Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015)

Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015)

Avengers: Age of Ultron is basically what you want it to be: an entertaining movie based on comic books that has exciting action and fun Joss Whedon dialogue. The movie delivers on all those promises and that’s enough for an enjoyable comic book movie for me. It doesn’t go that extra step that Guardians of the Galaxy went, but on the other hand it has a much more fascinating villain and a more coherent plot overall. The character interactions are fun and this, unlike the first movie, every character gets enough opportunities to shine. It is amazing to see how many actors these movies are able to gather. It’s hard for me to tell how much fun such a movie is without having the background knowledge of the comics, but as a comic reader it is hard to deny how much fun it is to see those characters come alive and do their thing. Not everything makes complete sense and, just to be clear, this is no masterpiece of moviemaking (despite some great shots). It’s a fun movie, a million times better than the dreadful Man of Steel, proving (likes Guardians) that comic book movies are not all alike. It was mostly what I wanted it to be.

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Comics Are For Everyone: The Last of the Greats/Avengers vs. X-Men #6

Comics Are For Everyone: The Last of the Greats/Avengers vs. X-Men #6

“Humans are flawed and this is why they destroy the earth.” Would anyone doubt that assumption? Probably not. I do because I think it’s not humans but culture that is flawed. Anyway, I want to look at two comic books today that ask the question: What would happen if all the problems in the world could be solved? What would humans do then? Those are intriguing questions that revolve around the notion of humans being flawed or not. If they are not flawed, solving all the problems would save the world. If they are flawed, all the problems will just come back. Looking at these questions are Joshua Hale Fialkov and Brent Peeples in their mini-series The Last of the Greats, published by Image in 2011 and 2012, and Jonathan Hickman and Olivier Coipel in the best issue of the event comic Avengers vs. X-Men (or just AvX because it’s so cool), published in 2012 by Marvel (which was written by every major Marvel writer but was quite a mess overall).

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Comics Are For Everyone - Fear Itself #1

Comics Are For Everyone - Fear Itself #1

Fear Itself is a Marvel event comic. Every year one of the Big Two (Marvel and DC) publish a series of comic books that ties into every major character they have and tells of some big world-changing event after which nothing is the same. Which normally means a big character dies (and comes back 1-2 years later). As you probably can see, event comics are a mixed bag. They are mostly event- or hype-driven and rarely story-driven. Some are good, most are okay, some are bad. Fear Itself is, in my opinion, one of the worst Marvel events, despite being written by the mostly good Matt Fraction and illustrated by the always good Stuart Immonen. It looks great, but the story is not really interesting and gets caught up in too many details that don’t necessarily make sense.

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