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

Review: Age of Ultron #7

Spoilers below!

I feel like this issue was a little bit dissapointing, this series seems to be abandoning storylines randomly. For example, the group of heroes who travelled to the future to stop Ultron? That never happened because Ultron was apparently now never created.

I was interested in seeing the usual heroes of the Marvel universe in this series but Bendis had created a new timeline and completely changed most of the heroes, which makes it very hard to feel invested in any characters or their situations because you can never be sure if they'll even exist in the next issue.

It doesn't explain what happened to the heroes who didn't travel to either the future or the past and you can be pretty sure that storyline won't be carried on.

I was enjoying the series before but I feel like it's being stretched too far and that they could've finished the story by now, and the time travelling plots and different timelines are definitely over complicating the story.

I do, however, really enjoy the art in this issue by Brandon Peterson and Carlos Pacheco. That, unfortunately, is all that I really enjoyed about this issue.

Hopefully this series will be back to it's regular standard in the next few issues.

Rating: 4/10

X-Men: Battle of the Atom announced at C2E2, scheduled for September.

Today is Marvel's X-Men panel at C2E2, they've got lots of announcements including Wolverine becoming killable and the cancellation  of the long running X-Factor series, but there's one that seems quite big. Battle of the Atom!

This is a ten part crossover in the X-books that takes place within two months, beginning in X-Men: Battle of the Atom #1 and running through the other X-Men books between September and October.

The storyline involves three teams of X-Men, the originals, the Uncanny and a team from the future led by Kitty Pride including Kate Bishop and Deadpool, supposedly, having a battle.

I've never been a major X-Men fan but I've been getting into the All-New X-Men series and this news seems pretty exciting.

Battle of the Atom will be written by Brian Michael Bendis, Jason Aaron and Brian Wood.

Battle of the Atom artwork

Future Deadpool design.