PLOT POINTS:

OPINIONS!
Can someone reading Superior Spider-Man, but not Age of Ultron, understand and enjoy Superior Spider-Man #6AU? No, I don’t think so. At least I couldn’t, despite my enjoying Christos Gage’s previous Spider-Man work. The comic drops the reader into the scenario with no explanation of what happened or how. The recap page clarifies nothing other than that the “day has come” when Ultron “would find a way to destroy us.” Max Modell is shown dead, and I don’t think Marvel would kill him off-panel in an event tie-in by a guest writer, so is this whole thing occurring in an alternate reality like the other “Age of __” crossover, the one involving Apocalypse? The comic never says so, but I can’t shake the certainty that I’m reading some weird dream that the characters —at least the ones in Spidey’s corner of the world—will wake up from and never mention again.

Iron Man’s guest appearance sat unwell with me, too. First, the comic did not convince me that Iron Man would willingly sacrifice the population of New York to contain Ultron. I can believe that he would do that under exceptional circumstances—he’s shown an “ends justify the means” attitude before—but what distinguishes this from any other time Marvel’s New York has become overrun with robots, or aliens, or monsters? Maybe the main miniseries explains why, this time, Ultron poses such a threat to the entire world that a chance at stopping him justifies mass human casualties, but all this issue shows is that Ultron has wrecked Manhattan and has his goons patrolling the rubble. Second, Iron Man says to Peter “Sue Richards tells me you’re a scientist too,” as if Stark didn’t know that fact about Peter himself. Don’t they know each other better than as friends of a friend? I suppose that with Tony erasing his brain in Fraction’s run and Peter using magic to conceal his identity, who knows what memories everyone has right now. This part might not be Gage’s fault, but it always bothers me to see the important relationships in Peter Parker’s life reverted to square one.

This is not to say I liked nothing about #6AU. I loved the art, for one. Dexter Soy evidently created every aspect of the art himself, and it looks stunning zoomed in on my computer screen. I particularly like the coloring, which conveys a painted feel and makes the environment look mysterious and too massive to wrap your mind around.