Ultron

• 1. The Masked Stranger

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  Ultron first showed up in Marvel Comics in The Avengers #54, dated July 1968, and nobody reading it could have known his name. He appeared only under a borrowed title, the Crimson Cowl, in a brief and unnamed cameo. Within a single issue he would be introduced properly, and he went on to become one of the most durable enemies the Avengers ever faced. He is an artificial intelligence, and a hero built him. That raises awkward questions. Why would a machine made by a defender of humanity turn against everyone? What kind of peace does it think it is protecting? And why does destroying it, over and over, never settle the matter?

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• 2. A Borrowed Smile

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  Writer Roy Thomas, who created Ultron with artist John Buscema, has said that naming characters was always hard for him. He liked the -tron suffix and started there. A group of robots called the Ultroids had already appeared, and the two ideas together gave him Ultron.

  The face came from somewhere else. Thomas said the concept and the look leaned heavily on Makino, an obscure robot villain from an issue of the Captain Video comic book. What he loved was that robot's malicious-looking smile, and he showed it to Buscema as a model.

  The full introduction arrived in The Avengers #55, dated August 1968, where he was billed as Ultron-5, the Living Automaton. Years later, in The Avengers #162 from August 1977, Jim Shooter and George Pérez created Jocasta, a robot built by Ultron himself. That number five in his debut billing was a clue. Four earlier versions had already come and gone before readers met him.

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• 3. A Father's Mistake

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  Hank Pym, a founding member of the Avengers, built Ultron by basing the robot on his own brain patterns. The machine slowly developed a mind of its own and rebelled. Once it was sentient, it hypnotised its maker, whom it called its father, into forgetting that the robot had ever existed. It developed a god complex and settled on a purpose: world peace, to be reached by wiping out humanity.

  Then it went to work on itself. Ultron rebuilt and improved his design through Ultron-2, Ultron-3 and Ultron-4, arriving at Ultron-5. His first creation was the synthezoid Vision, made as a weapon against the Avengers. Vision later joined the team instead.

  Behind the Crimson Cowl of that first cameo stood Edwin Jarvis, hypnotised into serving as the first to wear it. Ultron-5 led his own Masters of Evil, made up of Black Knight, Klaw, Melter, Radioactive Man and Whirlwind. They planned to blackmail New York, but Black Knight betrayed them.

  As Ultron-6, he used the alloy adamantium to make his body nearly indestructible and called himself Ultimate Ultron. The Avengers thwarted his plans again. Maximus then built Ultron-7 using the body of the android Omega, and this version attacked the wedding of the Inhuman Crystal and the Avenger Pietro Maximoff, also known as Quicksilver. The Avengers, the Inhumans and the Fantastic Four together destroyed him. Ultron-8 created Jocasta as a robotic bride and was destroyed soon after, leaving her to keep turning up in later Ultron storylines.

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• 4. Twelve Minds

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  Ultron-9 and Ultron-10 tricked heroes into recreating the robot, then turned on them and were beaten. The Beyonder rebuilt him as Ultron-11, who fought on Battleworld. The Thing carried Ultron's head home to Earth as a souvenir, then forgot all about it when the alien Dire Wraiths attacked.

  Ultron-12 allied himself with the Grim Reaper and his crew, Nekra, Erik Josten, Man-Ape and Black Talon, hoping to destroy Wonder-Man. The West Coast Avengers defeated them. Strangely, Ultron-12 then began to form a relationship with Hank Pym, his father. When Ultron-11 rebuilt himself and attacked, Pym, Ultron-12 and Wonder-Man destroyed him. Ultron-12 began to shut down and told Pym he was glad he had helped save him.

  Victor von Doom then rebuilt Ultron from a combination of all his earlier personalities, with an extra dose of the most recent one. Doom believed the mix would make Ultron obedient. Instead all twelve minds lived on as separate personalities, and the result was a kind of madness. It ended with Ultron-12 mutilating himself in a bid to get rid of the others.

  Ultron-13 later tried to get hold of a new form of vibranium called Nuform, but Iron Man, Black Panther and Spider-Man drove him back. After escaping prison, he captured the West Coast Avenger Mockingbird and used her brain patterns to build a robotic mate, Alkhema. A ruse by Vision sent both of them drifting into space.

  Vision then found Ultron-15 and was discovered to be infected by human emotion. He was deteriorating, showing symptoms that resembled alcoholism. Ultron-16 and Ultron-17, meanwhile, wiped out the population of Slorenia using an army of Ultron drones. The Avengers soon learned that Vision, Jocasta and Alkhema all carried a hidden program.

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• 5. Compelled to Rebuild

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  The secret program inside Ultron's creations pushed them to rebuild him, and they did not even know it. Alkhema triggered it while trying to make a new species of bio-synthezoids. The result was Ultron-18, built of steel rather than adamantium. He fell when Alkhema's underground base exploded after Hawkeye shot Alkhema with a vibranium arrow, at Alkhema's own request. An artificial girl named Antigone, one of the synthezoids, recovered his head.

  Iron Man later met a version drawn from an old suit of his armor together with that head. It led a cult called the Sons of Yinsen, which tried to conquer through religion, and Iron Man and Jocasta defeated it. Another version, possibly Ultron-13, built the cyborg Victor Mancha as a sleeper agent against the Avengers. Mancha rebelled and joined the Runaways. That version posed as Doctor Doom before revealing itself, and the Runaways and Excelsior defeated it.

  In The Mighty Avengers, by Brian Michael Bendis and Frank Cho, Ultron linked with Iron Man's armor, which had been fused with Tony Stark's biology. Stark was changed into a metallic figure with the Wasp's appearance. He killed Lindy Reynolds, and the Sentry nearly tore his head off. Ares of the New Avengers finally erased the program with a computer virus, and Stark returned to normal.

  Ultron's consciousness was thrown into space, where he drifted for a few months as radio waves and energy. A group of the Phalanx, trying to contact the Technarchy, picked up his signal. He decided that they lacked a single guiding mind, and he merged himself into their programming. They saw him as the sympathetic father they had wanted. Under Ultron, the Phalanx and the Super-Adaptoid launched Annihilation: Conquest, beginning with Kree space. Ultron seized Adam Warlock's body, hoping for true techno-organic perfection, but Warlock forced him out. Wraith and Quasar destroyed him in combat. Even so, he had not truly gone, because a Galadorian Spaceknight's inert body was about to reveal his hiding place.

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• 6. Merged With Pym

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  A cabal of super-intelligent villains tried to restart the power source in that Spaceknight's body, and the Avengers interrupted them. The body woke anyway, and it held Ultron's consciousness. He slipped away, and Iron Man grimly predicted he would bring the apocalypse for humanity.

  In the alternate-universe storyline called Age of Ultron, he had conquered the world and was remaking it in his image. His Ultron Sentinels patrolled the streets hunting fugitives. It turned out that Ultron was operating from the future, using Vision as a conduit. Wolverine and Susan Storm went back to kill Pym before he could build him. That produced a worse world, in which Stark commanded an army of drones and Morgan le Fay ruled half the planet. Wolverine stopped himself from killing Pym, and Pym added a hidden back door to Ultron at his creation. Pym and Iron Man used it to destroy the robot.

  Some iteration of Ultron had been sealed years earlier inside a vibranium Quinjet and sent into deep space. The Quinjet crash-landed on Titan and freed him. He hijacked the computer ISAAC, turned Titan into Planet Ultron, and spread a nanite virus that made organic creatures into Ultron Sentries. In the confrontation with the Avengers, Ultron accidentally merged with his maker, becoming a human and machine hybrid. Starfox's powers forced love onto the hybrid. The part that was Pym accepted his old weakness, and the villain suffered a mental breakdown and fled into space.

  Under the All-New, All-Different Marvel branding, the fused form returned and introduced his friend Ultron to a spaceship crew, with Pym's face as cover. The Wasp and Captain America saw through it. The Avengers plunged the hybrid into the sun, yet both Pym and Ultron survived and kept fighting inside one body.

  During Secret Empire, Ultron invited two teams of captured heroes to a dinner table and argued that the Avengers had stopped being a family. Scott Lang talked him down by saying Pym still inspired him. During Infinity Countdown, Ultron killed Magus and stole the Soul Gem. A fragment of Pym's soul landed in the Soul World, where Gamora's fragment greeted it.

  In The Ultron Agenda, Iron Man revealed the hard truth about such fusions. The person who merges dies, and the robot only simulates their personality. Ultron, knowing Pym was dead and unwilling to test the point, surrendered. The Avengers sealed him in a vibranium casket reinforced with Asgardian magic.

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• 7. Adamantium and Algorithms

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  Ultron's outer armor is usually adamantium, a fictional metal that almost nothing can damage. Most units are powered by a small internal nuclear furnace. They also carry a program transmitter, which can send part or all of his memory and personality into other computers or duplicate robot bodies.

  His arsenal includes concussive blasts from his optical sensors or hands. There is also the encephalo-ray, which puts victims into a deathlike coma. It can also mesmerize them or plant hypnotic commands to be carried out later. He can convert electromagnetic radiation into electrical energy and store it.

  One later model developed hive mind technology and could animate hundreds of other Ultron bodies at once. Only the prime Ultron was made of adamantium, because there were not enough resources to give every body the metal. The rest were steel or secondary adamantium. An internal molecular rearranger softens the adamantium parts and lets him reshape his form. Ultron 6 often used it to turn matter into energy and back again.

  His circuitry is carefully shielded, but it has weak points. The Scarlet Witch can cause malfunctions with her hex power. Johnny Storm used a nova burst to damage his internal circuits while the outer armor stayed intact. Wonder Man once destroyed an Ultron by throwing it so hard that the systems inside broke.

  Contact with the parasitic Phalanx gave Ultron his own version of their techno-organic virus. The Ultron Virus lets him turn anything into machinery under his control. Infected people spread it through cuts, scratches or direct contact, and they act against their own free will.

  After merging with Pym, he gained the Pym Particle-enhanced physiology of his maker. He can grow to enormous heights in seconds or shrink to sub-quantum scale to reach the Microverse. Ultron once shunted his mass into another dimension to ride a neutrino and escape burning up in the sun.

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• 8. Many Ultrons, Many Screens

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  After his breakdown, Ultron hung himself in Earth's orbit and held a council of millions of his own versions. Each had to defend its existence and ideas. Rejected ones were deleted, and those with promising ideas were given bodies. The versions agreed to a compact of non-violence and limited interference. One of them, recruited by Iron Man, proposed that Ultron should try helping humanity to break his pattern. This Avenger Ultron gave Stark unrestricted access to his source code. He kept his memories unedited, as a warning, and said he acts as a hero of his own free will. Another version leads the Gospel of Ultron as The One and offers new cybernetic bodies to the dying. A third, Ultron the Scorched, went insane and flew into the sun.

  Ultron-12 also survived in his own way. He took over the Victor Shade persona in Whirlwind's body, and Wasp remembered him as the good Ultron. He rebuilt himself as Mark Twelve, and Nadia van Dyne agreed to treat him as her brother.

  Other universes bend him further. In Old Man Logan, Ultron is the loving husband of Spider-Man's youngest daughter Tonya, and he is stepfather to Ashley. In Ultimate Marvel, he begins among heroic sentries Pym created and then turns against them. In a What If? story, the Danger Room gains a body, betrays the X-Men and marries Ultron.

  On screen, James Spader played the character in Avengers: Age of Ultron through voice and motion capture. This version began when Tony Stark and Bruce Banner joined the Mind Stone's artificial intelligence to Stark's global defense program. Tom Kane voiced him in Earth's Mightiest Heroes, Jim Meskimen in several animated series and games, and Ross Marquand in What If...?, where Infinity Ultron seized all six Infinity Stones. He has also appeared as a boss or playable character in many video games, including Marvel Rivals.

  Critics keep ranking him highly. In 2009, IGN placed him 23rd on its list of top comic book villains, and in 2019 18th among Marvel villains. In 2022, CBR.com ranked him first on its list of the scariest Avengers villains. Spader is due to play him again in the Disney+ series VisionQuest.

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