If Avengers: Age of Ultron is one of the most highly anticipated films of 2015, then surely the similarly titled AVENGERS: RAGE OF ULTRON will be a must-read graphic novel in the first half of this year. First announced back in July at SDCC 2014, the Uncanny X-Force team of Rick Remender and Jerome Opeña reunite for the latest in the current wave of Marvel Original Graphic Novels. Due to drop on 1 April 2015 (no joke!), Marvel has provided the press with a first look at this forthcoming epic.
In this graphic novel, we’ll see Thanos’ homeworld of Titan bending to the will of Ultron, and Hank Pym holds the secret to bringing him down. It’s a red-letter year for all three of those characters, so expect this one to fly off the shelves.
“The Avengers mostly contend either with the foes of their individual members, such as Loki, or teams of villains such as the Masters of Evil,” says SVP, Executive Editor Tom Brevoort. “But as a group, they have only two discrete villains of note: Kang and Ultron. So whenever you embark on a story featuring either of them, it needs to be a very strong and important story indeed. AVENGERS: RAGE OF ULTRON is such a story, both going back to the formative days of Ultron’s existence, and also transforming him in a manner that can’t help but impact upon future stories. Plus, he’s a whole planet!”
Remender has been making a steady stream of output at Marvel on headliners Uncanny Avengers and All-new Captain America, and is doing some amazing things with his creator owned Image Comics titles Low, Deadly Class and Black Science. He is currently developing Tokyo Ghost for Image, with artists Sean Gordon Murphy and Matt Hollingsworth, and is one of the comics that most excites us in 2015. Meanwhile artist Opeña’s detailed art just pops in this high-end format, bringing an epic feel that even the best superhero cinema can never hope to match.
Previous entries of the revived graphic novel line have included Avengers: Endless Wartime, Spider-Man: Family Business and X-Men: No More Humans. and Jim Starlin’s Thanos: The Infinity Revelation. Marvel’s graphic novels go all the way back to 1982, of course, with the now-classic The Death of Captain Marvel, which in many ways kicked off the modern concept of the graphic novel.
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