When I first saw the solicitations for Avengers AI a few years ago, I said to myself, "I'm not sure I want to read this".
Shortly thereafter, though, the part of my brain that thinks in shades of green, red, and gold spoke up and said, "Yeah, but the Vision's in it".
"Well it's not my Vision. He's got all these funky nanite powers now, and they changed his look".
"C'mon, you're a completest. You know going to read it eventually anyway".
"Yeah, but...".
"CMON!"
OK fine!". So I read it.
After the first issue I thought "Alright, this isn't bad".
After the second issue I though "OK this is really good".
By the end of the third issue I thought "Wow. This is amazing".
Why, after my initial skepticism, did I end up enjoying this series so much? Take some of the psychedelia of Morrison's Doom Patrol, stuff it inside the super science of Ellis's Planetary, and inject it with some of the humor of Giffen and DeMatais's Justice League International, and you have a rough approximation of Avengers AI. I'm not going to go through the series issue by issue, but I am going to touch on those elements of it I found the most interesting or entertaining. The premise of the series is that Dimitrios, the artificial intelligence Hank Pym created to defeat Ultron in the Age of Ultron miniseries, has taken on a life of its own, and is determined to wipe out humanity. A great deal of the book takes place in Dimitrios's virtual world, expressed through a level of surrealism that rivals the visuals from Steve Ditko's work in Strange Tales.
Before I get into things, though, I should add a little caveat for those of you unfamiliar with the book. Avengers AI is not a series you can take, to use the phrase of a certain podcasting Match-Head, "at a thousand foot level" in terms of the greater Marvel Universe. As much as I enjoy it, there are some elements that (at least to my humble observation) haven't necessarily translated as seamlessly as possible into subsequent and concurrent series (although I believe it could have been done with a little creative editorial intervention). As such, I prefer to view Avengers AI largely in its own encapsulation.
So, what are those elements that I enjoyed? Well, obviously the Vision is in it. In fact, out of a relatively small cast of characters, he takes center stage for much of the book. He also has great characterization, with a dry sense of humor and a sharp intellectual wit.
As I mentioned above, though, this may not be the Vision you were expecting. It was established way back in the 70s that all of Ultron's creations have a directive programmed into them known as the Ultron Protocols, which compel them to recreate their own creator, often at the worst possible times. With Ultron recently defeated, and sensing the Protocols beginning to initiate, the Vision creates a device which reconfigures his entire body, thus overriding this embedded programming. His new form is entirely made up of nanites, and he is able to change his shape, an element which writer Sam Humphries and artist Andre Lima Araujo put it innovative, sometimes almost surrealistic, use.
I had the opportunity to ask Humphries as to what inspired him to initiate such a dramatic change in the Vision. He replied, "A lot of it was just having fun and coming up with cool stuff for André to draw, which he did beautifully every time. And of course, looking at his power set and extrapolating -- if you were Hank Pym, and you were to upgrade him with near-future abilities, what would you pick?"
The presence of the Vision is not my sole character-based joy regarding this comic, however. With Avengers AI, Humphries has done what no other writer in the sixty-plus years of Marvel history has been able to accomplish: he made me like Hank Pym.
For the most part, with the exception of the visual of the Yellowjacket costume, and of the portrayal of Giant-Man in Avengers Forever, I hate Hank Pym. I hate the wishy-washiness of his different identities. I hate how he treated the Wasp in the Englehart and Shooter eras of the Avengers. I hate how he sold off Jocasta to Ultron in Mighty Avengers like a fifteenth century nobleman marrying off his daughter to cement a peace treaty. I've mentioned before that Pym merging with his creation in Rage of Ultron feels like the logical and fitting evolution of the character, and I stand by that opinion.
For the twelve issues that comprises Avengers AI, however, I didn't hate Hank Pym. The reason for this is pretty simple: within the series, Humphries reveals that there's actually something wrong with the character, specifically that he has bipolar disorder. As illustrated in the book, Hank goes through highs of manic enthusiasm, followed by periods of suffocating depression, and that the only thing that balances him out is playing superhero. While this doesn't (and doesn't try to) excuse some of Pym's more erratic behavior over the years, it does go a long way toward putting it into something of a more understandable context.
Yet another Pym family member appearing in Avengers AI is Victor Mancha, the cybernetic "son" of Ultron, and former member of the Runaways. I was happy that Humphries made use of Victor's relationship to both the Vision and Pym early in the book, and I asked him if that was an aspect he had been particularly looking forward to writing. He replied, "Yeah absolutely. I love RUNAWAYS so I jumped at the chance to include Victor. And that bro-brother dynamic really appealed to me -- the exuberant Victor and the stoic Vision. What would they even talk about?! I have a large and complicated family so that aspect intrigued me."
The truly breakout character of the book, however, was the Doombot. As the name implies, it is a robotic duplicate of Victor von Doom, complete with the Latverian dictator's megalomaniacal personality cranked up to the Nth degree. This unit, though, has been repurposed by Pym to follow his instructions, and has been fitted with a miniature black hole bomb in its chest, rigged to explode if it goes haywire. As such, the Doombot fights alongside the team, and does so very well, all the while vocalizing it's disdain for the Avengers and lamenting it'd desires to crush all of humanity. My favorite Doombot moment came in issue 7, an Inhumanity event tie-in. The team encounters a newly transformed Nu-human, an elderly woman who has taken on a tentacled Cthulu-esque appearance. Doombot calms the woman, and halts her rampage in a New York alley, by waltzing with her, and in a bizarre form of compassion, convincing her to use her new gifts to "teach the world a lesson and show them who the real monster is".
The team is organized by SHIELD agent Monica Chang, a leader hard enough to get in Steve Roger's face, and also notable as being one of the few practicing Muslims in comics. Rounding out the group is the enigmatic Alexis the Protector, an AI that exists in a physical quantum state, and sister of Dimitrios.
Would I recommend this book to my fellow Visionaries? If you feel the need to follow a strict adherence to traditional Marvel conventions this series may honestly not be for you. If, however, you enjoy books with rich characterization, witty humor, and revolutionary takes on long standing characters, you should definitely check it out.
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