7 Great 'Avengers' Comics to Read After Watching 'Age of Ultron'
(Marvel)
Based on the uncanny box-office returns — not to mention your patronage here — there’s a good chance you’ve seen Avengers: Age of Ultron. And with the film hovering around a 90 percent audience approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, chances are you liked what you saw.
Now is the perfect time to go deeper into the mythology behind Earth’s Mightiest movies — especially with Free Comic Book Day on Saturday and Marvel.com and Comixology now offering discounts on Avengers-related titles pegged to the film release. We’ve selected seven books to slake your superhero thirst until your next trip to the cineplex.
While not designed for die-hards, Avengers: Age of Ultron Prelude, is a solid starting point for newbies and casual fans.
(Marvel)
This grab-bag of adaptations and seminal comic-book plots, packaged specifically as a tie-in for the new film, includes a recap of the first Avengers; the retconned backstory for Age of Ultron’s Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch; the interwoven Vision/Ultron origin tale from 1968; the climactic installment of the classic 1998 Avengers “Ultron Unlimited” arc; and the intro to a 2013 Marvel crossover event called “Age of Ultron,” which has nothing to do with the movie plot. (All books are available digitally and in print form; the links are to the Marvel site, but they can also be found on Amazon and Comixology.)
Completists, meanwhile, will prefer more robust versions of those sampled storylines. The debuts of Vision and Ultron played out in Avengers Nos. 54 to 58, and all of those issues are available digitally as part of the Avengers Epic Collection: Behold… The Vision.
Comic-book design has come a long way since ‘68, but these vintage stories are worth reading and establish characters and themes that are still relevant — and bankable — four decades later.
Avengers Assemble Vol. 2 contains the full version of what is hands-down Ultron’s greatest hit: “Ultron Unlimited.” The ragebot is back and badder than ever, flattening countries, and — in a plot point borrowed by Joss Whedon — constructing a massive mechanized army.
(Marvel)
The Age of Ultron graphic novel spans the Marvel comics universe and finds Ultron and his sentinels lording over the world from their headquarters in a devastated New York, while surviving supers hopscotch across alternate realities and timelines to figure out how to end his robotic reign of terror.
(Marvel)
While released to coincide with the film launch, Avengers: Rage of Ultron has absolutely nothing to do with Joss Whedon’s movie. But it does have some of the same characters and a plot that re-conceives Ultron as a planet and finds the titular villain and his original creator, Hank “Ant-Man/Giant-Man” Pym engaged in an epic Oedipal struggle.
Shippers will groove to Avengers: Vision and the Scarlet Witch featuring easily the weirdest romance in comic-book history. The magical mutant and caped android get hitched, decamp to a home in the Jersey ‘burbs, and, via magic, have kids of their own. We smell a hit sitcom, ABC. Just sayin’.
(Marvel)
Teased mightily in Avengers: Age of Ultron, the next major motion picture teaming members of the Avengers will be Captain America: Civil War. While that movie’s a year away, the Civil War collection will whet your appetite and help set the scene for the game-changing battle between Captain America and Iron Man that forces heroes throughout the MCU to choose sides.
(Marvel)
Happy reading.
