Avengers A.I. #12

Each Wednesday after work I have a routine. I'll get a burrito at my neighborhood taqueria, and then I'll walk down Broadway to the comic shop and pick up the new releases for the week. It is a good practice to support your local comic dealer because he provides a safe, clean space for people to congregate. My neighborhood comic shop actually hosts fantasy games each night. When you walk in the front door you have wall-mounted comic-book displays on your left and right, but in the back of the store are card tables at which sit people, mostly young men, but some women too, and a few older folks, playing Dungeons & Dragons. It is a neighborhood social club, which is what used to represent the bedrock of our society.

With the waning of ethnic fraternal orders and labor union locals, the neighborhood social club is an anachronism. Our lives have migrated online. Amazon and Facebook, Google and Apple -- corporate behemoths -- dominate our waking hours and consciousness. The problem is we are not spirits. We are meat wagons that convey a spirit. So we need a healthy local community in order to be happy where we live. That means we need clean, safe social spaces in our neighborhood. And that is why I am proud to support my local comic shop.

A breathtaking exploration of the increasingly artificial nature of our civilization is the 12-issue run of Avengers A.I. The title provides an epilogue to Age of Ultron. That Marvel crossover event concluded with Hank Pym besting his malevolent artificial-intelligence spawn, Ultron, by introducing an virus that wipes out Ultron. The virus morphs into Dimitrios who traipses around in 1960s-era Iron Man armor. Dimitrios' goal is no less than the annihilation of all reality.

Avengers A.I. is written by Sam Humphries; the artist is Andre Lima Araujo. Both the writing and the art are superb.

Avengers A.I. #12 is the series finale. You will find nine scans from that issue below: the cover page and eight interior pages. Dimitrios, close to realizing his plan of reaching the nexus of reality, the "Golden Knot," and snuffing out the Universe, beheads Galactus and rides it to a showdown with the Creator, who turns out to be a bald-headed parrot.

I am reminded of an Alan Moore documentary, The Mindscape of Alan Moore (2003), that I saw several years ago where the prolific comic-book author predicts that, due to the breakthroughs in computing power that have been multiplying so rapidly, society will soon "turn into steam." What this means exactly is open to interpretation. I took it to mean that civilization as we know it will be radically altered, and we will make a disastrous attempt, much like Dimitrios, to slough off corporeal existence.