Age of Ultron Spoilers: What's Next For Marvel?

Warning: Spoilers ahead for Age of Ultron #10, on sale today.With the conclusion of the Age of [...]

Hank Pym Age of Ultron

Warning: Spoilers ahead for Age of Ultron #10, on sale today.

With the conclusion of the Age of Ultron miniseries, Marvel Comics have laid the groundwork for a massive change to their multiverse, the likes of which the publisher has never seen before. It's more in line, actually, with DC Comics's Crisis on Infinite Earths, a story in which the vast multitudes of alternate earths get crushed under the bootheel of an event. That is, as many expected, why we saw the end of multiverse-traveling books like Age of Apocalypse and X-Treme X-Men coming just ahead of this concluding chapter.

Ultimate Spider-Man and 616 Galactus

And that, combined with the massively spoilery splash page near the end of the issue (not the Angela one, but the one at left), begs the question: exactly HOW important will the Hunger event be? Since Marvel has a tendency to sometimes hard-sell a story only to have its fallout actually prove more significant than the event itself (remember Civil War?), some fans are, perhaps not unreasonably, speculating that this will be the end of the Ultimate Comics universe. Certainly it's possible--other than Ultimate Comics Spider-Man, who has crossed over with Spider-Man before and has a relationship with the Marvel Universe proper now, there has never been a huge amount of consistency in terms of quality, reception or sales in the Ultimate Comics universe. Would Marvel throw it all under the bus for the purpose of one big event? Or, perhaps, had they already decided that Ultimate Marvel's time has passed and they're electing instead to wring one final event out of the dying world? Well, the last time such a rumor came up, Age of Ultron writer Brian Michael Bendis tweeted unambiguously, "The Ultimate universe is not cancelled!" Of course...that was four months ago. The second chunk of the story's ending was largely disconnected from the overall story, and had already been spoiled. What does Angela have to do with all of this? Well, Joe Quesada has some words on that...

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