Review: Age of Ultron #8

Cover to Age of Ultron #8

You may remember that my review of the last issue of this series wasn't very positive, I found it a bit dull and was annoyed that they'd just erased most of the story and a lot of the characters I was looking forward to seeing more of in this series. I think this issue was quite a big improvement.

Although you don't get to see the heroes of the old universe again, I do think they did a good job of making you care about the characters in the alternate universe, and I actually enjoyed seeing the changes between the old universe and this one, and it was interesting to see what the Marvel Universe turned out like without Hank Pym, one of the founding avengers and the creaor of Ultron.

Bendis has come up with interesting consequences of Hank Pym dying years ago, including the most of Avengers and X-Men being completely different to their regular counterparts, and the personalities of some so different they feel like completely new characters. He wrote the tension of the heroes of this universe when  they found out that there were alternate versions of Wolverine and Sue Storm really well and seeing the team argue and fight about the alternate heroes was actually quite a good read.

The art in this issue by Brandon Peterson is brilliant, I wasn't keen on the series' art change at first because I loved Bryan Hitch's work on the first issues of the series, but Peterson has done a great job on the issue, and   the page showing (SPOILERS) the Helicarrier crashing into the city below was amazing.

I had two problems with this issue, first off, there was no appearance of Ultron in this issue, which is always a bit disappointing when buying a series called "Age of Ultron", hopefully the character is back in a big way in the final two issues of the series. The second is that I think there was a lot of unused opportunities to show what became of a lot of the other heroes in this universe, such as Spider-Man or Hawkeye, instead it focused on a group of Avengers and X-Men (along with the Thing, Ben Grimm).

Overall, an interesting issue, but I think it could've used the idea of this alternate timeline more to show different characters.

Rating: 7/10