Marvel Entertainment’s renowned heroes are in an unfamiliar and unsettling position in the publisher’s just released “Age of Ultron” miniseries: defeated, demoralized and desperate.

 

After years of well-placed warnings that have gone unheeded, the ever-adaptive artificial intelligence that is Ultron has come out on top, turning the planet into a dystopian landscape that is wrecked beyond compare with technology at the top of the food chain.

 

It is, says writer Brian Michael Bendis, a reckoning of sorts with the Marvel universe “destroyed” and “half the heroes dead and half the world is dead.”

 

Bendis says the 10-issue limited series will stretch the limit of Marvel’s heroes, including Avengers, X-Men, the Fantastic Four and others, and says nothing and no one is sacred.