My Reaction To The News That The Avengers Sequel Will Be Age Of Ultron

Because Someone Had To Do It

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SIR

Age of Ultron Book 10 /
Age of Ultron Book 10 AI



My first instinct after reading Age of Ultron #10 was to jump on the dogpile. But I hesitated, because I knew - because I'm a sucker and pay attention to these things - that the story wasn't really over because there was an epilogue scheduled for the week following the release of Age of Ultron #10, the imaginatively titled Age of Ultron #10 AI. After reading Carla Hoffman's piece here (which is a good piece, you should read it), I must confess I was feeling just a tad bit more charitable towards Bendis for having written Age of Ultron. Now, I want to stress that this was a momentary feeling - really, only a few seconds hesitation - but I was nonetheless attracted to the idea of Bendis as a high-powered surgeon who comes in, performs a high-pressure operation, and then leaves before the nurses begin the actual process of cleaning up the mess. When you view these things less as stories (which they aren't, not really) and more like spearheads for publishing initiatives (which they are, truly), the metaphor makes a lot of sense: Age of Ultron is messy, yes, but the idea is that it spawns a couple series and changes the direction of a few more books. People get excited so maybe they order a few more copies than they otherwise would of whichever books are spinning out of the event. New series that don't have a blockbuster creative team or popular premise need all the help they can get in this market, after all. The stories at the heart of the events are moot. They need to exist because the company has a need to earn a certain amount of money every fiscal quarter and major events are a guaranteed draw, but the quality or lack thereof is really besides the point.

All of which means, on a profound level, that the events in and of themselves don't really matter that much anymore. Sure, some events have had more lasting consequences than others, and to Marvel's "credit" they've done a good job of actually making these events "count." I put both of those words in the operational scare quotes for a good reason. House of M, Civil War, and Secret Invasion all had long-lasting consequences, and successfully changed the direction of the line for years to come. Everyone knows, everyone always knows, that everything will revert back to normal eventually, but Marvel has done a good job of playing these events in such a way that they actually do have consequences. The problem is that they've done too good a job here, in such a way as to alienate those readers who don't care about line-wide continuity repercussions and don't like their favorite characters having to participate in rolling crossovers every other month. ("Rolling crossovers" is roughly analogous to "rolling blackouts" in this context.) Dark Reign actually inspired a handful of fun stories, but woe betide any reader who was uninterested in Norman Osborne ruling the world and just wanted to read, say, a normal Avengers story during that period. (Which isn't strictly true, since Dan Slott's Mighty Avengers was a fine book, but it was mostly a B-team without any of the normal headliners and therefore suffered accordingly in sales.)

There was a time when events mattered, and that time was 2006-2007 during and immediately after the publication of Marvel's Civil War. That story was huge, and the best way to gauge it's popularity is to simply note the fact that in the duration between when the story began and when the story ended - and Civil War ran very late towards the end - the company couldn't publish enough Civil War branded books. They rushed out tie-in one-shots to full the publishing holes, and series that had not initially been announced as crossing over to the series swiftly changed their plans and saw sales rise as a result. In the immediate aftermath, Iron Man was briefly the hottest character in comics, at least in terms of his ubiquity - he was everywhere: for about a year afterwards as white hot a guest star as Wolverine, the Punisher, and Ghost Rider had been in the early nineties. Since Civil War, each successive event has tried hard to fit into the shoes left by Civil War, to ever-diminishing returns. Secret Invasion was a hit in terms of sales but Dark Reign was received with less enthusiasm than The Initiative, and was widely seen as having outstayed its welcome by the time Siege happened. The Heroic Age, as a branding exercise, was less successful than either The Initiative or Dark Reign, and the relatively soft sales of the line after Siege contributed to the belief that Fear Itself was rushed out in order to bolster flagging sales. Partly as a result of this perception, Fear Itself was received terribly and every spin-off launched in its wake was a flop.

The exception that proves this particular rule was Avengers vs. X-Men, and that is because, well, look at the title. The problem is that even by the bloated standards of superhero events comics you can only do a story that big so often. Given that Avengers vs. X-Men was designed to pay off on multiple story threads dangling for almost ten years (through Avengers: Disassembled, House of M, Second Coming, and yes, Civil War), there is really no feasible way to expect that that kind of success can be be recaptured anytime soon. Avengers vs. X-Men was so unmistakeable in its unabashedly cynical mercenary intentions that it less resembled a publishing initiative and more Gatsby's last party before the lights went out - it was a hit while it lasted, but the morning-after crash was inevitable.

If you subtract the once-in-a-lifetime adrenalin surge (and possible direct market dead-cat-bounce) of Avengers vs. X-Men from the equation, Age of Ultron makes a lot more sense as a follow-up to Fear Itself. Like Fear Itself, I predict the handful of Age of Ultron spinoffs to have little commercial traction in and of themselves - the Galactus story may get some interest based on the fact that everyone knows at this point that they just rung the bell for last call in the Ultimate Universe, but as it's not being written by Bendis sales will still be unspectacular. I don't see the Robot Avengers lasting out more than two years. I give it two years instead of one because it has the Avengers name to fall back on, which is still a fairly strong draw - but the track record of Avengers books that don't prominently feature Iron Man, Captain America, Thor, Spider-Man, or Wolverine is not very strong. (For contrast: The Defenders title that launched out of Fear Itself had a top-shelf creative team but barely squeaked by a full year despite excellent reviews because the Defenders brand is just slightly less unpopular than that of the Global Guardians.) Guardians of the Galaxy will continue to sell well not because it ties in very loosely to Age of Ultron but because Marvel is putting every ounce of their muscle behind making sure that their next big multimedia property actually has a not-canceled comic book on the stands in a year and a half. The only alternative to Guardians of the Galaxy selling well is, frankly, slightly humiliating. They don't want any repeats of the decade-long Blade fiasco.

All of which brings us back to the metaphor of Bendis as the expert surgeon leaving a gigantic mess for other creators to clean up. It is telling - was telling - that Age of Ultron #10 AI was not actually written by Bendis. The problem from my perspective is that the person they got to write the book wasn't simply another nonentity brought in to clean up after the fact, but Mark Waid. He's "A Name." Furthermore, after returning to the company somewhere around two years ago his star has been on the rise - he made Daredevil a critical and sales success after a couple years of shifting fortunes. But more important than the fact that he made the book a (moderate) hit again - remember, Daredevil is traditionally a consistent performer - is the way he made the series a hit. He threw out almost everything that hadn't been working with the book and started from scratch with a completely different tone and a far denser approach to storytelling. Look at the fact that of the two books that launched at the same time as Daredevil and under the same initiative, both The Punisher and Moon Knight have been canceled, despite the fact that both of these other books had higher profile writers in Greg Rucka and Bendis himself. (Rucka has since departed mainstream comics altogether [at least for the time being]). Daredevil, on the other hand, has been hailed as one of the best comics of the decade, and one of the template series for the way Marvel has approached their Marvel NOW! marketing initiative.

So there was some degree of (perhaps deluded) optimism on my part that Waid's involvement in the epilogue might mean that the person in charge of batting cleanup might actually be able to make some sense of what had gone before, and that the result might therefore "count" significantly more than another epilogue written by another writer. I held back from immediately weighing in on the story's (completely unsuccessful) ending because I held out hope that the last chapter might at least offer some closure in regards to the more egregious plot holes. That's the kind of thing you might reasonably expect an epilogue to do, after all - that's what epilogues have been doing for hundreds of years. But fear not - anyone worried that Age of Ultron #10 AI may have attempted to make sense of the preceding ten issues can put those worries to rest, because the epilogue issue really had fuck all to do with the actual story of Age of Ultron.

None of the plot holes from Age of Ultron have been closed. None of the unresolved threads have been tied up. Basically, what we saw in the ten issues of Age of Ultron is what we got. The only characters who even remember the story remember it second hand, from being told what happened after the fact. The two characters who should otherwise remember the events of Age of Ultron might or might not remember, Marvel isn't clear, because the last issue of the series was such a mess that we don't even know what happened to Wolverine and the Invisible Woman.

In an interview with CBR, Tom Brevoort was chary when answering a question regarding the dispensations of the Wolverine and Sue Storm who experienced the Age of Ultron:

Hank killing Ultron was the culmination of Wolverine and Sue Richards' plan to save and restore the present day, and at the end of "Age of Ultron" #10 we see them briefly celebrate their success. It felt like they bonded over these last few issues and became friends right before the space-time continuum cracked. Is that true?

Sort of, and this is one of those odd doglegs. A version of Wolverine has a relationship with a version of Sue, but since the "Age of Ultron" timeline was essentially averted in "Avengers" #12.1 that Sue and Wolverine are an extra Sue and Wolverine. They're not the characters who are in "Fantastic Four" and "Wolverine & the X-Men" right now. They can't be, because for those characters, none of that happened. Ultron was beaten in #12.1. He never came back and blew up Manhattan.

In fact the Sue that's present on that rooftop didn't get to see what the present day would have looked like without Hank. Because the Wolverine that was killed in the past stopped himself from creating that sequence of events in the first place.

It's very complicated in terms of the time travel stuff [Laughs], but yes, we saw those two characters have a relationship and share an experience, but how that translates to our Wolverine and our Sue going forward remains to be seen. It does mean that potentially somewhere out in the world there's another Sue and another Wolverine. Or they may have been swallowed up by one of the cracks in the universe. Having those extra iterations of those characters walking around may have been too much for an already strained multiverse to handle.

In another article, Axel Alonso answered a similar question posed by a fan:

Getting into fan questions, Fluffy6079 wanted to nail down some of the particulars of the finale, asking, "I have a question regarding the resolution of Age of Ultron. Are there now 2 Wolverines and 2 Invisible Women in the mainstream Marvel U? Because Ultron was defeated before he could take over, Wolvie and Sue never would have gone back in time. So, when they come back from their time traveling there should be a pair there that never left. Right?"

Alonso: So it would seem, Fluffy6079. On the other hand, we see no more of that additional Wolverine and Sue after the time-quakes hit, so it's possible that their presence was the last straw on the back of the space-time continuum, and they were swallowed up by it, even as Angela was spat out.

In storytelling there are two kinds of ambiguity: intentional and inadvertent. A good story should never leave any doubt in the mind of the reader as to which type of ambiguity is being utilized. And certainly, interviews conducted by editors in the wake of the conclusion of said story shouldn't consist of hand-waving intended to mask the fact that no thought whatsoever appears to have been given as to just what happened to Wolverine and Sue Storm. The issue itself doesn't even try to explain, or if it does, it does so unsuccessfully. After leaving the appropriate message with Hank Pym (more on that in a minute), Logan and Sue return to New York.



(Can we just take a minute to note how insanely large Sue's breasts are in that panel?)



And that's it. That's the conclusion of Logan and Sue's adventures in Age of Ultron, assuming you don't count one weird panel where Wolverine is screaming and seeing images of himself from parallel worlds and alternate futures.



You know what's missing from this panel? How about a caption.

Seriously. Captions are useful. Captions help your reader to figure out what's actually happening in the comics they're reading, as opposed to having to sift through the ashes and bones online. They are especially useful when describing any kind of abstract, cosmic, or metaphysical shenanigans, the type of which even the most skillful artist might struggle to clearly illustrate. What is happening to Wolverine in that panel? Well, it appears as if he's experiencing some sort of temporal rift type thing, visions of himself on different worlds, past and future. What happens to Wolverine himself here, the real 616 character? Does the Age of Ultron Surplus Wolverine merge with regular 616 Wolverine? Is Surplus Wolverine swallowed into a rift in the fabric of space and time? Did Superboy punch the universe? It would be one thing if the reader had any confidence whatsoever that these questions were questions that the company had any intention of addressing - but as should be obvious from the previous interview excerpts, this isn't a plot hole that the company itself regards as important enough to be addressed.

Let's look at the timeline for Age of Ultron #10.

The "present day" for the action of Age of Ultron #10 is June 2011, the original release date for Avengers #12.1. The core of Age of Ultron #10 is a handful of pages reprinted from that book. Now, I regard this as one of the few smart bits of storytelling in the entire event: I'm a sucker for time travel stories that feed back on themselves, in such a manner that the beginning turns out to be the end. Don't ask me why. So I got a kick out of the fact that the story looped back in on itself like this, and that the key to defeating Ultron turned out to be refighting a battle from two years ago. (I know that might not seem cool to you, but I liked it, OK?)

But other than that one bit of clever plotting, literally nothing else about the issue makes sense. In the first place, if the "present" of the story is two years ago, then that means that (putting aside the disposition of the Surplus Logan and Sues) Henry Pym, Hank McCoy and Tony Stark have known about the temporal problems for two years (our time) and at least half a year (Marvel time). So if we accept that Age of Ultron #10 AI takes place right after Age of Ultron #10, then we can only believe that Hank Pym was slumming it with Avengers Academy since having his great personal epiphany about his life's work. The question of how the events of this series impact the Beast's actions at the onset of All-New, All-Different X-Men is open, but I actually think this plotline will be followed up on, for the simple reason that Bendis is currently writing the X-Men. Additionally, I . . . think? . . . that the events of Bendis' canceled Moon Knight series make sense now, since that series was premised around a group of villains trying to claim Ultron's head, and we do see Ultron's head flying off his body (and stabbed by Wolverine) at the climax of Age of Ultron #10's (anti-)climactic battle scene. Meaning that the actual sequel to Age of Ultron was published two years ago, sold poorly, and was canceled.

There is another open question regarding whether or not this fits in with Bendis' first storyline in the Avengers series that was launched with the Heroic Age - you remember, the storyline with the future Avengers coming back to the present to prevent Kang and Ultron from destroying the world, the same series that gave us this wonderful wall of promotional material. I haven't gone back to re-read that arc - give me a break, I'm supposed to be studying for my preliminary exams - but I am vaguely, morbidly curious whether or not that story makes any sense in light of Age of Ultron - to say nothing of Rick Remender's use of Kang in Uncanny Avengers. (My uncharitable guess is that Remender has given more thought to how Kang's timeline works in these stories than Bendis, but I could be wrong about that.)

There is at least one more major plot hole that jumps out at me at this time. At the beginning of Age of Ultron #10, Sue and Logan deliver a message to the present Henry Pym (or rather, the Henry Pym of 2011) - a message that takes the form of a video on an iPad.



Think about this for a second: "You won't remember making this video." Huh? Neither Wolverine or the Invisible Woman have anything resembling telepathy. There is nothing in Age of Ultron #9, #10, or #10 AI about Past Hank Pym, Wolverine, and Sue Storm going to see Dr. Strange or Professor X about getting his memory wiped. Now, there is the appearance of an out - in the original Ultron origin story (Avengers #58), Ultron himself wipes Pym's mind of the memory of having created Ultron, a block that holds until after the Vision has infiltrated, attacked, and then joined the team. The problem is that even given the fact that Pym inexplicably has a memory machine that allows him to reveal the memories that Ultron has blocked, there's no reason given as to why he wouldn't also remember being accosted by an older version of Sue Storm and a crazy Canadian with metal knives shooting out of the backs of his hands, who told him a long story about the next ten years that culminated in him writing a bunch of new code for the killer robot he was about to build..



I had high hopes that this plot detail would be addressed in Age of Ultron #10 AI, if nothing else, since this was supposed to be an issue written about Pym in the wake of Ultron's defeat. But in the actual finished issue, this is how the matter is addressed:



To be more precise, it isn't addressed. We're just supposed to accept that somehow they managed to make Pym forget the events of Age of Ultron as they happened between panels in a flashback of Avengers #58, and that the memory machine that restored Pym's memories of creating Ultron would not have restored his memories of having written the anti-Ultron code and encountering the future heroes. The memory machine isn't even mentioned in Age of Ultron, incidentally, so if you hadn't gone back and reread the original in order to try to make sense of the story (like me), you wouldn't even know that this plot element had existed in the original comic.

So, I want to stress, this mess isn't Mark Waid's fault. He's done the best job he could with what he was given - that is, the responsibility of writing an epilogue to one story that was in fact mainly designed to be a prologue for another story (that would be Avengers AI, although who are we kidding, it's Robot Avengers). He's written yet another "Hank Pym finds redemption" story - one in a long line of attempts to put a new spin on one of the few heroes from Marvel's earliest days who has never really worked as anything other than a bit player. The motivation for this is fairly simple, in fact, it couldn't be simpler, and it's the same reason why Marvel is moving heaven and earth to ensure that Guardians of the Galaxy is a hit: there's going to be an Ant-Man movie in two years time.

I don't want to sound like I'm dogging on Pym. I like Pym - in fact, contrary to some people's estimation - I daresay he's one of my favorites. He's seriously flawed - he's not Spider-Man, whose greatest flaw is that he's too good! - he's got mental problems and makes poor decisions all the time. He is seriously bipolar, and even if it's never been explicitly stated it's so obvious as to hardly bear any scrutiny. Not only did he accidentally create the Avengers' greatest villain, he has also consistently fucked up his relationship with the most awesome heroine in Marvel's stable, the ever-winsome Wasp. But he keeps trying: he keeps having moments of self-doubt and low-self esteem which are followed by moments of redemption and manic competency.

The problem is that this is a story that keeps getting written about Pym, so often that it's practically a mini-genre all of its own - Pym was redeemed in Avengers West Coast, he was redeemed in Kurt Busiek's Avengers, he was redeemed in Dan Slott's Mighty Avengers, he was redeemed in Christos Gage's Avengers Academy. I understand why this keeps happening. He did some bad things. And it only makes sense that most writers would see those problems as being Pym's signature attributes - hell, his mental illness was one of the major themes of Busiek's Avengers Forever, perhaps the archetypal Avengers story. Waid gets a lot of credit for having written a very good Pym in the pages of Daredevil - it makes a lot of sense that two of Marvel's moodiest and most unbalanced heroes would find kindred spirits in one another. It did a good job of building on Pym's roles in Mighty and Academy. And now a new Pym-led series is starting up from the rubble of Age of Ultron, and as terrible as the event itself was, and as unpromising as "Robot Avengers" looks from everything I've seen, I still hold out hope that Pym will yet prove he has what it takes to be a marquee player.

So, where does that leave us? Essentially, Age of Ultron was a launchpad for a new Hank Pym-fronted Avengers spin-off, with a couple completely unrelated plot threads tacked onto the back end. The question of what exactly became of the team of Avengers sent into the future in Age of Ultron #6 is never answered - we must assume that their final assault on Ultron in the future was suicidal, and that after Wolverine's initial murder of Hank Pym they simply ceased to exist. Having read a fair amount of these types of stories in my lifetime, I expected these Avengers to be revisited at least once more (as I believe I already mentioned), in one of those fade-to-white panels that indicates the death of a universe or timeline. But we don't get that much. The last we see of the group in issue #6, they've been set upon by a horde of Ultron drones, and are being massacred. This tasteful panel is the last we see of the group:



. . . except, that is, for the cover to issue #10, which offers us a glimpse of what that group's final battle against Ultron would have looked like . . .



. . . except, that is, for the fact that, as I mentioned, the battle never happens, and is erased from time the moment Wolverine kills Pym. But the issue had the cover, presumably so people looking at the catalog would still think the story was going to address its outstanding plot points instead of simply setting fire to the whole lot of them and running away as quickly as possible.

Which brings us, finally, to the ugly elephant in the room, the true meaning of the Age of Ultron, a plot development so rank and noxious and fetid that it could only have been sucked from the pinched anus of Todd McFarlane.



When I first read the rumors that Angela was coming to Marvel, I thought it was a joke. It didn't make any sense. It doesn't make any sense. Angela is a terrible character, notable only for having been co-created by Neil Gaiman, despite the fact that she couldn't have been more generic if they had tried. She's an angel - get it? - and her gimmick is that she's a bitch. That's it. She's a "bad girl" with a literary pedigree. She's got slightly higher production values than Lady Death or Glory, but mark my words as someone who lived through the 90s, she was a product of an age that figured out that the only female protagonists an audience of adolescent (and delayed adolescent) boys could tolerate were naked female protagonists. And inevitably these naked females were given identical attitudes that made them, in essence, charmless sociopaths with a taste for bad jokes - essentially, Sylvester Stallones with bolt-on tits. Now, while I know full well that all of the era's "bad girls" had considerable followings among female readers, I can't help but remain firm in my conviction that, setting aside the relatively unobjectionable lineage of quality "good girl" art that runs through comics history, the "bad girls" were explicitly misogynistic creations designed to separate teenage boys from the contents of their wallets by preying on their sexual insecurities.

(I should confess here an indefensible nostalgia for Lady Death - such a strange character, launched from the unfettered id of American youths raised on a steady diet of AD&D, Iron Maiden, and Night of the Living Dead. But Angela has no such naive charm - she is purely the product of middle-aged men who set out to concoct the most unimaginative and lucrative media property conceivable.)

The fact that she was a character in Spawn gave her some notoriety - for everyone out there scratching their heads as to who the hell Angela is, it's worth pointing out that there was a brief window of time back in the Age of Clinton when Spawn was as popular as Spider-Man, Wolverine, and Batman. She was a big deal even if she only ever appeared in a handful of comics before disappearing down the rabbit hole of Todd McFarlane's never-ending circus of legal troubles. Now, twenty years on from her initial appearance, she has about as much heat as Nature Boy. Angela's gimmick was that she hunts Spawns - she wears Spawn medallions as earrings, for Christ's sake. Now, of course, she will have nothing to do with Spawn, and without that raison d'être, it remains to be seen what exactly she will do, besides cruising the universe and randomly "ending" people.





Because that last word balloon? "I'm coming to end you"? Those words have haunted me for weeks. There is a world in those words, an empty world of false juvenile machismo and dire media references in place of actual creative content. A Google search of the phrase "I will end you" reveals that there are at least two previous instances of the phrase being used in movies released in the last fifteen years - once in Good Will Hunting, and once in Firefly. Good Will Hunting was written by Matt Damon and Ben Affleck - Affleck played the lead in the 2003 Daredevil film, a film whose look was partially inspired by Quesada's brief run on Daredevil in the late 90s. Additionally, a minor character in the movie (the rapist Jose Quesada) was named as a "tribute" to the then-Marvel Editor-in-Chief. Firefly was the brainchild of writer-director Joss Whedon, who rose to prominence behind the helm of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer film and television program before achieving massive success as the brains behind the recent Avengers film. Whedon also has a substantial list of comics credits to his name, including a run on Astonishing X-Men.

You know what's really cool? Ending your series with a line you stole from one or both of your chummy celebrity pals, a line echoed every night by thousands of twenty-somethings trying to sound menacing as they level up their paladins on World of Warcraft. It doesn't sound at all imposing or even convincing, it sounds like the type of thing a child would imagine sounded really cool but which sounds sincerely stupid if ever uttered by a grown adult. Much like only a child would imagine a character such as Angela had anything to offer the reader besides being wank material you could smuggle into the house without your parents being any the wiser. But then, who needs "bad girls" in the year 2013 when even saintly matrons like Sue Richards are packing back-breaking breasts?

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My last thoughts on Age of Ultron take the form of a response to a comment to my previous post. Jason Michelitch very thoughtfully wrote:

I haven't read Age of Ultron, literally everything I know about it comes from having just read this article, and so aside from thinking that the coloring (by I think Paul Mounts?) in that Ultron-flashback splash page is pretty nice, I have no opinion on the book whatsoever. This seems like a pretty intelligent skewering of the book, and I enjoyed reading it.

This sentiment, however, I think bears further scrutiny:

"I don't think a massive blockbuster event story is the right place to conduct some kind of radical genre experiment."

Why not?

To use your own analogy, why not hire the Coen Bros. to direct the Transformers? Wouldn't that be, as you say, interesting, and maybe amazing? The reasoning you give is that they're unlikely to produce a popular film, which is an understandable reason if you take it as a given that the primary goal of a Transformers film should be popularity -- that's not something I'd necessarily agree with, but I can understand the point of view. But as we can see from the sales charts you produce, Bendis is likely to produce a popular comic. If the Coens were likely to produce a proportionately popular film, wouldn't this rationale against putting them on Transformers vanish? And wouldn't it then be in everybody's aesthetic best interests to see what kind of new or different idea they might bring to the table?

I'm not in any way trying to say that Bendis is actually the qualitative equivalent of the Coen Bros., but setting aside subjective assessments of each talent, there's a skip-logic to your argument that experimentation doesn't belong in "big" media products. I think the extension of that idea is the assumption that interesting work belongs on the margins, and I can't see any rationale for that beyond just hard-line capitalism -- and that seems like it should be the concern of the bean-counters at Marvel, not critics. Aesthetics are often determined by economics, sure, but it seems strange to me to write criticism implying that they SHOULD be.

This is a very good point, and not one to which I am certain I have a satisfying answer. Longtime readers of this blog might recognize this argument as one that has recurred occasionally throughout its almost (gulp) ten-year history.

The reason I would give for not wanting to see the Coen Brothers tackle The Transfomers, and I realize this argument is rife with possible contradiction, is the same reason I would give for criticizing the Ang Lee Hulk. I recently caught the Lee Hulk again on cable and was reminded of just how awful a film it was - or rather, to be more precise, how awful a Hulk film it was. There were some nice things about the movie - some good performances, a couple striking images and one brief but excellent scene of the Hulk fighting the army - but nearly everything else that went into the making of the film was so misguided as to be indefensible. I've seen a number of very intelligent people defend the film based on the merits of it being a noble failure, but I can't say that I have any desire to ever see that film again. The later Incredible Hulk film with Ed Norton might be a far more pedestrian film in every sense of the word, but it's a more satisfying Hulk movie by a long stretch.

There are certainly rare talents who can stretch the definitions of genres and force the expectations of generations of readers to change accordingly - but these talents are very rare. Most craftspeople working in comics - working in any nerd field, really - strive for competency. Reading a good superhero comic - a really, genuinely good comic, with no reservations - is a rare thing indeed. I've read more bad comic books than good comic books by many orders of magnitude. And while ambition is usually something to be applauded n the arts, if we're completely honest it fails a lot more often than not. I admit my tastes in this matter may have become refined to the point of ludicrousness: I can appreciate the attention to solid craft in something as inconsequential as Scott Lobdell's Superman, while Batwoman often strikes me as simply a chore to get through.

And a lot of this, I admit, is down to my own selfish desires as a consumer of superhero comic books, and the fact that my continued involvement in the genre is predicated (as with most people) on a deep and abiding sensation of comforting nostalgia. I'm not sitting here tearing apart Age of Ultron to be cool or to affect an ironic pose - I really, genuinely would love to read an awesome book about Ultron conquering the Marvel Universe. That is so far up my alley, you can't even imagine. I want to sit in my armchair and put up my feet (I literally have an armchair with an ottoman in my office for just that reason) and enjoy my comics. I love The Avengers. It's been one of my favorite books since I was a kid, and Ultron has always been in my top-tier of favorite villains. When Age of Ultron was first announced, I was excited despite the fact that I knew full well Bendis has a terrible track record with big events. House of M and Secret Invasion were - respectively - terrible and bland, and terrible and borderline illegible. And sure enough, my worst expectations eventually proved triumphant over my idiotic counter-intuitive hope that somehow Bendis wouldn't fuck this up, just as he's fucked up almost every major story to pass through his fingers for nine years running.

So when I criticize a book like Age of Ultron for biting off more than it can chew, for failing miserably, for overreaching and falling so far short of expectations, it's not necessarily because I think interesting work should be left at the margins. (Although, honestly, it probably should, for the simple reason that talented people have better things to do than try to bend a system to their will if they have the resources or stamina to work outside or on the outskirts of the system.) It's because in this particular instance I don't trust these creators, at this company, to successfully follow through on this type of genre experiment. Good work is being done at Marvel all the time - even genuinely interesting work like Young Avengers, Hawkeye, Waid's Daredevil. For superhero comics, some of this stuff is downright shocking in its willingness to be different. But Kieron Gillen, Matt Fraction, and Mark Waid are all better writers than Brian Michael Bendis. And what's important to note, furthermore, is that each of these gentlemen writes differently when they are working on a big property or massive event than when they are writing something smaller, more personal, or more eccentric. Audience expectations aren't the most important thing, but when we're talking about commercial art they're not not important, you know? A good craftsperson knows better than to spit on the customers.

If Bendis wants to try this type of experiment, fine, go ahead, it's Disney's dime, but he has a shitty track record, and don't expect me to pretend he doesn't. He can write good comics but events like Age of Ultron play so far against his strengths that it is almost tragic to see how far his (and Marvel's) estimation of his abilities differs from his actual ability to successfully carry a story like this. He's good at stuff like Ultimate Spider-Man, and I have always liked Powers. He's written some not-bad Avengers stories, but that's only because he's written so many of them that some of them would have to be better than others, right?

Leave the Coen Brothers to make Coen Brothers films. They're not even that far off the mainstream, but they're far enough that they wouldn't have anything to gain from putting themselves through the agony of trying to work closer to the heart of that system. Let the people who can make good Transformers films make good Transformers films (none of those persons are, to be sure, Michael Bay). I like the Transformers! I'd like to see a good Transformers movie probably a lot more than the next guy. But I'd rather see a solid double or triple than another "noble failure" that didn't work because of a profound failure to understand what made the property interesting to begin with. At some point this kind of sleight-of-hand, whether intentional or no, and even when conducted with the best of intentions, is simply a bait-and-switch: you advertised and hyped one kind of story, but delivered another.

Because that's the question here. We're not talking about fine art made by brave auteurs. We're talking about superhero comic books made by corporate functionaries. The best and most we can and should expect is an engaging story competently told. The worst we can expect - and sadly, what we receive much of the time - is a string of ill-conceived cliches forced into close proximity by writers whose Platonic ideal of storytelling is an Excel spreadsheet. I just want to read a good comic book. Why is that so hard?

SIR

Age of Ultron





Do I think that a massive fan backlash is going to bring low Game of Thrones and cause HBO to lose millions of subscribers? Obviously not!

Comics is a strange world. It's small enough and the people who participate in it are intense enough that we take it for granted that this way of reading is normal. We live in a weird funhouse world. There's a term from art history, mise en abyme, which literally means "placed in abyss" - used to describe scenes in art where two mirrors are placed opposite one another and the viewer can see the reflection of one of the mirrors in the other. The most famous use of this technique - by which I mean, the picture you will most likely see in any art history reference volume to describe the technique - is Diego Velázquez's Las Meninas. It seems as if the comics industry is predicated on this type of abyssal discourse, predicated on the unquestioned assumption that the industry is small enough that anyone with sufficient expertise and vigor can make of themselves an authority. I think the relative size of the industry is of vital importance here: in a small room, it's easy to see the reflections of two mirrors placed on opposite walls and to trick yourself into imagining a vast cathedral in the space of a closet. It's a tight abyss.

Whereas most (but certainly not all) of the old-school entertainment industry is built on a one-sided delivery model, comics (and other nerd media) is fixated on the idea (usually illusory but still deeply ingrained) that the field is a two-sided conversation between fans on the one side and professionals, publishers, and corporations on the other. It's a strange thing indeed that the current media landscape is forcing much of the entertainment industry to adapt to the exigencies of this metastasized strange microbrew environment of instant (hypothetical) responsiveness. Now that so much of entertainment is small-bore niche programming and DIY operators, this is how people who want to work in art and entertainment have to operate - they have to at least pretend they care about the idea of fans as something other than abstract Neilsen numbers or Billboard sales statistics.

But no matter how many different methods they can figure out for movie stars, TV personalities, and famous singers to interact with fans without actually having to, you know, interact with them in any meaningful way, they're still most likely never going to be able to equal the comics industry in terms of actual interaction. You can go online right now and find a Tumblr where one of Marvel's Senior Vice Presidents of Publishing will answer any and all questions, even stupid and insulting ones. By any measure that's pretty neat, right? Imagine a Senior VP at Warner Brothers or Fox having a Tumblr like that. It's a strange world, this comics scene, where we can actually interact not just with the creators themselves but with the executives and editors who tell the creators what to do. it gives us a weird feeling of entitlement. The people who started printing letters' pages in Golden and Silver age comics were coming from the tradition of the sci-fi pulps, another field built on a porous relationship between fan and creator. I wonder, if they could have seen how it all turned out, if they would have done anything different.

I am amused by the fan reaction to the last season of Game of Thrones for the same reason that I am amused at the progress of Age of Ultron.

As of this writing I haven't read the last issue of Age of Ultron, even though it has apparently leaked. So I don't know if the rumors that have been flying around for the last few months have been accurate or not, and furthermore I don't know if the story ends on anything even remotely resembling a satisfactory note. Odds don't look good, nine issues in, I can tell you that. So far, Age of Ultron has been pretty terrible, and it doesn't look as if the final issue is going to be some kind of strange kamikaze left-turn that will validate all the previous nine issues worth of fuck-all. I live to be proven wrong, however - if I am not the perfect model audience for a storyline called Age of Ultron, I really don't know who is.

The story is abysmal. It seems to have been written for the specific purpose of pissing off its audience, which is a really odd sensation to get from a book that, all told, will cost its readers $40 + tax. (Does issue #10 cost more because it's double-sized?) When compiled into a shiny hardcover (which will probably inexplicably also retail in the $40 range) it will take less than a half-hour to read, and that's being generous and assuming you read slowly. Reading the story on an issue-by-issue basis, it's really remarkable how much of a cheat each issue has been - it's not as if every issue has left the reader hungry for more, it's as if they only remembered to print half the issues, and the half that made it to print was the half without the plot. It doesn't surprise me at all that the final issue is double-sized, because as it stands now they're going to need at least half of those pages to be solid walls of text in order to explain all the stuff they conveniently left out of the rest of the series. But I am dead certain that the double-sized pages are not going to used to provide the missing exposition, but will instead be even more in the way of random landscape shots, a handful of brief gnomic conversations, and then a few non sequitur teaser endings.

So, to recap: a long-anticipated event called Age of Ultron has lasted nine issues without actually once showing the title character. Oh, wait, scratch that - Ultron did appear, finally, on the last page of the ninth issue.



If this scene looks familiar, that's because you may have already read it, back in 1968:



Rather than giving us a story about fighting Ultron, Age of Ultron is instead a time-travel story about what happens when the heroes go back in time to prevent Ultron from having demolished the human race. Or rather, to be more precise, it is a story about what happens when Wolverine goes back in time to prevent Ultron from having demolished the human race, which is something everyone else knows is a bad idea because they've all read "A Sound of Thunder" and know how that ends. So rather than providing any kind of climactic battle with Ultron, I fully expect the final issue to show the negative consequences of Wolverine having gone off the reservation to stab his way across history. (Isn't this basically the premise of Exiles? Why didn't those time-travelers break the multiverse?) After nine issues, this is the climactic cliffhanger: a flashback from 1968's Avengers #58, illustrating the creation of Ultron. Which is certainly an interesting approach to making a cliffhanger in the year 2013.

I'm going to be generous here and say that there is the kernel of an interesting idea at the heart of Age of Ultron. It's not a new idea, it's not even a particularly interesting idea - but good creators have done a lot more with a lot less. The problem is almost entirely one of execution. However, there is a kind and merciful God. he series has been released at a rapid clip: the first five issues were almost weekly, and the second half has been bi-weekly (save for the tenth, I believe). One the one hand, it is somewhat nice to see a series like this actually come out on time, and even at an accelerated schedule. On the other, the story itself has made it blindingly obvious that anything other than an accelerated release schedule would have kneecapped the venture entirely by laying bare the complete lack of plot in excruciatingly plain terms. One issue a month would have made the series not just a poorly-received event (which is patently already is) but a complete joke.

Shipping the series so quickly has paid ample dividends for the company. Take a look at sales for the first six issues, courtesy of Paul O'Brien:

4,6,7. AGE OF ULTRON
03/13 Age of Ultron #1 of 10 - 174,952
03/13 Age of Ultron #2 of 10 - 109,383 (-37.5%)
03/13 Age of Ultron #3 of 10 - 105,505 ( -3.5%)
04/13 Age of Ultron #4 of 10 - 101,057 ( -4.2%)
04/13 Age of Ultron #5 of 10 - 97,982 ( -3.0%)
04/13 Age of Ultron #6 of 10 - 97,242 ( -0.8%)

Set aside the usual first issue drop, and these are remarkably solid sales. Imagine sales for the series if the story had been allowed to dribble out slowly over the course of ten months. They would have lost quite a few readers by month ten. I don't think this is one of those series that would have picked up momentum over the course of a year - far from it. Marvel gambled that dumping over half the series in one fell swoop would pay off with stable sales, ensuring that later orders could only be hurt so much by poor word of mouth. The gamble worked. We don't have the luxury of hopping into Dr. Doom's time machine in order to see a parallel world where the series was released at a more standard rate, but we can guess that there are definite reasons why the story was sold the way it was. I wonder how sell-through has been for later issues of the series, or if we're going to be seeing copies of this book in the quarter bins for years to come.

This isn't a new problem. This has been the standard complaint regarding Bendis' event stories for almost a decade. (House of M was released in 2005!) Rather than addressing the problem, Bendis has been allowed to continue to write these stories in this way more or less unchecked. Now, he's obviously made a lot of money over the years for Marvel. There are good reasons why he is allowed more-or-less carte blanche regarding these events: he has a proven track record of producing stories that sell well out of the gate and that (perhaps inexplicably) continue to sell in collected form years later. But the criticisms regarding the pace of his stories has never abated. Releasing Age of Ultron so quickly is probably the best way to counter this problem, short of - you know - actually trying to write a single issue that takes more than four minutes to read.

Thankfully, Brian Michael Bendis keeps a Tumblr where he answers fan questions on topics such as these. One fan wrote him to suggest, in reference to Ultimate Comics Spider-Man:

Could I ask you to read one of your recent books, any of them that cost 3.99$ and time yourself when you do, and then sit down and read Transmetropolitain #1 or Preacher #1 timing yourself again, then explain to me why I should pay 3.99$ for Mile's story when I make 10.50/ hr?

To which Bendis answered:

First of all, I have done all of those things.

I have read every issue of my book at least a dozen times before you see it and I’ve read everything Warren Ellis and Garth Ennis have ever done (sans some of those wacky avatar books :-))

 I don’t know how long it takes you to read. I don’t know if you’re skimming or staring at the beautiful artwork. I don’t know if there is a value system to how much time it takes to read something versus how well it is written or how true the writing is.

 word count does not equal good. the words are not the only thing on the page.

 some of my favorite songs are under two minutes long.  

 buy things that make you happy.

all i can do is make comics i would buy with my money. i would buy Ultimate Spider-man.

This answer does a fantastic job of encapsulating what could best be described as a dysfunctional dynamic within the mainstream industry. There's an idea on the part of creators and editorial that any reader who complains about not getting their money's worth must be reading their comics wrong. When Bendis states, "I don’t know if you’re skimming or staring at the beautiful artwork," there's a really profound disconnect here between what the creator himself has learned to value and what the fans themselves value.

I've been reading comics for almost as long as I've been alive - literally, some of my very first memories are buying Batman comics on family car trips and staring at them in my car seat. I study, write about, and teach literature for a living. If I don't have at least some ability to judge the aesthetic merits of a comic book after all this time, then I honestly don't know who does: there's my sense of entitlement for you. I write a comic book blog with a 9 1/2 year paper trail - you can look back through the archives and find every stupid thing I ever wrote, every creator I ever needlessly antagonized, every sweeping generalization I popped off and then painfully retracted. I know a few things about how comic books work. And I know that when a creator says something like "I don’t know if there is a value system to how much time it takes to read something versus how well it is written or how true the writing is," there is something very profoundly missing in terms of a reciprocal, cordial, sympathetic dialogue between a creator and fan.

The "value system" is simple: if a comic is entertaining, it is doing its job and the reader is left with few if any complaints. If the comic is unentertaining, for whatever reason, than the creator has failed at his or her job. People don't poke holes in a comic they enjoyed. Pointing out that a Bendis comic is decompressed and doesn't provide enough story for the reader to feel as if he's gotten his or her money's worth should really not be a point of controversy in the year 2013. If a reader tells you they're not getting their money's worth from your book, you damn well better apologize. You don't have to swear to change everything overnight - if you've got a style that still succeeds in getting customers in the door, there are obviously sufficient people around who do appreciate what you're doing. But don't tell your fans they don't know how to read. Say you're sorry and move on.

How do you read comics? I don't know about you, but I really don't read most superhero comics with the kind of care and diligence I would use to read Love & Rockets. If I see a two-page spread of smashed buildings and rubble - and boy howdy, are there lots of two-page spreads of smashed buildings and rubble in Age of Ultron - I'm going to scan it to see what the relevant information is before turning the page. I'm not lingering over the drawings. Because, sure, Bryan Hitch can draw. He can draw really well. But asking him to draw page after page after page of smashed buildings and rubble is just stupid. It's moronic. It betrays a pathological inability to understand the most basic difference between detailed drawing and involving stories. Yeah, seeing a couple pages of carnage is fun. But so much of the first half of Age of Ultron is just the same thing repeated over and over again. Now lets do the same thing with different characters! What are Black Panther and Red Hulk doing in Chicago? Pretty much the same thing as Black Widow in San Francisco! Lots of people scurrying around in rubble waiting for a plot to happen. And then, the worst part, the absolute worst part, is that the real "story" as such doesn't even begin until the end of the fifth issue. It's not until they actually get into the time machine - one group of heroes heads into the future for a last-ditch assault on Ultron, while Wolverine and Sue Storm hijack the machine to go into the past - that the actual business of telling the story they intended to tell gets underway.

Stop a minute and think about the fact that this story is called Age of Ultron. I know I made this point before - forgive my repetition - but when you see a story called Age of Ultron, do you expect Ultron to appear in that story? Do you expect the story to be in some way about Ultron? You could write roughly the same story about Dormammu, or Korvac, or Dracula, or Thanos, or the Leader, or really, any massively powerful villain with a deep history who could conceivably conquer the planet and do serious damage under the right circumstances. (Pointing out that this is also part of the plot of Age of Apocalypse is surely redundant at this point, yes?) In the early issues we got an endless supply of Ultron drones, and one legitimately interesting twist when it was revealed just who was directing the drones to hunt for Avengers, but no Ultron. Based on the way the plot has progressed, there is simply no way that issue ten contains anything resembling a climactic battle with Ultron - if Wolverine and Sue Storm have succeeded, the "Age of Ultron" will never have come to pass. There will be no reason to actually fight the villain, which means the actual confrontation will probably last a couple pages before fading out into one of those white panels that indicates a timeline has been destroyed or overwritten, at which point the story will switch gears to describe the terrible consequences of Wolverine's actions.

Back to Bendis' Tumblr, he addresses another, more complementary fan query:

How did you come up with the Age of Ultron story? What made you want to write it? Also, it seems like there could have been numerous ways to write this story, did you always have one concrete way of telling it? Or were you in between different plot ideas? Thanks!

To which our man answers:

It started with the very writerly idea of taking a villain, a classic villain, whose promise has always been complete apocalypse, and deciding to start the story after the apocalypse has already happened. what if the villain won?

 the germ of the idea started when I was writing the avengers THQ video game that you will never see because they no longer exist and the game was canceled ( I still have a copy, it was a good game) and the premise that they had come to me with is: Secret Invasion but the alien invasion had already taken place. the avengers got caught with their pants down kind of story. I thought to myself that if I would do Secret Invasion again I would love to do it that way. just drop the reader right into the story instead of the traditional build up.

 I was also, and continue to be, obsessed with the idea of a story that starts with one genre and flips to another. movies like Barton Fink where you think you know what kind of story it is and then all of a sudden, an hour later, you realize it’s completely different.

 knowing that both of these ideas could be frustrating to some of the readers who have been groomed on the traditional three act structure of an event comic, I knew I was going to take a bit of a beating from some corners of the Twittersphere because you can’t even judge the piece until it’s completed, but, as is my way, I don’t care. :-)  once an idea gets in my head it’s very hard not to do it.

 but this entire year has been a big transition for me as far as genre and style and I have been so relieved at the positive feedback and support.

 and as Tom tweeted today, the final issue is, to my surprise as well, black bagged for your protection. and with the final issue all my cards will be on the table

I don't think a massive blockbuster event story is the right place to conduct some kind of radical genre experiment.

We're not talking about art films here. We're talking about a superhero crossover. I can't help but read these words and come away with an unmistakable feeling of contempt - maybe not explicit contempt, sure, but a lack of respect nonetheless for the fans and readers who buy these stories, and even the stories themselves. The fans and readers who "have been groomed on the traditional three act structure of an event comic," who might actually like that type of story, and who might be feeling more than a little bit ripped off about the fact that the finished product has transformed into some kind of Coen Brothers hybrid right before their eyes. There's a reason why they don't hire the Coen Brothers to direct The Transformers - sure, they might produce a really interesting movie about transforming robots from space, but chances are it wouldn't be a particularly popular one.

And on some very basic level, if you work in the more popular reaches of the entertainment industry, then don't you have to be conscious of the fact that you are producing popular entertainment? I would argue that there is a profound disconnect here between a creator who is - by his own testimony - bored of writing blockbuster crossover stories, and an audience who have every expectation of receiving a blockbuster crossover story. As it stands, Age of Ultron is half monumentally boring post-apocalyptic travelogue, and half time-travel story - the second half literally moots the first half, but you still spent $20 on all those beautifully drawn two-page spreads of rubble. (No flies on Hitch, but even he had to be thinking "enough is enough with all this damn rubble!")

We have the comics industry we deserve. On one side of the fence you have an armed camp micromanaged by corporate drones who do not appear to understand the most basic rudiments of storytelling, and on the other side you have rows of auters who have been empowered by the unshakeable belief that they are creating great works of durable art and not actually corporate-owned superhero comics. Neither philosophy succeeds particularly well in creating readable superhero adventure stories. There is a point between the conception and execution of a grand narrative where the ambitions of the creators must come into direct conflict with the expectations of the audience. The conflict threshold for superhero comics is quite low, and every creator who purposefully puts themselves into conflict with the expectations of their audience really has to work had to justify the friction.

The conflict threshold for epic fantasy is usually quite low as well, but somehow George R. R. Martin has made the tension work for him. I was fascinated by the discourse surrounding the last season of Game of Thrones because it has been very interesting to see how plot points intended for prose have been scaled to meet the requirements of a mass-medium television audience. Television programs that intentionally alienate their audiences don't have a history of lasting very long, but all indications point to Game of Thrones being the exception that proves the rule, the franchise whose appeal outweighs the appeal of any single character or plotline.

Age of Ultron is no Game of Thrones. Although Bendis would surely like to believe that he is a genre-twisting auteur who has, like Martin, earned sufficient trust from his audience to be able to count on their enthusiasm to follow any wild story he can conjure, his poor critical track record with blockbuster events speaks for itself. It's important at these moments to remember that the comics industry is no captive audience, although we certainly do style ourselves as such. We don't have to eat the turkey if we don't want to. Sometimes the abyss is just one-sided mirror.

Munchausen Weekend

Man of Steel

Short version: I liked it! It was pretty good, with some minor caveats.

Long version: spoilers, I guess.



The funny thing is, after I got home and mentioned on Twitter that I enjoyed the film, a couple people said they were surprised to hear me say that, and that they had been expecting me to hate it. That is interesting! Certainly, heading into the movie I wanted to like it, but that should hardly be taken to mean I wasn't trying to be as critical as I often am. I hated a lot of things about Iron Man 3 - it was a pretty awful movie, all things considered, and the fact that so many people embraced it uncritically was - if not surprising - still disheartening. That Man of Steel is a lot better than it needed to be, and that it is being met with a somewhat more muted reaction, is no less surprising. (People on Twitter are quick to respond: fans just like Marvel more, and give them the benefit of the doubt that DC never gets, with the obvious exception of Batman. Very true.)

I mean, sure, in the big scheme of things who gives a shit if one of the largest entertainment conglomerates in the history of the world hits their quarterly earnings projections? But since these are the bread and circuses we are given, we might as well have something nice and shiny with which to distract ourselves as we roll over the waterfalls and onto the jagged rocks of cultural oblivion.

Many of the negative critiques I've heard regarding the film seem to be the kind of critiques that you could have predicted sight-unseen. The film is too dour. The film takes itself too seriously. There is too much disaster porn. There are too many obvious Christ references. Not enough Clark Kent. Not enough Daily Planet. Too much Krypton. All of which you could have gleaned from the credits. All of which are certainly true.

But you're stuck reviewing the film you watched, not the film you wanted to see. And while certainly I think the film might have wisely spent more time setting up the adult Clark Kent, or putting some more levity into the character interactions, or even given us a less melancholy version of Superman himself, that's not the film they chose to make. For the most part, the choices the made work within the constraints they've established. The film they chose to make is, for better or for worse, po-faced, sincerely unironic, and very violent. These were conscious decisions made to distance the film from previous on-screen interpretations of the Man of Steel, specifically the associations of Richard Donner's original films and the regrettable Bryan Singer retread. If you want an explanation as to why Man of Steel is the way it is, all you need to remember is that the studio's unambiguous remit for this film was to do for Superman what Christopher Nolan had done for Batman. Why do you think they went out of their way to put Nolan's name on the film? Nolan was very clear about the fact that he didn't want to make a Superman movie, and yet they got him to put his imprimatur on it anyway. They were serious about wanting to make this film work in a big way, and the best way they saw to do that was to make the film serious in a big way.

I have never made any secret of the fact that I am not the biggest fan of Nolan's Batman movies. In brief: too dark, overly complicated, thematically muddy - basically nonsensical when you put any amount of thought into trying to understand why anything in those films happens the way it does. I didn't really see any of those problems in this film. The plot was fairly straight-forward - no annoying third-act "surprise" twists, all the important elements were laid out plainly for the audience to see, all the character motivations were more or less well delineated. I am so very sick of the "puzzle box" school of film plotting, and it was refreshing to see a large film so steadfast in its desire to keep the plot mechanics as untangled as possible. Superman has a clear character arc from the first time we see him through to the last frame. General Zod has a coherent motivation and concrete goals. Although some of the plot points revolve around MacGuffins and Hamdingers (slamming this capsule into that ship will send them both back to the Phantom Zone! Superman has the whole Kryptonian race imrpinted in his DNA!), they're all clearly spelled-out in the necessary comic-book-science fashion.

The story they chose to tell maybe isn't the story a lot of Superman fans wanted to see. This isn't a well-established, super-competent Superman - this is Young Superman's first adventure. Although he's had a lifetime to adjust to living on Earth, which is a definite advantage over the Phantom Zone army (and certainly one of the most clever bits in the film), he still hasn't gotten used to his abilities because up until the moment he puts on The Suit his father gives him, he'd always been afraid to really test the limits of his powers. When he engages with the villains, he's barely competent. He doesn't know how to fight at all, which is why he keeps getting his ass handed to him by people with the same powers who have been trained to fight. His only advantage is that he has a remarkable degree of self-control and patience, skills given him by his Earth parents and developed through decades of hard work and perserverence. I'm willing to overlook a number of problems with those scenes - his relative inability to lessen collateral damage, for instance - by remembering that by the time he first engages with Zod's forces in Smallville, he couldn't have been flying for more than two or three days. Although his moral compass is solid from the beginning, his abilities are not commensurate with his ambition, not yet.

The way the film plots out Superman's first adventure creates some interesting storytelling problems which could either be used as fodder for the sequels or ignored entirely. For one thing, having Lois meet Superman before she meets Clark - and making it explicitly clear that she knows from the very beginning who this Clark Kent fellow really is - sidesteps one of the franchise's most important dynamics. Now, it's important to remember that this movie isn't really setting up the kind of open-ended storytelling engine you might expect to find on TV or the comics themselves: there are probably going to be two or three more Superman films in this series, tops. So maybe it just isn't that important to set up a situation where a Lois / Superman / Clark triangle could exist. That triangle was essential to the franchise for decades, but I don't believe it's necessarily integral to the character, although I know many people disagree vehemently on this subject. I liked Married Superman just fine, and don't think being married hurt Superman at all, certainly not the way it did Spider-Man. Superman isn't really much in the way of a bachelor, anyway - after 75 years everyone knows he belongs with Lois, and having them married for so long in the comics was something out of which the creators actually got a fair degree of mileage (as opposed, again, to Spider-Man, where the marriage was more an impediment than anything else). The fact that the Nu-52 Superman isn't currently dating Lois is just stupid, because every single person reading the books - every single person - knows he's never actually going to marry Wonder Woman, and that he's eventually going to marry Lois - if not actually in the comics, then, you know, "next year," and forever after. It just doesn't do Lois any favors as a character to put her in a situation where she doesn't see that two people with whom she is intimately familiar are one and the same. I like the fact that the movie isn't chary about the fact that Clark loves Lois the first time he sees her, and that also the first time he saves her life she trusts him completely.

Another potential problem is the fact that Superman only actually reveals himself to humanity in reaction to Zod's threat. Now, in the movie, it makes perfect sense: Clark can't become Superman until he learns from Jor-El who he actually is, and learns not to be afraid of his powers, and to trust in the decency of the human race to be able not to lose their collective shit when he steps in front of a camera for the first time. But in terms of the plot, the fact that he comes "out of the closet" at the same moment the Earth is under attack from evil aliens, it seems like it will be that much harder for Superman to gain people's trust. Again, this is another Nu-52 plot point that I'm not happy about: it's all well and good if the average Joe on the street distrusts superhumans or superheroes in general, but Superman should be that one guy that everyone trusts, even if they are afraid of Batman or think that Wonder Woman is a man-hating Marxist feminazi or that Green Lantern is an intergalactic fascist. But looking forward to the sequel, I can see this being a powerful argument for Lex Luthor (because, duh, Luthor is the sequel) - how can we trust this Superman creature when all we really know about him is that his people want us all dead? So again, if this movie were being used to set up a new ongoing Superman serial, that might be problematic, but as a plot point in an isolated film it doesn't pose too many problems, and might be working to set up conflicts for future sequels. I do hope, however, that they don't spend too much time in the sequel on anyone "hating and fearing" Superman - that's Luthor's schtick. In fact, that's Luthor's character in a nutshell. He's that guy who has to look a gift horse in the mouth and remain suspicious of the one man in the entire world who purports to act with no ulterior motive whatsoever, because he is constitutionally incapable of understanding altruism.

Walking out of Iron Man 3 I was just exhausted and fed-up - with the character, with Robert Downey, Jr., with the elements of the Marvel Studios format that were obviously already congealing into stale formula. Walking out of Man of Steel I am eager to see the next one - especially now that they're done with the de rigeur origin story, now they've established the setting and given us a small army of good actors to fill out Superman's universe. The second movie will obviously be Lex Luthor. Since they're following Nolan's blueprint so closely I anticipate them putting a lot of work into making Luthor as impressive as he deserves to be - they're going to want to find an actor who can sell Lex Luthor like Heath Ledger sold the Joker. I want this to work because Lex Luthor is really fucking cool, and deserves to be treated as such. (Also: I really hope the next film is done with Krypton, because I've always maintained that Krypton is actually the least interesting thing about Superman. Jor-El's story ends the moment his planet explodes, so the insistence on the part of successive generations of filmmakers and TV people that Jor-El remain an important figure in Superman's life seems really weird to me.)

But there are other complaints which deserve to be answered. The first major complaint I've seen is that the amount of destruction in the movie is simply obscene. There is some truth to this. Superhero movies are spectacle, and audiences expect (or, at least, studios believe audiences expect) to see every penny of the budget onscreen in the most obnoxious manner possible, and the best way to do that is to show shit blowing up. Now, of course, if a major American city really suffered the kind of damages Metropolis sees in this film, the death toll would be in the thousands, possibly the tens or even hundreds of thousands. (New York gets trashed pretty hard in The Avengers, but it's worth pointing out for the sake of comparison that the Avengers in that film are always primarily concerned with getting civilians out of harm's way.) This is problematic, but pretty much inescapable for modern superhero films, which are essentially old-fashioned disaster films by another name. It says some weird things about our national psyche in the wake of decades of real-life disaster porn on television that this is our cathartic entertainment, but ultimately I think it says just as much about the state of the movie industry. These movies are the biggest entertainment spectacles in the world right now, and the most impressive ways movie studios can imagine to show off all the money they have to spend is by blowing shit up. That's a little bit depressing and speaks to a profound lack of imagination on the part of moviemakers, but I don't see it changing anytime soon.

When Metropolis starts getting (literally) pounded in this film, Superman is on the other side of the world in India trying to disassemble a giant World Engine that is destroying the planet. So, Superman can't be in two places at once - and although a lot of people die as a result of this, I think it's important to remember that one of the reasons why this scene plays out the way it does is that Superman trusts the people he's working with to do the right thing. After the military starts working with him and not against him, they all work together to decide what needs to be done, and he trusts that they're going to to be able to accomplish it because he believes in their abilities. That's a very Superman thing to do, really - we all have important parts to play, and even if he's more powerful he can't do it all, and we need to help each other to succeed. It's important that we see the military trying so hard to take down Zod's flagship, even if they're unsuccessful, for the same reason it's important we see Perry White working so hard to save Jenny the Intern from the rubble - because that's the whole point of the movie. Superman can't be everywhere, but he can inspire us to be better, and to do what needs to be done. That's one of my favorite bits in the movie, actually, now that I think back on it: Perry White and Steve Lombard hear Jenny the Intern (who is hopefully named Olson) screaming under a pile of rubble. Perry moves to help her but Lombard pauses a moment before coming back with a metal pole to use for leverage to dig the intern out. It's great because Lombard's reaction is precisely the kind of thing we want to see happen around Superman - Lombard obviously wants to leave, to get out of there, to save himself, but after a split-second of hesitation he comes and helps. Because it's the right thing to do.

Which leaves us with the last, most controversial aspect of the film - the ending, when Superman kills Zod. Now, watching this film I knew that this was going to be a problem. I knew that this was most likely how the film was going to end, and I also knew this was most likely going to be the single plot element that most fans would have trouble swallowing. But as it played out, I didn't actually have any problems with it. I've already read Mark Waid's impassioned reaction against the film's ending. If there is anyone on this planet who I trust to be an authority on all things Superman, it's Mark Waid, but I'm not going to be a purist about this. It works because even though it's a terrible thing that Superman should never do, the film goes out of its way to show us that this is the only conceivable way the story can end. Superman doesn't kill Zod for convenience, or out of revenge or even as punishment - he kills Zod because there is, in a split-second, no other conceivable choice, and there is no other conceivable choice because Zod wants to die.

Now, think about Superman's character arc throughout this movie. When the movie begins he's already more or less dedicated his life to helping people, even if he's still a bit unsure about the best way to go about doing so. He's absorbed all the lessons in decency and kindness that his parents could possibly have taught him - and Jonathan Kent's death, far from being the afterthought that it is in most iterations of the mythos, is crucial to his character growth. (If you clicked on the link above, Waid does a great job of explaining just how much this plot point helps define Clark.) But he is still missing that one crucial part of his life, the knowledge of his heritage, that is necessary before he can come out into the open as Superman. Finally, when he meets Jor-El's ghost and receives the Kryptonian uniform that becomes his costume, he is ready to take his first steps as a public figure. And then the plot begins, because the moment he dedicates himself to learning the limits of his powers and using them to their fullest potential, in public, is when Zod comes to Earth and states his intention to kill every last person on the planet.

So even though Superman has already made the decision to be good, he is still basically inexperienced, and goes from having no idea who he is to having to make the choice to end his race in order to save humanity in the space of about a week. When Zod comes to Earth, Superman gets his ass kicked at first, for all the reasons discussed above. But finally the tides turn, Superman and his human allies save the day, and the only other Kryptonian left alive in Metropolis is Zod. And I really can't overpraise Michael Shannon's acting enough here, because even though he's playing the character at an almost hysterical pitch, he is still completely lucid, and he lays out in precise detail exactly how the film is going to end: he was born and bred for one purpose, and that purpose was to protect and preserve Krypton, and Kal-El has prevented him from fulfilling his purpose, and so he has no more reason to live. He wants to kill Superman, sure, but really, he wants to make Superman kill him. Because he knows that Superman doesn't want to do it. Zod has been trained to kill, to be as cruel and efficient as necessary to protect Krypton, but he doesn't have any other purpose. He's lost, but he can still make damn sure that Superman doesn't win. The last thing he can do is put Kal-El in a situation where he will be forced to kill the last living connection to his home planet and people.

So at that final moment, with Zod a split-second away from killing four innocent people, Superman does the only thing he can. He makes his choice, and his choice is to protect the people of Earth. Could he have found another way? Maybe a mature Superman could have easily thought his way out of the problem, known how to fly Zod away from a crowded city, been able to more effectively counter Zod's superior tactical ability and fighting prowess. But this isn't that Superman, not yet: this is Superman's first real adventure, and it's also his greatest test. So when push comes to shove, yes, he kills Zod. But you know he's going to carry that moment for the rest of his life, he's going to hear the crisp 'snap' of Zod's neck in his dreams whenever he sleeps. The grief he expresses right after he kills Zod, after he loses the last tangible connection to his birthright, is real. He will do everything possible to never again be placed in a situation where the only possible recourse is to take another being's life. He will do better, be better. And that is Superman.

As for the rest of it? Zach Snyder isn't a half-bad director when he leaves all the cheap junior high fan-service and gay-bating at home. In fact, one thing I kept coming back to throughout the movie was that there was some unmistakeable subtext connected to the manner of Superman revealing himself to the people of Earth - his conflicting desires to come out and to stay secret, and his ultimate heroic choice to reveal his true identity and trust that the people around him will accept that his intentions are noble. Considering Snyder's . . . less than sterling track-record with the gay community, the fact that he was responsible for a Superman movie that acts as an admirable coming-out narrative is pretty fucking remarkable, and surely worthy of some attention.

As for the Jesus Christ pose - well, again, there's only so far you can run from that in a story about an alien who is sent to Earth by his father to help people. There's one scene with Superman falling backwards off a spaceship into the atmosphere with his arms outstretched like Christ on the cross that felt a little bit "on the nose," as the kids say. I groaned a little, I confess. But there is also a scene in a church earlier in the film where Clark's decision to reveal himself is framed in terms of a reference to Jesus' acts of charity, which I thought was a commendable use of religious imagery to communicate the importance of selflessness and self-sacrifice.

So did I like the movie? Yeah. It was good. It's better than it needed to be. I'm looking forward to the sequel. And that is the best complement you can pay a movie like this.