet and they you get knocked back down to Earth by a villain who mistakes you for his arch-nemesis?

No?

Man, this is not a relatable comic for a lot of you.

That is what happens in this issue, but, honestly, I would love to have seen the "Squirrel Girl, Warlady of Mars" story that appears to be what the cover of this issue is advertising. Perhaps, now that the series is ending at issue #50, I'll pick up the reigns and get Doreen to Mars for some green ape action.

"Doreen, I'm sorry, but we just don't have the time. If we stop that robbery, then Galactus makes it to Earth and everybody dies anyway."

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1676: The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl #2, April 2015

You know how sometimes you're the only one who knows that Galactus is coming to devour the Earth, so you have to "borrow" some armour from your good friend Tony Stark so you can fly to the moon to keep the Eater of Worlds from, y'know, eating your world?

That's never happened to you?

Well, it happens to Squirrel Girl.

But we also get to see the beginnings of one of the great friendships of modern comics, Doreen Green and her roommate Nancy Whitehead. It's almost as impossible to imagine this series without Nancy as it would be to imagine it without squirrels. Right from the start, Nancy is established as an important character not only to Doreen's narrative, but in her own right too. That's one of the really lovely things about this series: the supporting cast are every bit as interesting and fleshed-out (to the extent that they can be as supporting characters) as our focal heroine. Over the course of the last four years the book has in many ways moved from a single-character focussed narrative to an ensemble cast. And Nancy was there right from the beginning. (As was Chipmunk Hunk - we just didn't know it.)

"Dude, you literally just got lost staring at his cheekbones."

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1675: The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl #1, March 2015

I couldn't do it.

Reading Lovecraftian horror first thing in the morning was just too much. So, though I will finish reading the stuff I pulled out, I'm taking a break and am instead going to read the much happier, more optimistic, first series of The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl.

I don't know what more I can say about this comic that I haven't said before. It's easily the best thing Marvel has put out in the last decade or so. While I loved Secret Wars, and Hickman's Fantastic Four, and Bendis' Avengers, Squirrel Girl blows them all away. It's funny, poignant, exciting, kind....really, all of the things that we want in a superhero comic but perhaps didn't know we wanted in a superhero comic. Doreen is an amazing character, full of hope and charity, and her relationships with her friends (both squirrel and human), coupled with some superheroics, make her one of the, strangely, most relatable heroes to have emerged from the House of Ideas.

I'm going to read the truncated (by Secret Wars) first volume, and then perhaps jump back into the Cthulhu stuff with a fresh, and fortified, mind.

"You have learned too late not to jump in the face of the great Kraven, but know this: your body will serve as a warning to future generations."

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 320: Age of Ultron #10AI, August 2013

I think that if you had to choose a primary Marvel U character whose trajectory has been the most consistently tragic since their debut, Hank Pym would have to sit very near the top of the list. I'm not sure what it is about this character that has invited so many writers and artists to heap difficulty after difficulty on him. I've proposed a few times in these posts that there are characters in the Marvel U that emblematize particular human traits, and part of me wonders if Pym is just such a character. But what does he emblematize?

My initial thought was that he's a scapegoat figure, the one that we offer up as a sacrifice, with whom we imbue our most negative traits and narratives, so that we might escape them, purge them, ourselves. If we look back through his life, through the lives of alternate versions of him, he's beset with tragedy and violence. Severe mental breaks, abusive relationships, genocidal inventions, and, if this issue is to be believed (and it should, 'cause it's Mark Waid, and he tells truth), the mother of all persecution complexes. And these are just the ones I know about from what I've read of him. I'm sure there's more. So we heap these terrible things on poor Hank Pym, and hope that it appeases whatever fates run the universe and that we will not end up suffering as he does.

But you know what gets eclipsed by Pym's tragedy? He keeps coming back. In his inimitable style, Mark Waid, ably embellished by Andre Araujo, reminds us that perhaps one of the greatest attributes of humanity, super or otherwise, is that we keep getting back up. Waid's run on The Flash could probably be summed up in exactly those five words: we keep getting back up. We don't stop believing that we matter. That's what this comic is about. It's about a person realizing that he's been told he, and by extension, his art, doesn't matter, that he and it will never amount to anything. And in telling this tale, Waid and Araujo touch us all.

I have often been asked why I study literature. What difference does the study of literature make to the world as it is lived, to how we function in our rational existences? Frye, in Anatomy of Criticism, calls literary critique an art form all its own, and in this sense, I identify with Hank in this comic. Do something productive, something that results in a practical application, that somehow has a perceivable and lucrative affect on the world. Frye also notes that through literature we envision different ways of living, of organizing ourselves, from the personal to the global. How, then, can anyone ever ask why we study literature? Surely one of the most important questions we can ask as sentient organisms is "Are we doing the absolute best, are we 'human-ing' as well as we possibly could be?" In this, we can respond either yes or no, or we can question what it is to "human," and both of these responses are fundamental to the continued evolution of the species. Why study art? Why create art? Why critique art? Because if we didn't, we be robots. And Age of Ultron has just shown us how that all turns out.

On to the quarter comics tomorrow! (Though I think the first issue of the Avengers A.I. series might be in there, so perhaps we haven't left Pym completely behind yet.)

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 319: Age of Ultron #10, August 2013

Bendis does something quite lovely here in returning the tale right back to where it began in Avengers 16.1. After the insanity of the previous 10+ issues, it's nice to see Ultron get what's coming to him. What's interesting, though, is that we experience this cathartic moment, this, and I won't be shy about it, vengeful moment, for something that Ultron has not yet, nor ever will do.

It's a very interesting facet of fiction, and particularly of time travel fiction, that our linear perspective of the narrative is not the same perspective of the characters that we've read the linear narrative about. Ultron perpetuates one of the most brutal genocides the Marvel U has ever seen, and we, you and I, witness it first hand, follow the adventurers through their attempts to fix this, only to wind up back at the start, before all these events, which is also the end.

Now, that said, the original iteration of 16.1 does not feature the defeat of Ultron, so we're left with the notion that there was an "original" timeline that was rewritten - in many ways this mirrors the set-up of DCs crisis-rewritten universes. There's always some holdover, someone or thing that remember the previous continuity, serving the function of keeping all those old stories in continuity, but also of acknowledging the long-time reader's emotional investment in those stories.

All this is to say that Ultron gets his ass handed to him, which he deserves, and everyone gets to live. I'm curious as to whether or not anyone's ever dealt with Wolverine and the Invisible Woman having lived through and remembered all of the events of AoU. You'd think that those two, at least, would be suffering some serious PTSD. But, as with many shattering events in superhero universes, they likely let it slide from their shoulders and their minds, and get on with their lives. Their abilities to cope with trauma are also super, it appears.

I know I said this was the end of the AoU, but there's actually an epilogue comic, written by none other than Mark Waid, and I happened to find it today while I was out comic hunting. So we'll actually finish up Age of Ultron tomorrow, and then get on to some quarter bin treasures. See you then.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 318: Age of Ultron #9, August 2013

There are two moments that really stand out for me in this comic. The first is the opening splash page depicting the result of two Starkguard helicarriers crashing into New York City:

That there is some rampant destruction.

The second is Wolverines'(s) decision to kill himself.

That third panel there, where a Logan who's experienced two different ends of his world stares at the sun (rising or setting), and, without movement or voice, makes peace with the fact of his death. I'm fairly outspoken about my opinion that Wolverine is one of the most over-used characters in the Marvel U, but this is a moment where he is utilized brilliantly, and the character shines through the grimness of the story. Wolverine very rarely considers himself heroic. I think that he is here.

I don't want to say anything more today. These two sequences are amazing, and there's that whole pictures:words ratio thing. We'll finish up the Age of Ultron tomorrow.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 317: The Fearless Defenders #4AU, July 2013

What's kind of nice about this particular crossover issue is that I have pretty much no idea of what the Fearless Defenders are like in regular continuity, so this just seemed like a cool story with some semi-familiar characters, like another chapter of Age of Ultron (which it is), as opposed to a reimagining of something with which I was already engaged.

So, the first question that pops to mind, of course, is when the hell did Hippolyta become a character in the Marvel U, and how come she's so frickin' badass?

This issue gives us the most comprehensive look at the Latveria-Asgard Wars, though saying that it's comprehensive is a bit of a misnomer. We see a few aftermath shots, and that's about it. I have to say, were they ever to return to the AoU, I'd love to see this war played out as a proper, boots on the ground (a la Siege:Embedded) title. Style it after the old 70s DC war comics, keep the level of superheroic silliness (said in the most affectionate manner possible, btw) to a minimum, and give us a good, solid war tale. Doom versus Odin, with Thor and Sif, and the Warriors Three, and Baldur and Loki, and (somehow) Ares all mixed in. I'm getting Illiadic shivers down the spine.

Not much else to say about this issue. Hippolyta's costume is fantastic, but I would have expected nothing less from Phil Jiminez. I used to equate him with the second volume of The Invisibles, but really he's more one of the men who now sits at the feet of the Wonder Women. Maybe they'll give Hippolyta her own series, and he can write and draw it, and not have to deal with silly New 52 Wonder Woman.

(Y'know, every now and again I'll write something like that about the New 52 and feel bad, since I've read so little of it. And then I'll pick up an issue and read it and it's just fucking crap. *sigh*)

Coming up to crunch time with two issues left. Who will live, who will die, will anything even remotely change at the end of the crossover? Stay tuned!

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 316: Uncanny Avengers #8AU, July 2013

Bah, time travel! (Really ought to be the rallying cry for the entirety of Age of Ultron).

Another look into the differing ways that various characters have turned out in the new time line - what's actually thoroughly interesting here is that Havok seems to have grown up. I've never been a fan of Havok. Being an elder brother, I understand how sibling rivalry works, and my younger brothers, having attended the same high school I did, regale with the expectations teachers placed on them as a result of my performance.

However, my brother outgrew any resentment they may have felt over that and became remarkable individuals in their own rights. Alex Summers, Havok, younger brother of seminal Marvel hero Cyclops, never seems to. This could have to do with what Frye, in one of the rare moments in which I disagree with him, calls the "endless form in which a central character...never develops or ages [and] goes through one adventure after another," what he also terms as a "refrigerated deathlessness" in comic strip characters (Anatomy of Criticism, p.186). I've talked a bit about the archetypal nature of Cyclops when we see an alternate of him in the "Age of Apocalypse" storyline, and now I'm wondering if this adolescent jealously of his brother is Havok's archetype. Are they the Cain and Abel of the Marvel universe? Here, in the Age of Ultron/Age of Le Fey timeline, however, Havok seems to have grown up, taken charge of his life, and found purpose, leading and protecting the Morlocks, the less-fortunate of an already less-fortunate species.

Now, let me be very clear that I have not followed any of Havok's progress through the X-universe over probably the last decade or so. It could very well be that he's escaped his seminal brother's shadow, but I somehow doubt it. This is the defining trait of his character, and while "refrigerated deathlessness" is a bit of a harsh way of putting it, there is that sense of stasis surrounding comics characters that won't let them change very much. What I suppose I'd argue is that this stasis itself is a way of developing the character, in that the static traits themselves become the development, paradoxically. The longer a character exhibits this stasis, the more developed and ingrained the trait becomes, the more the character teeters on the verge of archtypifiying.

Heady stuff for early morning superheroes.

There's some brutal deaths in this issue, and a general feeling of grittiness that keeps me from wanting to read the rest of Remender's Uncanny Avengers. Aren't we done with the grittiness for a bit in superhero universes? Can't the pendulum swing back to epic, mad, joyful adventures of gods and goddesses, reveling in their powers and their ability to do good?

I think Age of Ultron is getting to me. More tomorrow.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 315: Age of Ultron #8, July 2013

Before I get to today's comic, I just wanted to mention another one I read while having breakfast. I picked up a box of comics at a flea market this weekend (which I'll write up a post about shortly), and it had a relatively large run of Marvel Two-In-One in it. Issue #86 was utterly great. The team-up is the ubiquitous Thing and Cain Marko, aka The Sandman. The two are usually at each others throats, but this time they sit at a bar and have a beer while Marko tells the Thing his life story. I can't help but wonder if this is the comic where the Sandman turns things around and becomes a good guy, though I feel like I've seen him taking on Spider-Man much later than the 1982 cover date on the comic.

Anyway, that's a much more pleasant situation than Wolverine and the Invisible Woman find themselves in in AoU. Much of this issue is devoted to the interrogation of these two, to see if they're clones sent to infiltrate Tony Stark's security force on behalf of Morgana Le Fey. You had to know that things wouldn't be even remotely okay once Hank Pym was killed. An interesting moment occurs when Stark has accessed their memories of the previous timeline, and he notes that it will take him his entire life to sort it all out. His primary concern is not the apocalypse of Ultron that he sees, but the fact that Wolverine and Sue have gone back and "broken" the timeline.

Emma Frost points out to him that they're all alive, instead of being dead, which one really ought to see as a bonus, but that futurist in Tony Stark is more than likely looking ahead to try and figure out exactly what ramifications this reset of the timeline will have.

What's interesting is that it's not the first time Le Fey has been involved in this kind of reset. The opening of the Busiek/Perez Avengers run puts her in command of the world, or much of it, as well. In fact, off the top of my head, aside from Ultron and Apocalypse (well, and Doom in Secret Wars, I guess), I can't think of too many other super villains whose plans for world domination have actually succeeded, if only for a little while. One wonders why she isn't considered in the ranks of those same villains more often, though perhaps its the relative importance we, as a culture, place on the scientific rather than the irrational. The other three use technology, though vastly advanced, to cement their place at the top. Le Fey uses magic, and we just don't cleave to that kind of thinking much anymore.

Alright. The next couple of days will look into the world of the Stark/Le Fey war. I'm curious to get a broader (even a slightly broader) look at this timeline. See you tomorrow.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 314: Avengers Assemble #15AU, July 2013

I have by this point managed to track down the last three tie-in issues for the Age of Ultron, so I thought I'd read them, just to break up the main series. Though this issue was published around the same time as the last issue of AoU, it's set a little farther back in the story as far as I can tell, though it certainly sets up some of the more magical twists that we'll see in the story as we continue.

One of the questions the New York-based heroes have been asking throughout the series is whether what's happened in Marvel New York has indeed happened all over the world. Leaving aside, but not forgetting, the ridiculous North America-centrism that this represents, it's great to get a glimpse of what's happened to the world outside of that hub of superhuman craziness, and, unsurprisingly, it's much the same as our focal location. Captain Marvel tells us that it took 8 1/2 minutes for Ultron to take Britain, which actually begs an interesting question: how long has the occupation been a thing before we come into the story? With the size of the building that Ultron has erected over Manhattan, we're led to believe that it's been some time, but how long would it really take to construct something like that when you have an unlimited work force? The longest part of the occupation would be taking down the majority of the superheroes. If we go by Spider-Man's tale from early in the series, he wakes up during the initial attack, goes out to help, and is then captured by Owl and Hammerhead. It's hard to believe that Hawkeye's rescue comes too much later on, as Spider-Man does not appear to be malnourished or particularly weakened as they escape. So it's been, what? Days, maybe. This adds a certain ominousness and a certain immediacy to the story which I think would have brought a lot to the story if it had been played up a bit more. Ultron came and in days took over the world. It certainly makes his level of power in some ways inconceivable, which, as Lovecraft teaches us, is the best way of making your reader think of something far worse that you would ever write.

It also highlights the resourcefulness of the heroes, if we consider that they come up with a series of "solutions" pretty quickly. On the flipside, it also highlights just how quickly these characters can fall to killing as a solution. Days from paragons of justice to brutal survivalists.

We'll get back to the main story tomorrow, and then a couple more glimpses into the new world that Wolverine and Sue Richards have created. Will it be better? Worse? Time, in many senses of the word, will tell.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 313: Age of Ultron #7, July 2013

Okay, sorry, but it's going to be a short one today,  regardless of the fact that there's some interestingly complex time travel stuff going on here. I'll deal with it a bit more tomorrow perhaps.

Wolverine and the Invisible Woman return to the present, only to find it substantially changed. Inevitably, they get into a fight with their former teammates who don't know who they are.

Shenanigans ensue?

More tomorrow.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 312: Age of Ultron #6, June 2013

One team in the future, trying to defeat Ultron. One team in the past, trying to kill Hank Pym.

What I'm finding quite interesting is that the plans of the two greatest tactical minds in the Marvel U (being Captain America and Nick Fury) are complete failures that end up getting some beloved heroes killed.

And if you've ever had an inkling to see Captain America beheaded, this is your comic.

I think that the fact that it's Wolverine's plan that ultimately has the most success (though we'll have to see how that all goes in the next issue) really says something about our superheroes. It's the same conundrum I was faced with when I watched Man of Steel. There's something in the zeitgeist these days that wants to bring our heroes, our gods, down to our own level, which somehow always comes around to killing. It's sad to me to see our heroes reduced to our level - having fictions in which the characters were opposed to killing was really one of the things that brought me into comics in the first place, to have something that somehow escapes the savagery of our bloodlust.

I don't think this murderousness of our superheroes is a long-term problem. We just live in a time when it seems the only way out of lots of our real world problems is the taking of lives. I look forward to a time when our superheroes return to showing us why that's not the final solution.

More tomorrow. It'll probably be pretty dark.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 311: Age of Ultron #5, June 2013

Happy New Year!

So, the conundrum is do we accept that time unfolds as it should, and move forward, or, given the requisite technology, do we decide that time can, and should, be re-written?

One of the things that comics, and Marvel comics particularly, do quite well is to dwell on the question of how much responsibility should come with great power. And by power, one might well mean Hulk-like strength, or simply a genius intellect. Does one have a responsibility to use these gifts in the service of humanity? Does one have a responsibility to make decisions based on factors that these gifts make apparent? That second one is where I've found Marvel comics of late have dwelt. Hickman's entire run on New Avengers was this question wrapped up in spandex. This issue of Age of Ultron also asks this question, couched in the question I opened the post with - while Nick Fury takes the heroes into the future to confront Ultron, Wolverine asks the question of whether or not it might make more sense to just re-write time, given that they have the tools to do so.

The trouble with asking this question is that it leads to the larger moral questions that might crop up in such a situation in the real world: if we can do this, shouldn't we go and kill Hitler and save millions of lives? Of course, then come the ramifications - what would the world look like without the Second World War having happened? Are we willing to give up what we have now, risk our very existences, to stop a madman from attempting genocide just shy of a century ago?

It's an impossible question. Which is why we have superhero comics, to ask these very things.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 310: Age of Ultron #4, June 2013

"He controls from the future!"

Bendis and company make us realize that the Singularity, should it ever arrive, might well be the most horrendous of moments in human history. One of my favourite science fiction writers, Robert Charles Wilson, released a book a few years back called The Chronoliths, about what seemed to be an invasion, more prophetic than violent, from the future. And why not? If the technology is there, why not rule from a place that a less technologically-advanced society can't access?

I'm certainly not saying that this is a new idea - we've seen it a number of times in comics. Morrison's Seven Soldiers, Hickman and Pitarra's The Red Wing, situations where the movement backwards and forwards through time offers opportunity for conquest. What differentiates Age of Ultron slightly is that Ultron is conquering from the future but knows that the conquered also have the capacity to travel in time. For his plan to succeed, it's not a matter of attacking somewhere without similar technology, but of not letting that place/time know from where it's being attacked.

And so, spoiler alert, Luke Cage and She-Hulk die to get some damning information. Which, in turn, leads to a concept fairly alien to us, if not also to the characters who want to attempt it: the erasure of an idea.

First, let me just say that the suggestion of the historical erasure of an idea by an imaginary person is just a lovely little bit of reality-play. Looking back at the Morrisonian revelation to Animal Man, without Ultron, these characters, these particular iterations of these characters, would not exist, in that the comic series, which itself defines the existence of these imaginary people, would not have happened. Now, this is a paradox that they themselves will likely realize - erasing Ultron from existence will necessarily erase the timeline they inhabit, and there will, I'm assuming (it's been a while since I've read the series), be debate over the ramifications of such an action. This is where something like literature emblematizes that Frygian notion of the imaginative being somewhere where we work out different iterations of society/reality, and in this case, where we work out situations and problems that are, for the time being, purely theoretical. What does time travel look like? What problems and opportunities will it present once we understand how to do it?

Okay, I'm rambling now. It's like when I was teaching last term and trying not to spoil books that I knew my students hadn't finished. But in this case, I won't bow to the pedagogical pressure. We'll get to it when we get to it, over the next few days.

2015 has been insane. A year ago I was in the depths. Now, I've crawled out of them, and stand facing the peaks I've been glimpsing in the distance for some time now. 2016 is going to be interesting. See you there.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 309: Age of Ultron #3, May 2013

Ick. Not sure this is a great plan, Cap. But at least we get to see a couple of the heaviest hitters in the Marvel U in the spotlight. Luke Cage is all set to be a new superstar, once his Netflix series gets released. She-Hulk is a great character who gets all too little attention, so to see her volunteer for so dangerous a mission (being sold to Ultron as an infiltration) is great. We get to see the different way that she deals with the powers associated with a Hulk, rather than her angrier cousin.

There's some great debate about Hank Pym in this issue, and having just watched the Ant-Man film, Pym is on my mind. He, Tony Stark, and Reed Richards can all be accused of letting intellect get in the way of their better judgment, but it seems to me the Pym is the only one who is ever really vilified by his peers, based around his creation of Ultron (and his propensity for spousal abuse, but that seems to problematically recede into the background sometimes). It's interesting to me that they lay that Burden on Stark in the second Avengers movie, but I think that's because we're going to have to see him as a villain in some ways once Civil War hits.

Well, depending on whose side you're on, I guess.

But back to this crossover. While Cap's plan seems a bit dodgy, other players in the Marvel U are taking things a bit more cautiously. As with Black Widow and Moon Knight in the previous issue, we're given a glimpse of Chicago, and the Red Hulk, Black Panther, and (colour-free) Taskmaster. Here, as they try to retrieve a piece of an Ultron for study, we see a less blatant attempt to understand and take down the robotic despot. Whether this, or the Fury files, will be of any help to the falling heroes remains to be seen.

Tomorrow.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 308: Age of Ultron #2, May 2013

Did I mention that this comic is bleak and despairing?

Don't believe the cover. Black Widow and Moon Knight are looking a lot worse for the wear in the interior. As the surviving New York heroes listen to Peter Parker's story, and wonder if the whole world has been overrun, BW and MK scavenge through the wastelands of San Francisco. If it's not the whole world, it seems that the North American continent, at least, is Ultron territory. It puts me in mind of the Age of Apocalypse, though for some reason this is much scarier. I think it's because rather than an alternate life under a despotic ruler, the Age of Ultron is simply death under a creature that sees humankind as a plague. There's no mercy in Ultron, no vain hope for a shred of humanity - we know Apocalypse is brutal and cruel, but he has respect for beings other than himself if they prove strong. Ultron just wants everyone and everything dead.

Bendis is stretching his legs in this issue a bit. A 10-issue series, not giant round of summer tie-ins - he can tell a story at his, and its, own pace. So he does. The comic is divided into two stories, basically. In San Francisco, a secret Nick Fury base is occupied by two deep cover superheroes. Fury always has a plan, so we're offered that hope. In New York, Spider-Man tells his tale of being kidnapped and almost sold to Ultron, and something sparks inside Captain America, who claims to have a plan.

Here's the thing, Cap. We're only two issues into a ten issue series. That's pretty much a guarantee that your plan isn't going to work. Sorry.

But it does tell us that, despite being pushed to a place that, likely, none of them wanted to go, they still have hope. They still embody one of the fundamental qualities of the superhero - that they can always find a way to save the world. I guess the question is what is that world going to look like once it's saved?

More tomorrow.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 307: Age of Ultron #1, May 2013

If there was any doubt as to the tone of this series, it's put to rest almost immediately as Hawkeye skewers his way through the first few pages. It's interesting, in so many cases, to see what particular creators think is the line beyond which these altruistic characters will kill. There's always so much controversy about The Punisher (and rightly so), but at some point in each characters existence, we've seen the moments where they are pushed to the same place, the same mindset, as Frank Castle. Perhaps it's that moment of moving from a situation of policing and enforcing to a situation of survival.

As I said yesterday, Age of Ultron is one of the darkest superhero stories I've read. As far as crossovers go, it's a gentle one. There are tie-in issues, none of which I've read, but they're definitely not necessary for one's enjoyment of the main story. Bendis and company tell a solid, coherent tale over the course of these 10 issues, though, spoiler alert, the ending leaves some things slightly open, so it's not quite a complete story.

It's a question I ask fairly regularly - is it possible to have a "complete" story in a serialized format like the superhero narrative? Even something self-enclosed, like All-Star Superman, leaves story threads hanging because that's the nature of the genre, isn't it? Maybe, just maybe, something like Straczynski's Rising Stars manages to tell a self-enclosed superhero narrative, but even that leaves an opening, not for the particular story that's been told, but for the notion that these stories are told over and over again. It's one of the reasons that the Arthur myth translates so nicely into comics, a la Camelot 3000 - it's a story that is not simply destined, but designed, to be told again and again.

Which doesn't really answer the question, but offers a perspective on it. Age of Ultron ties up its major threads, which really distinguishes it from the usual crossovers somewhat. What I think is quite special about this story is that, initially, it sets itself up as an out of continuity tale, but then, later on, we realize that it's set squarely in the mainstream Marvel U, and that makes it all the more terrifying. Part of me wonders if this wouldn't have been an interesting setting to do the same sort of thing that Secret Wars did this last year or so, suspending the main titles and offering in their place Age of Ultron mini-series. Committing to this setting for an extended period would have been a bold move for Marvel, but not, I think, an unprofitable one. And by "unprofitable," I mean that it would have definitely given writers and artists some room to explore different facets of these characters (the ones who've survived, at least) before reassembling the Marvel U and moving on to tell, and retell, the old stories again.

This series is going to offer some interesting perspectives on causality and retconning, so I'm looking forward to getting further and further in. If I can lay hands on the crossover issues for a reasonable price, I'll perhaps insert them where necessary. The Age of Ultron is not a happy age. But it shows us what our heroes are made of, and what they'll sacrifice, communally and personally, to maintain the status quo.

Though, to paraphrase a question Ultron asks in the film of the same name, what's so great about the status quo? Why keep things the same, when things can change?

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 306: Avengers v.4 #12.1, June 2011

I got Avengers: Age of Ultron for Christmas this year, and my wife and I have just finished watching (she'd never seen it before) so I thought that a fun thing to do for the next 9 days or so would be to read the "source material" (in that they share a name) written by Brian Michael Bendis and Bryan Hitch a few years back.

Re-reading the Bendis-era Avengers is a feat I've not yet attempted. He wrote the series for just shy of a decade, during which time there were numerous crossovers and, at times, multiple series. That's a lot of comics. And throughout that time, rumours flew of something called "Age of Ultron," but whether it was a story arc coming up, or a crossover event, none, save maybe the creators, knew. Bendis ended his run on the title in 2013, passing the torch to Jonathan Hickman. And then a few months later, Age of Ultron began. To call it one of the most nihilistic superhero stories I've read is to do it a disservice. Bendis, Hitch, and friends do everything they can to dismantle the Marvel Universe, to push its heroes to their breaking points and then see what happens beyond that. This issue, written 2 years earlier, is where it all starts.

One thing that is always for certain when you see "Hitch" and "Neary" on a comic is that you're in for a treat for your eyeballs. The two work so remarkably well together, and create such dynamism and expression in these characters. Though perhaps not quite as remarkable as their work on The Authority, this comic is very pretty to look at. It does seem in some ways like a fill-in issue (which, I guesss, it was), or a prelude to a story that really should have come a lot sooner. While I was willing, on the strength of his previous stories, to give Bendis the benefit of the doubt, the wait for Age of Ultron was a bit long, and this comic got forgotten in the interim.

But I've re-read it now, and will continue on through Age of Ultron for a few more days. A spaceknight crashes to Earth. Spider-Woman investigates, is captured, then rescued, and for some reason, the spaceknight morphs into Ultron. And Tony Stark tells the rest of the team that, basically, it's the end of the world.

All endings are beginnings, however. Tomorrow we'll have a look at what is born from the end of civilization. Be warned - it's not pretty.