JAMES STOKOE’S cover for ‘What If? Age of Ultron’ #2 is Typical Stokeian InsaniGlory.

James Stokoe has the sort of mind I’m fucking jealous of, man. Not to mention his goddamn talent. His ability to conceive of such outrageous concepts (Orc Stain) and execute gorgeous artwork (His enormous Galactus from a couple of years back) is fucking staggering. Woe be to someone like me, rife with grammar errors and cheap dick jokes. So it should be no surprise that his cover for What If? Age of Baddy-Guy Event #2 has me willing to prostrate myself before him. Pour Campbell’s Chunky Stew on my head and make me fetch the paper! I’m down with it. (Huh?)

Hit the jump for the glory. Steel yourself tho, you’re not worthy.

On sale throughout April, What If? Age of Ultron is a weekly five-issue series written by Joe Keatinge that takes the central story mechanism of Marvel’s Age of Ultron — what would happen to the Marvel Universe if Hank Pym had never created the malevolent artificial intelligence Ultron — and applies it to some of the publisher’s iconic heroes. What would happen in a world without the Wasp? What would happen in a world without Thor? And so on.

What If? Age of Ultron is particularly notable for its artist roster, which includes Chris Stevens on covers with interiors and variants by talents not typically associated with Marvel titles. Among them, Ming Doyle, Piotr Kowalski, Mico Suayan, Ramon Villalobos, Raffaele Ienco and James Stokoe, whose variant cover for issue #2 you’re seeing here for the first time.

Issue #2 of What If? Age of Ultron depicts a world without an Iron Man to put at end to the Armor Wars. Stokoe’s cover does a great job of telling that story in a single image, filling every bit of the page with the kind of hyper-detailed violence and chaos that has made his books like Orc Stain and Godzilla: Half Century War so popular with fans of great artwork. The variant is Stokoe’s first Marvel work since his contribution to the Strange Tales anthology in 2010. [Comics Alliance]