For a man I never met, Roger Ebert taught me a lot. His Little Movie Glossary trained my eye to spot a cliché from 900 yards and assess whether or not it mattered; I haven’t seen a red digital readout on a bomb in twenty years without thinking of him. He introduced me to a Louis Armstrong quote (“there’s some folks that, if they don’t know, you can’t tell ’em”) that I have said more than any thought that originated in my own head. Mostly, he taught me that I probably don’t have the temperament for criticism, at least not until old(er) age mellows me out. I’m still a little too scrappy to handle a situation where, say, I negatively review a movie and the director publicly wishes cancer on me. (This round to you, Gallo. Hope you had a super week!)

If I had to narrow Ebert’s impact on my way of thinking down to a single idea, however, it would be an axiom that he used many times over the years, though not so many times that I don’t still mutilate it every time I quote him. It more or less goes like this:

It’s not what a thing is about; it’s how it is about it.

Though I still have to resist the urge to roll my eyes at the first mention of the high concept, I am more aware because of Ebert that the story is in the telling. Just because there have been a thousand monster movies doesn’t mean there can’t be a 1,001st brilliant one. A movie about the creation of Facebook, which as I type it still sounds like Data Entry: The Motion Picture, can be one of the most riveting films of the year. A movie with a title sculpted out of pure, uncut fun like Cowboys and Aliens can make you spend two hours questioning Harrison Ford’s retirement planning and wondering if maybe you wouldn’t rather watch that.

This was the mental background music playing this week as I read Age of Ultron. A few years ago, you may recall, there was another “Event” book about an insurmountable, implacable force who could not be reasoned with and who landed a spacecraft in New York City to make it his domain. In that case, the force was our old friend the Hulk, who for a number of reasons failed to really strike any fear into our hearts. It was partly because Hulk was an old friend of ours, and we couldn’t really believe he had it in him (it was dramatic when Dr. Strange’s hands got crushed, but Dr. Strange’s skull was right there) but it was mostly because we knew nobody’s series was getting canceled.

Poor World War Hulk. It had to be set in a shared universe to work– if the reader doesn’t have a history with the Hulk and the Illuminati, who gives a damn about any of it?– but it could never work set in a shared universe because on some level you knew it couldn’t end. The Hulk comes back as angry as he’s ever been with a battleship and an invading army who believe these Earth shmucks destroyed their civilization, and they all want revenge. That’s a hell of a premise, but in the end either the Hulk has to kill the Illuminati and take over the world or he has to be vanquished and beheaded or something. If the last issue doesn’t announce “surprise, the Marvel Universe is over, everything is canceled” then you know without a trace of spoilers that it’s all going to be One Big Misunderstanding and everyone will heal and the Hulk will go on, $17 billion in property damage later, to get a job as a mid-level government employee without it ever coming up again.

And where’d that army go, by the way? Did they retreat? Get jobs at the post office? I must not have read that tie-in.

To some extent, all corporate comics have this problem. There’s a threat, but you know Spider-Man is probably not going to die, even when he really, really does. (I told you so, you basketcases.) In Age of Ultron, though, we have a series that is patently, brazenly rubbing it in our faces. In the very first issue, it announces, “Everyone is dead! Ultron murdered Thor and the Hulk and Aunt May, and Brian Bendis killed Jessica Jones and her baby off-panel. Brian Hitch killed She-Hulk’s hair and your ability to figure out who you are looking at in a given panel. It’s all over.” From page one, it says this, and it sticks to its story.

But that’s not true. Even the brain donors who were hysterical about Spider-Man dying know that’s not true. This is not a story that ends, best case scenario, with five surviving characters rebuilding human civilization for the next ten years.

So why do I find Age of Ultron so compelling after writing off an earlier series that was cut from so much of the same ripped, bloody cloth? Because it’s not what the story’s about. It’s how the story is about that.

By leading with World War Hulk‘s greatest weakness, Age of Ultron transforms the story into a kind of magic trick. We know how this has to end, more or less; how can it possibly end that way? How does Bendis escape from the straitjacket and catch the bullet in his teeth? “For my first trick, I will have my lovely assistant completely ruin and pulverize everything in the world, only to reclaim the status quo in ten issues.” We are now the kids in the front row, squinting for trap doors and doves in sleeves. The thing that made this same story so uninteresting last time (besides the goddamned Sentry) is the most interesting thing about this one.

Has there been another “Event” that started like an indie movie from the nineties, where we start at the end, in the thick of the action, and spend the rest of the story seeing how we got there? How has it taken this long?

The series is only at its midpoint; there’s still time to force feed me a few helpings of these words later. In the meantime, I’ll be over here, grateful for the story and the man who helped me learn to appreciate it.

Jim Mroczkowski wrote this at Walt Disney World, because he gives and bleeds and gives for you people.