I think that by that he means software, rather than hardware.
I stopped reading the X-Books as a regular thing about the time Cable was introduced (I’ve read various runs when a good author joined, but I stopped reading the X-Verse as a whole)
The short version (someone’ll have to pad this out as 1) My info is circa 1995 or so and 2) I don’t care about the characters all that much.) follows:
Around 1980, the original Dark Phoenix story happened. Around X-Men 135, Claremont called for Dark Phoenix to fly into space and eat a sun. In a moment of “whimsy”*, Byrne threw in a few panels of the perspective of an inhabited planet (with the Celery People from Avengers 4 (circa 1964, never appeared since) looking up in horror and then dying painfully.
Somehow that slipped by everyone and was published. Everything was to be resolved in X-Men 137 by having the Shiar Imperial Guard capture the X-Men, and then do a “lobotomy” on Jean, cutting away all the parts of her brain that did psychic stuff. She was going to be child-like for about 10 issues, then go through a grieving process (as though she’d been crippled) and in issue 150 the story would finally end with Magneto saying he could give Jean back her powers (something about magnetically controlling solar flares) and she’d refuse, knowing that she’d just keep that Jean->Phoenix-Dark Phoenix cycle going if she accepted. At that point she and Cyclops get married and eventually would have had a daughter.
However, the Editor in Chief correctly said “Wait. She just killed 4 billion innocent people (there’s a creepy shot of a celery boy being vaporized as he hugs his celery mom) and that’s it? No. We’re not going to let a good guy get away with genocide. Period. Come up with something else.” He refused to let them print X-Men 137 and forced a rewrite.
The rewrite had Jean commit suicide, after coming to the same conclusion (she’d just keep going Jean->Phoenix->Dark Phoenix). It was actually a much better ending.
However—all this meant that the X-Books were way, WAAAAAAAYYYY late. At a time where the Editor in Chief was largely hired to stop Marvel from being a bunch of hippie-slackers who couldn’t get two issues in a row on time. So there wasn’t time to make any other serious changes to stories in the pipeline.
Enter X-Men 141 & 142 (The original “Days of Future Past” story). There was a red-headed teenage telepath named “Rachel”. The kid was supposed to be Scott and Jean’s eventual kid, but…oops…Jean had been killed off 5 issues back. They simply redacted any Scott/Jean references to Rachel and let the story go forward.
About 3 years later, Scott met a woman named Maddie Prior who was originally supposed to simply look just like Jean but weird shit would start happening to/around her. The story ends with Scott/Maddie getting married and the weirdness was illusion-casting Mastermind trying to fuck with Scott’s head. Maddie and Scott did have a son (Nathan).
A little after this, a different looking version of Rachel shows up in the past. She came from a timeline where Jean didn’t die and the events of X-Men 141/2 just made things dumber (and worse).
Here’s where I start to lose track of…well…everything.
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It turns out that Jean was never The Phoenix. Jean was in a cocoon off the coast of New York and had been since X-Men 100. The thing running around in the issues from 101-137 was Jean’s…soul? mind? stuffed into a COSMIC ENTITY. (This ruined the original story, IMO). But it allowed them to bring Jean back since she wasn’t the one who killed the Celery People.
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But…it left Scott married to some Jean lookalike. Who was established to NOT be Jean and to just be a normal woman.
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So the writers just ignored continuity and characterization and have Scott desert his wife and infant son to be with Jean. (Scott’s primary characteristic is “Responsibility”. It was as out of character as having Batman go into a kindergarten and shooting kids). This was later handwaved away as “Scott was mind controlled” or something, but it pretty much broke the character
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They made Maddie an evil clone of Jean created by Mr. Sinister(?) because…stuff. Seriously–I have no idea of his motives. He flipped some sort of switch from “good” to “evil” and Maddie became “The Goblin Queen” (the movie “Labyrinth” had just come out and Claremont was like a sponge for pop-culture ideas. See the issue where Kitty replays the movie “ALIEN” for another example) and had ill-defined powers. It ended with her out of the picture. (Dead or temporarily dead) and Never To Be Spoken Of Again.
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A character named “Cable” showed up in New Mutants, his original motive being “Xavier, with his “Hide your gifts and try to blend in and segregate yourself” philosophy was just as wrong as Magneto’s “Kill everyone” philosophy”. The writers couldn’t exactly say it, but he was saying to come out of the closet.
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This is what eventually happened, but it happened in a bunch of steps piling retcon upon retcon. So what I’m about to write is far, FAR clearer than what actually happened.
A) Baby Nathan had been forgotten
B) He showed back up again, infected with a virus that turns you into a machine.
C) Rachel steals Baby Nathan and takes him to the far, far future (not her future–“ours”) where they can arrest the virus, but not cure it.
D) He grows up, but the virus is getting worse. However, since he’s the TOUGHEST PSYCHIC EVER he can hold back the virus using his psychic powers–but that uses about 90% of them up. So he’s largely depowered.
E) He comes back to change things.
F) He (something something something) Rachel to make sure she’s able to survive in her no-longer real future so she can rescue him. -
Meanwhile Xavier’s crazy son Legion goes back in time to try to kill Magneto before X-Men 1, figuring that that will fix everything: no Evil Mutants, no anti-mutant hysteria, no anti-mutant hysteria, Prof. X gets to be a full-time daddy for Legion. Oops. Legion misses and kills Xavier. This lets Apocalypse take over.
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Somehow Scott and Maddie get together in this Xavierless universe and have a baby “Nate” who does NOT get the techno-virus, allowing him to be THE TOUGHEST PSYCHIC EVER.
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Somehow someone goes back in time and stops Legion from killing Prof. X and the whole Age of Apocalypse universe disappears like a popped soap bubble. About 6 characters (including Nate) somehow manage to survive and appear in our universe (IIRC, Nate does it through SHEER FORCE OF WILL).
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There’s some other Scott/Jean kid, IIRC–not Rachel, a different girl–running around too.
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Also, Hope, who looks just like Jean Grey and has no past.
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Also, Jean Grey, circa X-Men 7 (1964-ish) is running around in the present along with the rest of the X-Men and they can never go back. (It’s a good story but don’t think too hard about it)
This isn’t remotely complete and doesn’t count dozens of revisions, reversions, retcons, un-retcons, etc. But it gives you a bit of background. I encourage anyone who read X-Men, especially after Cable’s introduction, to correct the stuff I might have gotten wrong.
So…when I said “Short Version”, I lied. This was way too long winded and off-topic. If anyone has any other “History of character X” questions, let’s move 'em to a new thread. Heh–sorry about that. :o
*That’s not the right word, but sorta
Vision was included in the Comic-Con poster. I think you had to know what you were looking for to know it was him, though.
Yeah–up until Bendis, everyone thought of Ultron as hardware (that incidentally could upload his software* to new bodies eventually), Bendis was the one who redefined him as software. It seems like a subtle difference, but up until Bendis, if you broke Ultron, he’d have had contingency plans in place–brainwashed someone to build him a new body, etc. After Bendis, he could just transmit his software from body-to-body.
Before Bendis, we occasionally saw different OS’s of Ultron running at the same time (IIRC Ultron-12–got over the Oedipal stuff and had a healthy relationship with Pym for the 2 or 3 issues it existed before Ultron 11(?) destroyed Ultron 12**), so you’d occasionally see four or five different Ultrons running around, but each was a different “person”. Bendis again was the first person to say that it was the software, not the hardware that made a “new” Ultron (even though in retrospect it’s kind of obvious, that idea just never clicked before).
*In a “They Saved Hitler’s Brain” sense–it wasn’t seen as a software upload, it was more of a brain transplant vibe.
**As an aside, the first version of Ultron to fight the Avengers was Ultron 5–the versions before that were evil, but didn’t fight the Avengers. Each time he upgraded, he added +1 to the number. Hawkeye once quipped that Ultron is the only bad-guy who tells you how often you’ve beaten him.
The funnest part is there’s still Alex and Gabriel, you can include Emma Frost in there which means including the Cuckoos… it is a dark, dark corridor with no end in sight.
Who’s the hairy-faced guy vaguely channeling a Wolverine look?
I loooooved the ballet dancers. What the hell?
Where’s Vision, damnit!
Looks like Wanda & Pietro are substituting Ultron as their abusive daddy figure instead of Magneto.
I though Evil AI was defeated by Weid Al in Age of Alpocalypse.
Ah, jokes that depend upon font!
Informed speculation is guessing that this is Ulysses Klaw.
It’s also one of the rarest sights in modern cinema - Andy Serkis’s actual face.
It’s pretty well-known that Vision is being played by Paul Bettany (otherwise known as Jarvis in the Iron Man/Avengers movies) - so I think at some point we’ll see Tony creating a match for Ultron and uploading Jarvis as the AI - since the Ultron in the trailer isn’t being voiced by Bettany, I assume his origin is different from just a straight Jarvis upload to one of Tony’s suits - maybe a survivor of Tony’s self-destruct signal at he the end of IM3? I mean, if I were an AI (and those suits certainly respond like they are - were they all Jarvis-controlled?) and I was told to blow myself up just because my creator wanted to impress his girlfriend with how much he’s grown as a person, I’d be pissed off too.
I think Joss will stay truer to the comics origin and Vision will be a creation of Ultron’s. That way we get parallel Daddy-issues.
If Fenris wants to get into an entire character breakdown with him I am all for that, but if someone else wants to take the helm…
…who is Klaw and how does he factor in?
Doesn’t explain why he has Jarvis’s voice, though, unless Ultron first co-opts Jarvis.
My favourite origin theory for Ultron is that he’s that one Waldo whose case Tony was always getting on, that he recovered from the wreck of his house, which acquires sentience and builds itself a body…
He’s a Black Panther villain primarily, so it looks like more vibranium/Wakanda are going to feature (possibly just as flashback? Or Ultron’s final body.) He seems to be in his neckbeardy/safari outfit form here, not his solid sound form, so earlier sounds likely.
The suits weren’t sentient. They were literally working off of video game-style AI of “see Extremis soldiers… ATTACK!” which is why they targeted Pepper at the end of IM3. If they were Jarvis-controlled or AI-powered, they would know not to do that.
Dummy? That’s a pretty neat theory, especially considering he saved Tony’s life in the first IM.
Don’t we see Tony driving away from the ruins of his house with Dummy in a trailer at the end of Iron Man 3? If that’s the origin of Vision it will be simultaneously very cool and really stupid.
I dig it.
Yep. He’s also with a teenage Tony in one of the newpaper photos in the opening montage in Iron Man 1 - “Tony Stark poses with the prize winning robot in his father’s workshop at Stark Industries”. Nice bookends to the movies.
James Spader sounds awesome as Ultron, IMHO.
I remember Scarlet Witch giving birth. Outside the hospital the Grim Reaper is attacking Grandpa-to-be, Magneto, who’s going to protect his daughter and grandchildren. For those of you who don’t know, Grim Reaper doesn’t have much (if any) in the way of powers, and his only weapon is a scythe instead of one of his arms.
A scythe made of stainless steel.
You’re no doubt wondering, just how far up…
But the writer had Magneto conk Reaper on the head with its blunt edge. Which proves to me the writer didn’t know Magneto, or grandfathers, very well.
One difference I noticed in the Quicksilver/Scarlet Witch versions is that in Days of Future Past, Quicksilver seemed much older than his sister, while in The Avengers, they’re twins, as in the comics.
Curiouser and curiouser.
My guess is that Stark creates Vision and Ultron at the same time, but Vision (being powered by Jarvis) is Starks favorite. This leads to Ultron slowly turning against his masters. In the first appearance in the trailer, it looks like they’re all celebrating while Ultron was left unceremoniously on the scrapheap.
My biggest worry is that it’s going to end with “We defeated Ultron and now his entire robot army has been disabled at once.”