Age of Apocalypse 14
Lapham, Liu, and Pak (s) and Lapham (w) and Araujo and Arlem (a) and Peter and Loughridge (c)
The first team dispatched to Earth (Hercules, both Wolverines, Northstar, and Kurt Waggoner) arrive to find the creature feeding on the dreaming Celestials, thought to be one of the most powerful beings in the universe. Northstar suggests they sit back and wait it out to see if the Celestial, now awake, can't solve the problem himself. 616 Wolverine, though, demands they continue attacking, citing that the creature fed on Charles Xavier and grew bigger for it and asking what would happen if the Celestial COULDN'T win. It's a great question and one that makes itself more pertinent as, by the end of the issue, the creature, after incapacitating both Wolverines and killing Hercules, forms a link with the Celestial and starts draining it. Meanwhile, in the AoA, Jean leads a team consisting of herself, Nightcrawler, Dazzler, Cyclops, Iceman, and Dark Beast to the Apocalypse seed. They talk about how best to use the seed before Jean has Nightcrawler secretly teleport the two of them (and the seed) away. She feels Nightcrawler's the only she can trust on the team, though he feels responsible for bringing the creatures here. All kinds of emotions to go around. Jean tells Nightcrawler that Prophet thinks she should use the seed to control the Apocalypse force. He speculates it won't control her and she'll be able to use its power. Before they can begin to do it (amid Nightcrawler's protests), Dark Beast finds them and steals the seed for himself.
There's a ton going on here and, again, with the stakes so high and feeling so real, this book can go just about any direction it wants. Like with Astonishing X-Men last week, the book is an incredibly quick read for how dense it is. There's a lot happening here and certainly a lot of people, but you can get a better sense of who everyone is and their personalities this issue. You leave this issue with the growing sense of dread associated with so many mid-event books but without that thought in the back of your mind that everything will obviously have to straighten out a bit by the end.
Age of Ultron 4
Bendis (w) and Hitch and Neary (a) and Mounts (c)
I've said several times throughout this blog's three month+ existence that Brian Michael Bendis likes to play a game where he tells a three part story in about ten parts. I think it's happening in most of his ongoings (All-New X-Men, Uncanny X-Men, and formerly Avengers and New Avengers) as well as in his limited series (Daredevil: End of Days and now Age of Ultron). His ongoings are a little bit less guilty of this, though I think he feels more comfortable with an issue or two per arc where nothing of significance happens (or one thing of significance happens amidst a thousand lines of back-and-forth dialogue). Age of Ultron has just wrapped up its fourth book and I don't think it was particularly bad. I don't think the writing was as quippy as Bendis tends to write it, which is a huge relief, and I think a good deal happened. However, this comes on the heels of a couple books where not much happened and, speculating here, right before a couple books where not much will happen. There are ten issues to this series and, like I said, it's hard to play around too much with the foundation of the 616. That means that, with all of this world-wide destruction and hero-death all over the place, the audience likely inherently knows that everything is going to be reset by the end of the series. It's very early-Marvel, with Stan Lee's insistence that every issue leave the book the same way it found it. No sweeping character changes, no character deaths, no broad overhauls on the image. Page one, Peter Parker is a nerdy boy with spider powers, page twenty, Peter Parker is a nerdy boy with spider powers who has just learned some sort of lesson. However, it tries an audience if they know that this is going to happen and they still have to pay forty dollars for the entire series. That's forty dollars to, in the end, see things likely be set back the way they were.
Luke Cage and She-Hulk stand in front of the Vision and Ultron guards with Cage offering She-Hulk to the robots. Vision seemingly breaks free of Ultron's control for a moment to tell Cage that Ultron is controlling them all through the future. She-Hulk stops playing possum and hurls Cage out of the tower, hoping he'll be able to tell Tony everything they heard and saw. She is quickly lasered through the head by one of the Ultron guards as the Vision looks on defeatedly. Cage (one of Bendis' favorite characters) fights Ultrons in the air and in the building he lands in (question: Cage has unbreakable skin but does he also have unbreakable bones? Because there's no way his joints wouldn't have just shattered there), overwhelming many of the Ultrons and getting thoroughly beat up in the process. The Ultrons nuke him. Meanwhile, Black Widow and Moon Knight find Fury's plans for end-of-the-world scenarios and decide to head, on his recommendation, to the Savage Land. Red Hulk accuses Taskmaster of trying to run out on him and kills him, taking the Ultron tech with him to the Savage Land (I don't know why he chose to go there, it's ill-explained). After the nuke goes off in New York City, our group of heroes decide also to go to the Savage Land (again, ill-explained). When they arrive, they find that Cage barely survived, then took a Quinjet to the Savage Land (because I guess this is just the known hero-evacution route) and crawled to Ka-Zar to wait and tell Tony everything he saw. Natasha and Moon Knight show up, as does Red Hulk, and they all decide to kill Ultron before he can be what he is in the future, leading us all to speculate that there's gonna be some time-traveling. Forty dollars for the whole series, without the tie-ins.
Thanos Rising 1
Aaron (w) and Bianchi (a) and Peruzzi (c)
That said, I was surprised at how human this first issue attempted to make Thanos. He started as a normal-ish boy, disfigured by a mutation and often death-threated. His own mother tried to kill him the first time she laid eyes on him, as did doctors who delivered him. They all claim that he has death in his eyes. However, he grows up relatively normally, with many friends despite his looks (normal villain procedure is to make him completely friendless and bitter with the world, so this is an interesting change-up) and a massive intelligence. He has flashes when he sleeps of his mother (now in a mental asylum) attempting to kill him, solved simply by no longer needing to sleep. He is also very skittish around death, violence, and blood. However, when a new girl walks into his life and points him to a cave with some miraculous gems, things start to change. He brings his two closest friends to the cave, where they're all separated by a cave-in. Thanos promises the creatures in the cave that, no matter how hungry he gets, he won't try to kill and eat any of them. Finally he digs his way out only to find his two friends dead and fed on by the same creatures he spared. He runs out in anger, sadness, and disgust. He withdraws himself a bit until the girl shows up again to prod him into taking vengeance on the creatures that killed his friends. It's Thanos' first slaughter.
Again, pretty interesting to watch a villain, especially one so lacking in humanity in every way, who started off so happy and innocent. It's a side of Thanos you don't really expect. It's an interesting decision though to recast one of the Marvel Universe's strongest and seemingly most heartless villains as someone sympathetic. We'll see how the rest of the series turns out and how the Universe wants to play Thanos as a whole as he comes more into the spotlight.
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