Hmm,
GCD says this is an 84-pager, but we're going to go ahead with it, since I was going to blog it anyway: from 2001,
Avengers: The Ultron Imperative. Written by Kurt Busiek (with Roy Thomas, Roger Stern, and Steve Englehart scripting some) and art by John Paul Leon, Paul Smith, Tom Grummett, John McCrea, Jim Starlin, Pat Olliffe, Jorge Lucas, Klaus Janson, and more.
This probably isn't as well remembered as Busiek's previous Ultron story, "
Ultron Unlimited" with George Perez, and Thor smashing in and "Ultron, we would have words with thee" and all. But it does have a ton of good art, robot copies of the Avengers, Ultron's crazy ex Alkhema, the Grim Reaper, and guest-star Hawkeye. (Hawkeye had been mostly written out of the Avengers book to free him up to lead the Thunderbolts; although Busiek would still bring him in three or so times...)
It also features several callbacks to classic Avengers stories, including two to the same page of
Avengers #57. Here, Cap and the Vision discuss
Percy Bysshe Shelley's poem
Ozymandias, which I think we've seen on this blog three times this year. Weird.
I keep this issue together with
Avengers #38 through
#56, the last stretch of Busiek's run, and probably my favorite run of Avengers ever.
That's funny you posted this, and I've just re-read #'s 38-42 of Busiek's run.
ReplyDeleteAnd hell yeah, what a run!
Never caught this one, but I am famialr with the Ultron Unlimited arc. Busiek really helped get across just how much of a deadly psycho Ultron is. As if we really needed convincing, but hey, killing off an entire country's population is no small feat.