Doomsday scenarios often make for great reading when it comes to Marvel Comics, and fewer have been as devastating as Age of Ultron. A vessel for artificial intelligence created by Hank Pym, Ultron excelled in intelligence and strength, eventually threatening the whole of mankind in a bid to take over through rage, hatred, and greed.
The time-traveling epic saw characters fall, battles ensue, and the very fabric of the Marvel universe ripped apart. To celebrate Brian Michael Bendis' incredible story of a world forced to the brink of survival, we look at the 10 most shocking moments of Age of Ultron.
10 Wolverine Murders Hank Pym
In an effort to right the wrongs of the past, Wolverine decides to ignore Captain America's orders and travels back in time to the exact moment when Hank Pym comes up with the idea to create Ultron. The future of the world was at stake, and Logan decides that the only way to stop it coming to fruition is to murder the machine's creator.
After a brief discussion with a rather confused Hank, Wolverine attacks him. As Pym turns into Goliath, the two fight each other, but after Sue Storm arrives and tries to stop him, Logan plunges his adamantium claws deep into Pym's body. The deed is done, but nothing could prepare the two for exactly how Logan's action would affect the future.
9 Vision Is Working For Ultron
When Age of Ultron begins, Spider-Man is being used as a bargaining chip by Hammerhead and Owl, and this act of desperation by the two villains gives the superheroes a plan for how to get to Ultron. When it's decided that Luke Cage will take She-Hulk as an offering to Ultron, they don't end up finding him.
Instead, they bump into Vision who is being controlled by Ultron from the future. One of the finest Avengers of all time is being used as a pawn by his creator, and it surprises both Cage and She-Hulk, leading to a fight between them and some of Ultron's Sentinels.
8 Tony Stark Is A Cyborg
Hank Pym's death led the Avengers to break up, as well as providing a much different fate for the billionaire playboy philanthropist Tony Stark. After Iron Man shows up to bring Wolverine and Sue Storm in upon their arrival to the alternate future they created, he scans them to see whether or not they are Skrull spies sent to infiltrate them by a new global threat (more on that later).
Upon interrogating Wolverine, Tony Stark reveals that his entire body was ripped in half during a different war that took place between the Latverians and the Asgardians and that he rebuilt his body to become half man/half machine. Furious upon seeing Wolverine kill Hank Pym, he exclaims that Logan "broke the world."
7 The Kree/Skull War Arrived On Earth
When Wolverine and Sue Storm arrive from the past after killing Hank Pym, a very different version of Earth exists, and one of the first things they noticed is the shocking revelation that the Kree/Skull War must've reached Earth, due to the Kree spacecraft that are now scattered across the Savage Land.
Without Ant-Man alive, the Avengers were never founded and therefore were never able to stop the invasion from happening. Nothing else is mentioned about the galactic war, but it's a stark reminder of how much an impact Henry Pym had on the world. It is the first of many huge changes highlighted after Pym's death, and also one of the biggest shocks to the new world.
6 The Death Of She-Hulk
When the plan to use She-Hulk as bait for Ultron, Vision gives a message to Luke Cage and She-Hulk that Ultron is attempting to decimate humankind from the future. Unable to control her rage any longer, she gives up on the plan and attacks Ultron's Sentinels.
As both She-Hulk and Luke Cage try to fight back, She-Hulk gets blasted by the Sentinels and falls to her death. We see quite a few superhero deaths in Age of Ultron, but this one hit home exactly how serious the stakes were, and also how deadly Ultron can be. Shortly after, Cage died from radiation poisoning after barely surviving the same Sentinel attack.
5 Wolverine And Sue Storm Meet The Defenders
Not only did a future without Hank Pym mean the Skrulls and Kree brought their war to Earth, but a different team of superheroes had become the main line of defense in the absence of the Avengers. In a shocking turn of events, a new line-up of heroes made up an alternate version of the Defenders.
This new band of superheroes was made of The Defenders originals Hulk and Doctor Strange, as well as Thing, Wolverine, and Star-Lord, but also a Nick Fury and Captain America hybrid known as Colonel America, the Wasp dressed as Captain Marvel, and Cyclops looking a lot like Cable.
4 Spawn's Angela Makes Her Debut Appearance
Perhaps the biggest shock in Age of Ultron came at the very end, where all of Wolverine's trips through time caused the entirety of space and time to be ripped apart causing untold damage to the multiverse. As a result, we see Miles Morales traveling through New York only to bump into the Devourer of Worlds, Galactus.
Not only that, but we see the first appearance of Angela - the Spawn companion from the 90s - claiming she would get revenge on the person responsible for taking her away from her own timeline. Shortly before Age of Ultron was published, Neil Gaiman got the rights to the character following a legal battle, then sold her to Marvel Comics, making this possible.
3 Black Panther Dies
There're plenty of superheroes struggling to survive after Ultron's attack on the world, and we see various Cities across America with pockets of resistance doing whatever they can to survive. In Chicago, Red Hulk, Taskmaster, and Black Panther are seen trying to evade some of Ultron's Sentinels.
Taskmaster manages to spot some of them, and without hesitation, Red Hulk jumps at them at rips one of their heads off. However, they all get blindsided by the arrival of more Sentinels, and even though Red Hulk does his best to hold them off, Black Panther gets caught by their deadly laser beams and dies, leaving Taskmaster to escape.
2 Magic Defeated Technology
As if Ultron's destruction of the world wasn't bad enough, Hank Pym's death led to a much greater threat - something Wolverine never envisioned when he undertook him plan. Tony Stark fills Wolverine in on their loss during the war between Asgard and Latveria, how the mighty Asgardians abandoned them after they lost, and how magic defeated technology.
The biggest representation of this defeat comes when Morgana Le Fey arrives with an army of Doombots to destroy Stark and the Defenders. She uses her magic to take out Hulk, then causes two huge Helicarriers to collide and crash below into the heart of New York City.
1 Wolverine Kills Wolverine
After the two helicarriers crash into New York City, most of the superheroes died, however, Wolverine manages to pull himself from the wreckage. Tony Stark - who is almost dead - tells Wolverine that he can't go back into the past anymore because time is a living organism and he could kill it by doing so.
Despite his warnings, he goes back once again and stops the Logan of Ultron's future from killing Hank Pym, instead getting him to build Ultron with a failsafe built in to stop him. When both Logans return to the newer future, the one who saw the future where Ultron kills everything doesn't want to live with those memories, so gets the other Wolverine to kill him.