Age of Ultron #1 (HERE BE SPOILERS!)

I will admit to a certain reluctance to dive into a world where Bendis is writing the Avengers again, particularly since I've liked him so much now that he's writing the X-Men.  But, given that I loved "Siege," I have to hope that Bendis manages to do better here than he did on "Avengers" and "New Avengers."  Fingers crossed.

Bendis starts in media res, sidestepping the continuity question entirely.  It's unclear, therefore, whether we're dealing with an alternative timeline, such as "Age of Apocalypse," or merely a future event that hasn't happened yet.  Bendis hints that we seem to be dealing at least with a future event in that Spider-Man sounds like Peter Parker and not Otto Octavius and Emma Frost is part of the superhero resistance (and not presently a mutant terrorist), but an alternative timeline could also explain those continuity discrepancies.  But, for the time being, Bendis doesn't address that question.  Rick Remender has taken a similar approach in "Captain America," compensating for the ambiguity for telling an amazing story.  It works there, since Remender's only dealing with one character, but I do feel like Bendis is going to have to address the continuity question fairly quick in this event, given that the entire Marvel Universe roster seems involved.

But, focusing on this issue, it's a pretty simple story, showing Hawkeye rescuing Spider-Man after he's been captured by Hammerhead and the Owl.  In telling this story, we learn that the super-villains are paying some sort of ransom to Ultron to keep operating and that Ultron itself has some sort of virus that it uses to control people.  We also learn that the surviving superheroes are completely without a plan, a situation shows in its profundity by the image of Captain America sitting essentially in the fetal position in a back room.

In other words, so far, so OK.  It's not a spectacular issue, but it's a serviceable one.  Although Hitch does a great job showing the magnitude of the devastation of New York, the prolonged action sequence that takes up 2/3 of this issue actually felt somewhat slow to me, lacking the sort of explosive energy that it probably needed.  But, the stage is at least set, so we'll see where we go from here.