Iron Man: The Ultron Agenda

It doesn’t have a volume number attached to it, but this is essentially vol. 4 of Dan Slott’s run.  “The Ultron Agenda” also serves to bring a lot of the subplots from the past issues — the A.I. rights movement, Jocasta’s human yearnings, Aaron Stack’s machines-first feelings, Arno Stark’s treachery, Sunset Bain’s scheming — together as one of the Avengers’ biggest foes comes knocking.  Ultron is back and still fused together with his creator Hank Pym.  Fusion is at the top of his agenda as he feels that everyone should be like him, whether they want to or not.  So it falls to Stark, his buddy James Rhodes, security head Bethany Cabe (and more) to put a stop to the mad cyborg’s latest scheme.  That’s assuming Stark can get his head in the game, however.  He’s been a little preoccupied lately with whether he’s an actual human or just a biological simulation of one running on fleshy hardware.

As I’ve been a biological simulation of Jason Glick running on fleshy hardware for a few decades now, I just want to tell Stark that it’s really not so bad and he just needs to get over himself.  Unfortunately Slott (backed up by Jim Zub on the first two issues and Christos Gage on the last three) really wants to push this idea as the title character’s big crisis for his run.  Putting aside the fact that it’s very dumb idea, it’s also one that has a very obvious outcome to it:  Tony Stark declaring that he is himself at the climax of the next volume.  While I loved seeing Slott’s ability to subvert expectations over the course of his “Amazing Spider-Man” run, it’s been largely absent from his take on the Armored Avenger.

Even if this story doesn’t surprise, or go as big as you’d expect for one focused on Ultron, it’s decent enough.  Slott and his co-writers keep the pace brisk with the complications flying fast and furious, with the titular villain’s undoing coming off as quite clever.  The art is relatively solid for a storyline that had four different artists working on it, as the initial gritty pages give way to ones that are more vibrant and energetic.  Stark’s deeply stupid identity crisis aside, this was an alright build-up to the “Iron Man 2020” storyline.  It isn’t, however, as good as it needed to be to get me to recommend that anyone who hasn’t been reading this should go and get caught up on Slott’s run before its end.