Comics / Comics News

Marvel Announces a Totally New Event

By Zak Edwards
November 20, 2012 - 16:00

In a surprise announcement yesterday, Marvel Comics revealed its latest idea to alienate readers and suck all their creators into another demanding and unreasonable event.  While less direct in its title than the just finished Avengers vs. X-Men crossover ‘hit’, Age of Ultron promises to be big and have real consequences on the Marvel Universe, like for real this time, guys.  Seriously, they’ve been planning this for apparently a few years, Marvel claims, trying to retroactively claim that random stuff thrown against the wall has, in fact, stuck long enough to rope into the “groundwork” of this event.  Just how Secret Invasion similarly had all these things you could go back and look at to see how they did totally not pull this out of nowhere, Age of Ultron is going to be remembered forever.  Forever!

And look at this image. So cryptic, so intriguing!

And, just as the Marvel NOW! initiative will have maybe finally gotten some new readers, these already on-the-fence consumers can also look forward to having their stories derailed by tie-ins to something they don’t really want to buy.  Long-time fans will have the distinct pleasure of seeing a new logo take up half the cover art (and all the story) of their favourite books.  So yeah, these new readers are for sure going to decide to drop even more money than simply stop showing up to the store or digital equivalent and long-time fans won't get frustrated.  Cause that’s what these events do: get more readers buying stupid event books for fear of not knowing how this event is totally and completely going to have lasting consequences!

Seeing how great an idea this is, it will surely stick to a ridiculous shipping schedule that will put strange demands on writers already having to sacrifice side projects to write books at a semi-monthly rate rather than monthly.  This shipping schedule will lead to anything by Jonathan Hickman, Jason Aaron (who, thankfully, recently ended his series Scalped to fully commit to these new shipping schedules), or other writers known for their wonderful independent work, be put ‘on hold’ and any consistency in art will be shot to the wayside, putting multiple artists into single books, drawing as fast as they can.  So not only will the quality of all these books drop in the writing front, they will also look like Frankenstein’s monster if Frankenstein just didn’t care if the body parts ‘actually’ lined up.
But seriously guys, long term impact and totally worth it!  They’ll probably have books afterwards called things like Damage Report and Fallout just to prove that there are consequences!

Age of Ultron starts March 2013!  Expect 300 Variant Covers to beat out DC Comics' recent announcement of 52 variant covers for a single comic, including one by Michael Turner, who will come back from the grave (just this once)!

Last Updated: August 31, 2023 - 08:12