Age of Ultron 8, Avengers: The Enemy Within 1, Iron Man 10

Age of Ultron 8
Bendis (w) and Peterson (a) and Mounts (c)

So we learn a little more about this alternate timeline as Bendis again tries to make us learn about the butterfly effect. The Tony Stark of this world questions Wolverine after accessing both Sue and Wolverine's memories alongside Professor X and Emma Frost. He learns that Wolverine was responsible for killing Pym and setting the world on a different timeline before explaining to Wolverine that the timeline he's created led to a war between technology and magic that caused Asgard to abandon Earth and divided the world into pretty much Tony's half and Morgana le Fey's half. Stark is ever suspicious of an attack from le Fey and spends some time believing that Sue and Wolverine are constructs of hers, an idea that is reinforced when le Fey attacks at a particularly inopportune time for our heroes. Meanwhile, the Defenders don't like Tony and want to talk to the prisoners. Then le Fey shows up and splits Tony's helicarrier in half.

I think everything I've said about this series remains true as I remain annoyed at the length, annoyed at the need to drill the butterfly effect into readers, annoyed at the implication that Hank Pym is the cog that makes the Marvel Universe turn, annoyed at the writing style, and annoyed at spending so much time in an alternate timeline that we all know will not stick around. That said, I'd like to mention something I don't think I've really brought up that much in the run of this series: the art. I think the art is fine on more or less static images and situations, with people talking and the like. However, from the get-go (and even with different artists at the helm) I've found the action sequences to be overly chaotic and a bit hard to piece together. In most of the fights, there are so many colors and lines converging that it's hard to tell who's fighting from panel to panel and almost impossible to say who's winning. In the beginning, that was a little more excusable because the fights weren't really the focus; the state of the city was the focus. Now, though, the fights are very much at the center of a lot of these panels and don't really stand out as much as you'd like, especially to try to cover for the story or the excessive dialogue. I have a theory that says that you'll be able to read maybe four of these issues when all is said and done and have as much of an understanding of the story as someone who read all ten. We'll see if that's accurate as the last two issues come out.

Avengers: The Enemy Within 1
DeConnick (w) and Hepburn (a) and Bellaire (c)

One of the reasons that I've really liked DeConnick's run on Captain Marvel is that she's made it a point to, throughout the series, establish that Carol has a life outside of the Avengers. It's maybe not a huge part of her life in terms of time-spent, but it's clearly massive in terms of how she identifies herself. She doesn't live at Avengers Mansion, she stays in an apartment. She has a routine that involves getting coffee or croissants at the same place and meeting up with an elderly lady each day. At her apartment, she has people that she cares about including the little girl who wants to be her and that girl's mother. She has Tracy the surly older woman with whom she bonded over their sicknesses. She had Helen Cobb (albeit in time displacement). She has Avengers friends too, like Spider-Woman and Captain America and Tony Stark, but she has more social visits from Avengers than you see in most solo books. The creation of Carol's little universe unto herself and the importance of it in her daily life is already playing a huge role in this series, as Rose has been kidnapped by Yon-Rogg (Carol does not know it's Yon-Rogg behind everything, but we've already seen him) and hidden away. With the help of Spider-Woman and Thor, Carol is able to track down Rose but finds that Rose has been a diversion so her captor could break into Carol's apartment. Carol hurries back to her building and clears everyone out of it. She busts into her own room (scaring her cat Chewie) and finds that her enemy has broken into her footlocker of important items. Missing from the footlocker is her piece of the psyche-magnetron, the machine that gave her powers and that is, as she describes it, essentially a Kree-built wish-machine. Now the world is in danger and she feels it's her fault. Spider-Woman rallies around her and insists that now the Avengers are involved and this guy will not get away with this.

The issue starts in pretty standard Captain Marvel form, which isn't at all a bad thing. There's a conversation between Captain Marvel and Spider-Woman that focuses around whether or not Rose is missing or just an old lady before chaos breaks out in the form of old-school villains the Grapplers. From there, the action never stops and the chaos piles up on Carol, who has trouble with her brain lesion (not helped by the fact that she insists on flying at one point) and with the whole situation. She suspects it's all a distraction to keep her from Rose before she realizes that Rose is the distraction. It's non-stop action but not in a way that feels forced or like action-for-action's-sake. It serves to keep Carol off-balance and unable to get a foothold on the situation, just as the audience is unsure of the villain's plot even though we know more than Carol (as Captain Marvel readers know it's Yon-Rogg behind everything and we watch him break into Carol's apartment while she's in Central Park). It's a really great layout and it feels already like this event is going to be something different and great, if incredibly stressful for fans who love Carol. I listened to an interview with DeConnick (found here) that features her at one point saying that she didn't plan too far ahead on these books because she didn't expect either of them to last. She cites people like Fraction and Bendis, who can plan series in year-long chunks, and Hickman, who can plan a series over a four-year chunk (amazing, and my fun fact of the day). She could have fooled me as this event seems born perfectly out of what she's done with both of her Marvel books over the course of the last few months. Looking forward to this one. It's also important to note that Scott Hepburn's art is solid throughout (and his characterization of Jessica particularly as someone who can't stop gesticulating) and Jordie Bellaire's colors are great and she uses the same color palette as on Captain Marvel, so the book feels like it slots perfectly into place.

Iron Man 10
Gillen (w) and Eaglesham (a) and Guru eFX (c)

One of the reasons I've enjoyed Remender's Captain America series is that it's taken the Captain America history and said "what don't we know?" It turned out that the answer was "what was Steve like before he was old enough to even try to enlist in the army?" With that, Remender had a whole new level to add to Steve's character and a series all ready to write itself. Gillen has apparently done the same thing with Tony Stark, except we already knew more about Iron Man's childhood. It was his birth that we hadn't really examined before. 451 has shown the film to Tony and goes on to explain that Howard was scouring the Earth to find a way to save the unborn Tony's life. Doctors said it couldn't be done and that, in fact, if it was done, they'd have wished it wasn't, so damaged was Tony. However, that wasn't a good enough answer for Howard and, eventually, he found out about 451. At the time, 451 was being held by the Greys, a race of aliens (in the style of the stereotypical sci-fi alien) who had opened a casino in Vegas. They had stumbled upon 451 and captured him, knowing that he was valuable but unable to crack into any of that value. 451 awoke to one of the underlings of the Greys, Rollo, and appealed to him to break him out, offering a nice reward. Rollo meets with Howard and entices him, letting him know about 451's extensive knowledge, which Howard hopes can be parlayed into saving Tony's life. He assembles a team including the likes of Jimmy Woo, Thunderbolt Ross, and Dum Dum Dugan to name a few and we get a nice, old-fashioned heist comic. The heist is successful (though Rollo is found out and killed) and Howard and 451 apparently escape. Tony doesn't believe any of it and is put to sleep by 451, as they'll need him "before [they] reach [their] destination."

It's an interesting idea and, as I said, gives a nice little look into the parts of Tony that we don't know so well. I'm pretty well-versed in Marvel but I wouldn't ever claim to know every single character and every issue they've appeared in, so I can't guarantee it's never been mentioned that Tony wasn't projected to survive birth, but that does seem like a pretty big fact for me not to have found out, so I'm going to credit it to Gillen. It adds a layer to Tony's story which is then doubly added upon by revealing that he wouldn't have lived without alien tech and methods (which we have yet to really hear about). Was Tony more than just a regular child, albeit a little more intelligent and with more resources? We also can't ever rule out the fact that 451 is simply lying. Everything is a possibility and we've already seen 451 lie to get his way before. Occam's Razor would dictate that 451 lying is a far more simple solution than "Tony was going to die in childbirth so Howard tracked down a mysterious robot who had accumulated masses of knowledge and broke that robot out of an alien casino so that he could try to help save Howard's son." Then again, this is comics and that second argument is far more in line with how Wikipedia explains comic plots. Stay tuned to this one; whatever the answer and motivations behind 451, they're bound to be interesting and to put Tony in previously unexplored areas, both physically and emotionally.