After taking on Apocalypse, Kang and the Red Skull, writer Rick Remender tackles what many consider the ultimate Avengers enemy in an original graphic novel.
Announced at San Diego Comic Con, Avengers: Rage of Ultron reunites Remender with his Uncanny X-Force collaborator, artist Jerome Opena. The in continuity story includes a story from Ultron’s past and flashes to the present as a new Avengers team must stop the evil artificial intelligence who’s taken over Titan, the home of Thanos!
Remender told Marvel.com this graphic novel will redefine the relationship between Ultron and his creator, Hank Pym:
“This continuity goes back so far at this point that we’re expecting people to understand things that we as fanatical industry folk have known because we read comics for 20 or 30 years,” he says. “That context and the heart of that relationship between Hank and his son Ultron has not been reformed and shone a light upon in quite some time. So the opening of the story takes place in the past, during the [Roger] Stern/[John] Byrne era of AVENGERS in a snippet where they deal with an Ultron and the choices that Hank has to make are unique to the history of Ultron while damning them in the future. So what we see is an untold story of Ultron that basically redefines who he is and his relationship with Hank and the father/son dynamic as well [as] the grand question: Is artificial intelligence life?”
This graphic novel comes just one month before the villain makes his cinematic debut in Avengers: Age of Ultron and offers a “new history” and will make a big impact on the future of the Marvel Universe:
“This is as important a story as I’ve written for Marvel in terms of continuity in what it’s putting together and what it’s changing and what it’s building into in the future,” he says. “This is a done-in-one that you can read and enjoy and be done with, but this is, much how ‘The Killing Joke’ gave us a Barbara Gordon status-quo change and put her into a new position, this book does that for a number of characters. Coming out of this book, there will be long lasting ramifications and this book will also, while self-contained—it was very important that it be a great self-contained story—but the consequences of it have long, reaching effects for not only Ultron, but Titan and Thanos and all the other wonderful pieces that are involved,” he told Marvel.com.
Fans may suspect this means the comic book origin of Ultron may be changed to fit the upcoming sequel in which Tony Stark creates the artificial intelligence.
We’ll know in April 2015 when Avengers: Rage of Ultron arrives. You can pre-order Avengers: Rage of Ultron here.
By Editor