Brian Michael Bendis took a classic Avengers villain to write an epic story that creates new directions for the Marvel Universe. With Age of Ultron #10 out now, I wanted to shared part of this interview in which Bendis talks about his goals for the story and consequences for the Marvel Now:
“I wanted to do two things: I wanted a story that starts in one genre, but then turns into another. I like that mainstream comics are all different sub-genres all going on at once, and I thought two of them clashing into each other would be kind of fantastic,” he tells Comics Newsarama.
“The story starts off: “What if this villain fulfills their promise?” You wake up one day, and it’s happened. Obviously the real-world allegory is you wake up and the terrorists have done something that we’ve heard could happen on the news every day for like 10 years — you wake up, and they’ve done it.
And then at the end, that the heroes, Wolverine in particular, have to go to great lengths to solve this, and the responsibility of using the space-time continuum — which Reed Richards has been talking about since issue #2 of Fantastic Four — something really bad does happen. And not just that they do something and all this stuff pops up, but the warning that both Iron Mans give: We’re not alone in the universe. If Earth is responsible for ripping time and something pops out of it, someone else in the galaxy is going to go, “OK, who did that? Where did that come from?” And that will start a whole new series of stories, as well.
Those were both in the original pitch document. I did say: What’s the craziest thing that could pop out of this rift? You can only do these rifts like, once. “What is the nuttiest thing?” Boy, I wouldn’t have imagined Angela in a million years. We made a list of the craziest things, like, “Batman!” “Oh my god, it’s Buckaroo Banzai, and Indiana Jones, and they’re married!” But when Joe called up and said, “Hey, remember Angela?” And I went, “From Who’s the Boss?” And [Quesada] then told me the whole back story with Neil Gaiman— as left field as that is, I just love it to death. That’s exactly the kind of thing. So I’m very glad that we were able to not only come up with what else we came up with, but to add that little cherry on top.
I am sorry, on many levels, that Angela leaked. It would have never been up to me to let that leak. [Marvel] would have let it just happen. But this is the world we live, there’s like, four people in the world trying to ruin everything for everybody else. So we had to step in front of the story so it doesn’t get a mixed message.
I know there are still a lot of people who don’t know what happens. I even heard from people today — the book shipped already in other parts of the world — who didn’t know Angela was coming into the book, because they don’t read every little thing we do online. It was exciting to see people respond in the way I was hoping they would.”
For the full interview here’s the Comics Newsarama link.
Angela’s story continues in Guardians of the Galaxy #5.
By Editor