If there’s one thing you can rely on, it’s bloated events masquerading as storytelling that try to serve multiple masters and as such fails all of them. Age of Ultron is so terrible it made me want to start drinking again. One overrated hack writer plus a paucity of originality and graphics that look worse than shit from five years ago creates a travesty.

I’m talking about the comic, of course.

The history behind the crossover is infinitely more interesting than the product it birthed. Originally meant to be the event of 2012, like Jeff Cesario on The Larry Sanders Show it was bumped in favor of Avengers vs. X-Men, a miniseries about two teams of superhumans fighting over the little redheaded girl and Cyclops getting wasted on a cosmic entity and killing his dad. When Age of Ultron finally saw release in 2013, it was a shunting, 10 issues crammed in 4 months. One got the feeling Marvel wanted the thing out and done with to make room for Jonathan Hickman’s Infinity: Infographics A Poppin’ (Now With More Byzantine Cosmic Structures). Marvel could’ve also been ashamed of how shitty Age of Ultron is; they’d have no argument from me. If you’d like to know the similarities between the comic and the film of same name, they are the following: the title and there is a character named Ultron. That’s it. Oh, both feature lots of rubble. If Whedon et al took any inspiration from Age of Ultron, it was what not to do.

In spite of the title, this has little to do with Ultron. Substitute him with Apocalypse, that Pets.com sock, J.K. Simmons, the story doesn’t change. He’s taken over the planet and all the remaining heroes live in underground shelters. Captain America’s shield is broken. (Marvel has gone to the “Cap’s shield breaks” well so frequently to indicate an event is major that it long ago lost any symbolic meaning.) It’s your standard apocalyptic Terminator scenario. The comic emphasizes this with splash page after splash page of indistinguishable rubble. Marvel contracted Bryan Hitch, one of the best comics artists at conveying action and scale, and made him draw a bunch of askew rocks and construction material. You’ll be seeing the phrase “a waste of time” a lot in this article. For some reason Ultron is letting criminals live so long as they poach superheroes and trade them to Ultron for a couple mid-level prospects and maybe a fourth outfielder. At 10 issues (not including tie-ins, of which there were several), this is over 200 pages and ideally could’ve been told on a postcard. Decompression, that is, deliberately slower pacing in order to tease out characterization and shade the themes through quieter moments, is great when done well. Brian Michael Bendis doesn’t do it well or hasn’t for quite some time. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

“Use it” is the worst advice you could ever give someone in any situation. “My kidneys are failing!” “USE IT!”

The first non-rubble set piece sees Hawkeye rescuing a kidnapped Spider-Man as well as preventing hoodlums from raping a woman and selling her into sexual slavery. (Man, good to see some of society still functions as is following a catastrophe.) Hawkeye shoots her with an arrow when she refuses to heed his call to leave the crack den, by the way. That’s how you know the situation is serious: Hawkeye will shoot a woman whose crime was almost being raped in the arm because she inconveniences him. For about half the series the assembled heroes bicker and complain at each other – a Bendis writing staple – in their shelter while rather pointless scenes in San Francisco and Chicago confirm there is also a lot of rubble there. Why is Black Panther in Chicago? Why is Black Widow in San Francisco? Why’s there a one page digression to a black couple in Austin, Texas that goes nowhere? (I suppose it’s to show that actually a robot apocalypse isn’t great for non-superheroes too.) At least Hitch remembers SF has trolley car rubble and Chicago’s rubblification actually makes Wrigley Field look better. I guess SF does pay off a bit because Moon Knight and Black Widow find out one of Nick Fury’s secret bases. I love the moment of discovery because pages earlier Widow says Fury keeps safe houses secret by never writing anything down. Then…they print out some addresses of his secret places. In another contrivance, the main group of survivors and the Red Hulk from Chicago all converge on the Savage Land secret base independent on each other. I can see why things like that had to be elided, having only 200 pages to work with is a real constraint. Seriously, the biggest change in the first two issues is in the first Captain America’s sitting down and the second Cap stands up.

“In dialogue, Moon Knight says these oddly close up Polaroids of heroes and villains are marked with red or blue based on whether they can be trusted, but there’s no red or blue anywher–“

“SOMETHING LOOKING LIKE IT MEANS SOMETHING IS JUST AS GOOD AS ACTUALLY MEANING SOMETHING”

Nick Fury, who at the time of this comic’s publication was still the original white one, has commandeered Dr. Doom’s time platform. We’re not meant to ask how he got it or why he has a cache of superhero memorabilia in his bunker. It’s like Liam Neeson when playing an American: don’t think about the accent, just go with it. Luke Cage died in a nuclear explosion to find out Ultron’s attacking from the future and using his “son” The Vision as a conduit in the present. That’s why the heroes can’t make any progress. Time is a glory hole that Ultron is just sticking shit in, drones and strange dongs alike, apparently. Fury wants to go to the future and have some splash pages against the robot there, but Wolverine offers up an alternative: go back in time and kill Hank Pym. The noted wifebeater/identity swapper/sufferer of the specific mental illness of “mental illness” created Ultron in the comics, not Tony Stark. And unlike Tony Stark, Pym hasn’t escaped responsibility with a grin, a snarky one-liner and an explanation of “that’s drinking, buddy”; he’s constantly facing and moving past and facing again hitting the Wasp, creating Ultron and voting for Nader in 2000. Getting killed by Wolverine early in his superhero career is sadly not the most ignoble thing to happen to the character this decade. (It’s too soon to tell if Ant-Man will influence the comics to give Hank throat cancer from eating pussy.) Here’s where the wheels fall off the whole fucking thing.

Oh, I thought he was going to first try diplomacy. How out of place it is that Wolverine threatens to murder someone!

Wolverine and Sue Storm go on a magical mystery tour of a world without Hank Pym and to the surprise of people who eat glue, things are shitty but for a different reason. Magic won out over technology so Morgana le Fey (actually the character’s name is Morgan le Fay, but why the fuck should editors go through the arduous process of checking Wikipedia?) controls Europe and Iron is a hard ass robot-man who resembles Bud the CHUD. It’s two half-assed dystopias for the price of one! It takes a few speeches telling him how much he fucked up, but Wolverine realizes that going back in time and killing people is not the answer. That’s why he goes back in time to prevent himself from murdering Hank Pym and I seriously started getting Sealab 2021 flashbacks. If someone called the Invisible Woman “Queen Dopplepopolis” all the flaws would fade away. Everyone convinces Pym to create a backdoor goobity goo computy magic, forget about it, and then mail himself a video message in 10 years. Ultron is defeated for the last time ever until someone wants to bring him back, but Wolverine’s gone and broken time. He time traveled too many times and now Galactus is in the Ultimate Universe and, in the secret last page that meant the issue was bagged to keep the secret but Marvel went and blabbed to USA Today anyway, Angela finds herself in the Marvel Universe.

Worthington’s Law, comics version: the more artists a comic has, the better it is. A Contract with God? More like A Contract with Shit!

Who’s Angela? Well, she’s a Spawn character created by Neil Gaiman that was part of a legal imbroglio with Todd McFarlane that also involved the rights to the Marvelman/Miracleman and more importantly the Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman comics that employed an otherwise unremarkable UK ripoff of Captain Marvel/Shazam. The whole clusterfuck is both a lot more interesting than Angela and Age of Ultron. Given Angela’s character exists in relation to a character Marvel doesn’t own and can’t use, they’ve bought/licensed a red haired woman with very little clothing and an unimaginative name (she’s an angel named Angela! BRILLIANT!) Maybe if someone time travels again the Green Hornet or the Geriatric Gangrene Jujitsu Gerbils will appear. This nonsensical final splash that has nothing to do with the preceding story sums up the problems with Age of Ultron and event comics as a whole. There’s no story, there’s no content, it’s a bridge, nothing more, nothing less. We start with a bunch of rubble and end with the multiverse being all fucked up. Want to know what Galactus does to the universe where Spider-Man’s black (and coincidentally has been subject to continental destruction, military coups and the writing of Jeph Loeb)? Read an upcoming comic. Want to know what a sexy angel in space does? Buy something else. Marvel comics are indeed a series of cliffhangers, an unending soap opera, determined to make sure the customer never stops reading, but it does not have to be this blatant.

Creator: noted feminist Neil Gaiman

Another thing Age of Ultron should’ve done better: pretending to be consequential. There are at least a dozen superhero deaths in the event and I didn’t give a fuck about any of them. Wolverine’s death in Days of Future Past mattered; Red Hulk turning Taskmaster into goo (or something, it’s confusing) is comical more than anything. No one gets a good death; She-Hulk is shot through the head in mid-statement, Luke Cage dies offscreen as Emma Frost relays his final thoughts, Thor, Hulk and the Thing died prior to Age of Ultron #1, Captain America’s decapitated by a laser beam from somewhere, etc. The weightless, moronic deaths lend credence to a theory I formulated while reading this piece of shit: Age of Ultron is actually not an event comic, it’s a parody of event comics. He’s written Secret Invasion, Siege, contributed to Ballistic: Avengers vs. X-Men and assholes like me criticized them for being terrible. So when faced with penning another crossover, he says “fuck it”. You want shocking deaths? Here’s tons of them and they don’t matter a bit! Want to see Ultron conquer the planet? It already happened. In fact, you don’t even get to see him until the penultimate issue, and it’s a flashback to a Roy Thomas comic. Want it to delve into the issues typically associated with the villain? Fuck you, Wolverine’s gonna create a timeline of magic Doombots and Captain America’s got a Nick Fury eyepatch and has been promoted to Colonel and Wasp is Captain Marvel because fuck it. Hell, in the final issue it even reuses art from Avengers #12.1, a prequel set-up issue that came out 2 years before Age of Ultron. I admire the comic for being an act of defiance, a subversion of the conventional intention for comics to be “good” and “enjoyable”. I mean, Marvel now exists as a intellectual property stone for Disney to draw blood from, the comics don’t have to do much beyond perpetuate trademarks and offer a couple of ideas for other divisions to stripmine and alter with impunity.

But say I’m wrong. Say everyone really fucking tried with Age of Ultron. If that’s the case, more problems become notable, like the fact that Bryan Hitch bails halfway through the series. In his place are Brandon Peterson and Carlos Pacheco, plus about 34 people contributing to the finale. They’re not bad at their jobs, but they’re not Hitch, and the artistic incongruity is jarring. Marvel seems content to say “fuck it” to cohesion, learning a lesson from delaying Civil War to ensure Steve McNiven drew every panel. (Age of Ultron won’t be an evergreen trade paperback anyway.) It’s why Mark Bagley gets so much work, he’s the David Eckstein of pencils. His art isn’t very good, but he’s got grit and hustle and is a white guy (not one of those showboating Brazilian or Italian artists) and can rush through about 30 pages in a week. You want a job done with no regard for the quality, you call him. So too do you rely on Brian Bendis, who through his employment at Marvel has wavered between 3-9 books a month for about a decade. The dialogue in this could be 1:1 recreated as colorforms, in that pretty much any character could say any line. The most we get out of characterization by speech is that Spider-Man never shuts the fuck up (yeah, he’s supposed to be Dr. Octopus in Spider-Man’s body; forget it, Jake, it’s Bendistown) and Luke Cage occasionally says “yo” and “damn” because black people. The rest is an unholy mixture of David Mamet and Joss Whedon speak (two distinct writing styles combined to be worse than the individual selves!) that I have no time for.

Wolverine can smell people through time.

Age of Ultron, whether sly meta-commentary or straight-faced four color drama in the Mighty Marvel Manner (the Mighty Marvel Manner was buried in a shallow grave next to Jack Kirby, as per an agreement with his estate), never succeeds in me giving a fuck about anything that happens. In truth, death in comics mattering is a misnomer; the issue is whether or not what happens to the characters is emotionally resonant. It’s possible to do that with alternate universe characters and in a short amount of time. I know this because films kill characters all the time and their deaths don’t need 40 years of backstory behind them to mean something. Here, you know, a bunch of kids are dead offscreen, half the Avengers are dead, Black Widow’s face is all fucked up (a fate worse than death for women, almost as bad as sterility), She-Hulk is rocking a horrible short haircut and I don’t give a fuck. Everything Sue Storm does in the plot hinges on the pain she feels in losing her family and I’m left to shrug. In the last issue, Pym-killer Wolverine has to stab Stopper-of-Pym-Killer-Wolverine Wolverine to…something time travel space time continuum Bendis fell asleep to some episodes of Star Trek and I could only laugh. It’s like if Donald Duck had to joylessly snap his future self’s neck so Huey’s Gizmoduck Corps dictatorship never comes to pass. Wolverine doesn’t even learn anything from the debacle. Oh, actions have consequences? I hope that’s not a new one for you, you 130 year old merchandising Madonna. Then again, he’s never learned that taking jailbait who lack strong father figures and have a desire to please under his wing, while he smells of beer and crotch, is questionable behavior for a headmaster/instructor at the “We’re Not Degenerates And Monsters, Seriously” mutant academy…

Ultron’s got three defining features, that are typically what stories featuring him are about. One is his relationship with his creator, Hank Pym. Another is the fact that his consciousness is based on his father, and therefore he’s much more human than he wants to admit and a grim reflection for Hank Pym. Third is an offshoot of the first, his Oedipal complex. He wants to kill his dad, he created a robot based on his dad’s ex-wife for the purposes of fucking, and his son The Vision rebelled against his father in a similar fashion. Bendis dispenses with all of that shit, except another variation of “Ultron implanted super secret programming in The Vision, so no matter how many times he’s proven himself he’s still a goddamn robot, and you can’t trust goddamn robots” that dovetails with Bendis’ half-assed issue of Avengers where Iron Man casually mentions after five years in a couple of shipping crates he got off his ass and fixed up a man judged to be so human-like he was allowed to marry before gay people were. In its place, time travel. On good days, time travel is opaque, confusing and headache inducing. Age of Ultron isn’t Primer, which is unfortunate because at least Primer was good. This blathers on about time being an organism and violating the time-space continuum so regularly and haphazardly—look, WHO GIVES A FUCK. Just give me a number to call so I can donate to the “Save The Timeline” foundation and shut up.

“Wolverine, isn’t your whole schtick that you’ve been controlled against your will by organizations for almost your entire life, used as a weapon for nefarious purposes?”

“Shut up!”

When I finished reading the comic, I sat on my bed for a good 15 minutes, in a sort of numbed state. Contemplating what I just experienced. Then the sick part of my mind – the part that had me watching episodes of Becker at 11 PM for a whole summer – spoke up: “wouldn’t it be great to see Marvel Studios try to adapt this shitpile as accurately as possible?” That Becker tempting abnormal growth was right; it WOULD be great to see Marvel, the studio with most positive brand association since Pixar, work around the clock to massage Age of Ultron into something watchable and comprehensible. Adapting Pynchon is a walk in the park compared to the car crash that is this comic. If done faithfully, it would singlehandedly destroy the modern blockbuster film industry, the Heaven’s Gate of CGI cartoons fighting CGI cartoons for the fate of the world represented by locales with the nuance of Street Fighter. “Some men just want to watch the world burn”, said Michael Caine in Jaws: The Revenge. I am indeed some men. Just think of how Alfred Hitchcock could create tension and suspense with the FILE PROGRESS BAR.

The great thing is my article you’re reading right now is probably shitty and yet still better than Age of Ultron. If we’re to surrender to mashup culture, I would much rather buy a T-shirt combining Titus Welliver from Bosch with Bosch from C.H.U.D. than the bucket of vomit provided by Marvel Comics and Third World Measles Vaccinations (19% success rate and climbing!) Corp at $toofuckingmuch a pop. Give Age to Ultron to a baby or small child; they’ll love shredding the paper and finally Marvel’s back to fulfilling its original remit of entertaining children.

Oh yeah, the movie sucked too.