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The Ultron of the MCU What If…? series isn’t the first variant of the murderous robot to try and take over the multiverse.
WARNING: The following contains spoilers for What If…? Season 1, Episode 8, “What If… Ultron Won?,” streaming now on Disney+.
Although it’s largely been an anthology series focusing on different worlds, What If…? has slowly been revealed to have an overarching plotline about a variant of Ultron waging war across the multiverse and coming up against the Watcher — who is forced to break his oath and recruit allies from across various realities.
The Perfect Ultron of What If…?’s eighth episode, “What If… Ultron Won?” is spreading across the multiverse, setting up the formation of a multiversal team of heroes. But notably, something very similar happened in the comics — albeit under very different circumstances.
In Age of Ultron by Brian Michael Bendis and Bryan Hitch, Ultron’s ultimate victory is only prevented by Wolverine and the Invisible Woman — the last surviving heroes of their time period — using a stolen time-machine to venture into the past and kill Hank Pym before he could ever build the robotic menace. Doing so radically altered the timeline and negatively affected the time-stream across the entire multiverse. Although Earth-616 was salvaged as a resulted and restored to a non-Ultron decimated landscape, other realities also felt the negative effects of such a change — a time-quake that accidentally killed variants of multiple major Avengers in their respective realities — each of which was the focus of a different issue of the five-part What If: Age of Ultron mini-series.
In the first issue of the mini-series (by Joe Keatinge and Raffaele Ienco), it is the Wasp of Earth-14622 who dies from the event, during the early days of the Avengers. This prompts Pym to design Ultron with more capabilities from the on-set, hoping it could protect the world better than the Avengers ever could. This allowed the villain to easily destroy the Avengers during their first conflict and led to the eradication of humanity within a month. Even in the aftermath and over a thousand new forms, Ultron could never truly overcome his issues with his creator — resulting in it creating turning Pym into Ultron model that genuinely believed itself to be Giant-Man, so it could continue to torture it forever.
But in another reality, Earth-45162 from What If: Age of Ultron #5 by Keatinge and a team of artists, it’s Pym who is hit by the Time-Quake. Surviving the assault, Pym loses the kernel of an idea that would have eventually become Ultron. The Ultron of Earth-14622 locates the effects on the multiverse and notes how it’s destroying their own reality due to the time-quake. However, they could survive this anomaly if they relocated to a world unaffected by the change. Locating Earth-45162 and believing it would be easy takings, Ultron led his armada across the multiversal barriers, hoping to spread to all other dimensions — very similar to how the Ultron of the MCU What If…? has made his move through the multiverse and destroyed the various realities it encountered.
In the chaos of its multiversal trip, it ended up drawing three heroes from across universes also affected by time-quakes — an older Wolverine from a reality where Stark technology became globally utilized in the wake of his death, a Black Widow who’d gained the powers of Thor after his untimely demise while fighting the Midgard Serpent, and the new Captain America from a timeline where Frank Castle ended up jumpstarting a new legacy of Captain Americas. The makeshift multiversal Avengers fought against the horde of Ultrons — with only the “Hank” Ultron aware of the damage they’d actually brought to this universe — spreading the damage to this world, but leaving their own decimated reality relatively safe.
Finding the Wasp of that reality, “Hank” was able to convince the Wasp of this peaceful world to lead the assembled heroes back to another reality, now free of Ultron. This leaves the assembled heroes — Captain America, Wolverine, Black Widow, Giant-Man, and Wasp — as the only survivors of their realities, living in the ruins of an Ultron-decimated one. But they elect to find a way to help restore their reality — and could potentially do so to the larger multiverse. It’s an interesting precursor for the potential Guardians of the Multiverse that have been teased to appear in What If…?, and ended up going up against a similar threat with a very different team.
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