Previously in "Age of Ultron": Ultron took over the world because he's cool like that, but then got stupid and started bartering for heroes for reasons yet unknown and not at all important. To finish him off, Nick Fury took a ragtag group from the Savage Land to the future to fight Ultron in a desperate attempt to free the present from his grasp! And then Wolverine went back in time with Sue Storm and killed Hank Pym because they're dumb. What happens next? You do not want to find out! :-)
I've said before that, as a casual reader, I rather enjoyed reading this miniseries. It was a pretty simple story--until the end, which we're getting to--and showcased a wide variety of superheroes early on. How many times will Red Hulk, Taskmaster, or Ka-Zar feature in a major Marvel event, you know what I mean?
That is until we get to these issues. These issues are just flat out bad. Bad on their own and bad in terms of the story. These two issues singlehandedly show what's wrong with the story and the decisions made by Wolverine and Sue Storm. It showcases an alternate world where everything is backwards and just flat out uninteresting, and the characters are once again out of their minds.
No longer is this the story of the "age of Ultron." Now it's the "age of Morgana Le Fey" who has practically nothing to do with Ultron. If she'd been hinted at earlier in the story as a threat they had to fight off or as another adversary to fight, then yeah, it would make sense, since now she is the main threat instead of Ultron. But nope, she just comes right out nowhere from a war fought several years ago. Might as well change the name of the comic.
The fact of the matter is that nothing in these issues is particularly interesting. Sure, it shows the effect of what Wolverine did, but that doesn't change the fact that it's not what we wanted to see, it's not what anyone would have wanted to see.
Issue #7 begins with Wolverine and Sue Storm landing back in the Savage Land to head on home to the present. Sue continues to be disraught over her decision to allow Wolverine to finish off her friend while Wolverine is just doing dandy, even threatening to kill her for questioning where he parked the flying car.
How nice.
They arrive back in the present time to a Savage Land ravaged by war...the Kree/Skrull war in fact. They narrowly dodge people in "Starkguard" outfits after Sue gives forced exposition on what happened during the war.
I should also mention that the art takes a weird turn where Sue and Wolverine start to be drawn like they are several years older than they appear a few pages ago. What? Why?
They arrive back in New York City which is still standing, but not in the best of shape, as it has been ravaged by war and several Helicarriers float around it. Sue begins to have a panic attack before they are attack by...the Defenders!
Immediately they accuse our heroes of being Skrulls, given that the Secret Invasion story arc had just wrapped up in their timeline apparently. Man, these guys are behind. Is this a result of Hank Pym's dying, is time brought back a few years? Crazy.
The only one sticking up for Sue is the Thing, while the other Wolverine of this world notices the odd scent his counterpart is giving off.
Because they're characters aren't getting any smarter and talking to people isn't at all a genius idea--like it would have been with Pym--Sue and Wolverine make a break for it. Mind you, they're trying to escape from two of the strongest beings in the Marvel Universe, a master strategist, and a man whose nose knows no bounds.
Sue manages to hold off more foes than Wolverine does as she fights off the Thing and the Hulk, but Janet manages to stop her dead in her tracks. Wolverine takes down his counterpart, telling him that it'll all be better soon even though there is no indication of this happening.
The Thing knocks him out and drags him away, only for them to be stopped by the arrival of Tony Stark...ish.
But where's the stache?!
This issue feels like it's pretty short and thank God it is! Both the dialogue and the characters feel out of place and you just find yourself skimming through the pages hoping for something interesting. Sue Storm holding off many different Avengers--I'm sorry, Defenders--is somewhat believable but there are stupid moments such as Wolverine escaping from Doctor Strange by throwing a garbage can's cap at him that make their escape not at all harrowing and silly, if anything.
Much of the issue is supposed to be shock factor that the world would be like this, especially with the arrival of Tony Stark, but you just find yourself not at all excited about what's happening because none of this should have happened, for reasons we shall find out in Issue #8.
This issue kicks off with Tony Stark getting caught up on the previous events of the comic book, and apparently nothing else because that's all irrelevant, right?
With him are Emma Frost and Charles Xavier, for some reason, as they rationalize with Tony that these two cannot be Skrulls, nor are they servants for Morgana Le Fey, who has apparently made Tony so paranoid that he thinks everything is her fault. Mail's late? Le Fey! Forgot to DVR Game of Thrones? Le Fey! Bad comic? Le Fey!
Okay to be fair that last one is partly true.
Apparently everyone believed that the ones who had killed Hank Pym so many years ago were Skrulls. However, even that is stupid. Sure, the Skrulls did appear before Ultron did so while it is possible that the Skrulls could kill Pym, how would they be able to mimic Wolverine if they'd never known about him before? Wolverine appeared over a decade after the Skrulls did! Hank Pym didn't even know who Wolverine was (technically because he didn't exist prior to that). If Tony Stark has all of this technology to pluck out memories and turn them into freaking computer files, then how can he not know that it would be impossible for Wolverine to be a Skrull?!
Also Captain America is now called Colonel America because why not.
Stark goes and begins his investigation of what's going down, starting with an interrogation of Wolverine. He explains how he lost his body in the Asgard-Latveria war that shot Le Fey into power, and, of course, Hank Pym was the key to winning the battle. Wow, didn't see that coming, what a shock...
Stark begins to berate Wolverine for killing Pym and at this point he's the only character that makes any sense as he is telling Wolverine exactly what he should have done and why what he did was so wrong. Outside, the Defenders meet up and discuss if they should make a move against Stark to grab the two prisoners.
And seeing how this comic has been nothing but a bloodbath so far, why stop now? Emma Frost makes one comment and BANG!
Off to the races.
It's on this page, though, that we get the solution to ALL of this. It reveals that not only were our heroes in the regular timeline complete morons, but that nobody in this series actually stopped to think for just a second, not even Nick Fury, who spent apparently fifteen days just hanging out in the cellar beneath the Savage Land.
Giving some last-second thoughts before things get ugly, Stark remarks that they could have warned Hank Pym that something could go wrong with Ultron and made him install a chip, or a part of his memory, to shut down before he reached his endgame shown in "Avengers #12.1."
BOOM. Done, problem solved, right? Wrong. While I do think that Sue Storm should have been smart enough to tell him that, I think it's a much better idea that Fury should have tasked Stark, and maybe Sue for back-up, to go into the past and tell Pym to install that chip while he took a task force into the future in one final assault. If they fail it shouldn't matter, since that future would never come to pass.
This just undermines the fact that there was such a simple solution but, of course, we had to be told that killing isn't the right thing and blah blah blah Wolverine's and idiot, I've already said that so many times. At least now the reader's caught up to speed with the writer's realizing how dumb this story they've created is.
Stark suddenly flips out once he realizes there's an attack and goes to kill both the captors when suddenly Morgana Le Fey arrives because they didn't switch to cable or something, I don't know,who's paying attention at this point?
And so, a huge battle commences in the skies as the Defenders take on the armies of Morgana Le Fey who, for being the new main villain of the comic, has all of TWO speech bubbles of dialogue while our heroes crash and fall and everything is blowing up and oh my goodness this battle is really, really uninteresting.
Our comic comes to a close, thank God, as two Helicarriers crash into each other before landing in New York City, causing a massive explosion as Sue Storm and Wolverine narrowly escape. Oh wow, it's just how Ultron came into New York, what a parallel!
Except it's still just as ridiculous.
For the first time I can actually say that these comics blow, and they blow chunks. The direction the story has taken is for the worst, nothing that is happening is particularly interesting, and only one character in the entirety of the two issues makes an sense before he loses his mind, too. The only other two characters that come close are Emma Frost and Xavier but because of their pretentious minds they spark the battle that sends Stark over the edge. The artwork also isn't particularly up to snuff with the rest of the book. Sure the battle looks cool but it doesn't have any grandiose feeling to it like the battle in the future did back in Issue #6.
Next week we'll get the finale of the comic and boy oh boy is it one big giant mess.
Don't forget to follow me on Twitter @seanovan13 to stay up to date on when I post. Thanks for reading!
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