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.

Infinity #3

Last weekend I dipped into Marvel's current crossover blockbuster event, Infinity.

Part of the Marvel NOW! re-branding that coincided with the conclusion of the Avengers vs. X-Men Phoenix war, Infinity, stretched as it is over several different titles with tie-ins in various books, is turgid, opaque, unsatisfying.

Don't get me wrong. I'm a big fan of writer Jonathan Hickman. And the art by Jerome Opeña, Dustin Weaver and Jim Cheung has been topnotch. It is just that I am exhausted with the blockbuster crossover events and the crass commercialism behind them. For instance, Age of Ultron supposedly feeds into the Infinity storyline, but I wouldn't know that because I threw in the towel on that blockbuster crossover event before the final issue. I have all the Age of Ultron issues here in the studio. I read the first five issues. I just have no desire to take the time to finish off the title.

The plot architecture of Infinity is a classic Western. Cavalry exits fort in pursuit of Indians. Marauders attack and capture defenseless fort. While most superheroes are in outer space engaged in Star Warsesque battles with the Builders, creators of the universe who have decided that the Earth must go, the baleful Thanos, in order to claim the remaining Infinity Gem, decides to stage a sneak attack on our seemingly defenseless blue-green planet.

Below are scans of the three pages that conclude Infinity #3. Black Bolt goes aurally ballistic on Thanos. The art is by Jerome Opeña and Dustin Weaver; colors, Justin Ponsor:

All-New X-Men #12

I think that All-New X-Men is the best-looking Marvel Comic around these days. Stuart Immonen's pencils, Wade Von Grawbadger's inks and Rain Beredo's colors make for great art. Brian Michael Bendis has been tapping the time-travel narratives heavily of late. His Age of Ultron series experienced a sudden loss of power three issues in I think largely due to the introduction of time travel. And the last few issues of his Ultimate Comics: Spider-Man, once an effervescent comic book, have felt tired and flat. But the story of teenage X-Men from the 1960s introduced to our jaded, techno-heavy, barbarous present age has been consistently excellent.

Comic books, a supposedly disposable media, are wonderful reflections of the Zeitgeist. So Bendis' All-New X-Men take on time travel -- placing characters from the 1960s, with their cleanliness and idealism, in our End Times -- is a brilliant idea. Below are four scrumptious scans from All-New X-Men #12:

Age of Ultron #2

Age of Ultron is the latest Marvel meta-narrative, or, in industry parlance, "crossover storyline." (For a convenient decade-by-decade list of Marvel's crossover "events," go to the bottom of the Wikipedia Age of Ultron page. I am partial to the Dark Reign arc myself.)

I've read the first three Age of Ultron issues, as well as The Superior Spider-Man and Fantastic Four tie-ins, and so far, so good. I've always enjoyed the conciseness of writer Brian Michael Bendis; his elliptical style is well suited to this tale of techno Apocalypse. It's an inverted Rapture where Ultron drones darken city skies while superheroes cower in tunnels.

Below are three scanned pages from Age of Ultron #2, written by Bendis, with art by Bryan Hitch: