I probably could've read the prior issues, but...

I actually did pull most of this series out of a quarter bin, but mainly because this cover featured my 'bot, the Sentry! He's almost recognizable on it, but if this series was hoping Giant-Man was a big sales draw, um...from 1994, Blackwulf #5, "Sale of the Sentry" Written by Glenn Herdling, pencils by Keith Pollard, inks by Sandu Florea. 

Not that I could have pulled Blackwulf the character out of a line-up, I knew Blackwulf the comic was a short-lived 90's title, from around the same time as Nightwatch. It's an original title...for some values of "original," because like a lot of Image books from the time, it's a team of characters whose names are all random or phonetically spelled words against their equally generic opposite numbers. Honestly, I'm not sure a lot of Blackwulf's crew was referred to by name all issue. For some reason, I had thought Blackwulf was an Eternal or something; but he and his merry band were operating "as a top-secret, government-sponsored strike force."

Giant-Man gets called in to help out, but not so much for his giantness, but as a roboticist; on the trail of the missing Sentry 459. That's burying the lede, though, since Ultron is the bad guy this issue, dressed up as a priest! He's taken over a small town in Pennsylvania with cybernetic implants, and I don't think he did it by force; Ultron may have just convinced them that's how you get on the World Wide Web. Meanwhile, Blackwulf and his guys were there in search of a missing teammate, Sparrow, who's quit their team and shacked up with "an old flame," Michael Rossi. (If that name rings a bell, it's probably from Uncanny X-Men #182, he had known Carol Danvers pre-Rogue. How or why he ended up there, I couldn't say; it's also a weirdly specific minor character to use.) One of her teammates gets her to blow her stack, pointing out the new Blackwulf, Lucien, was responsible for the death of the old one, and took his code-name to boot! Why? Look, you'd have to find those first four issues or something. I also have no idea how or why the Sentry/Ultron plot and the Sparrow plot are in the same town, and I sincerely doubt reading prior issues is gonna help me out on that one.

Ultron just kind of walks off in this one, giving the freed Sparrow a "control box" for her autonomic body functions. It looked like it had two buttons, so I don't know exactly how much control he was talking there. On-off? Up-down? Whatever Ultron did to the townspeople did a number on their nervous systems, but Hank has a fix, a computer program "that allowed them to simulate their daily routine." Blackwulf notes he programmed them to think they had free will; which he finds disturbing--it's downright hellish, isn't it? So there's a small town in the Marvel universe where the locals walk and talk and maybe even interact with you, but are probably about as alive as a wax museum. I wonder if Hank has to update them, or if they're still running OS94...

I don't even think that's uncommon, I think that happens every now and again in comics: "Everyone in this town is dead, their brains eaten by planarian worms/computer virus/alien consciousnesses/etc. But, they still mostly act like they used to, so...no harm done?" This is what New Yorkers think of the flyover states, isn't it...