By Jeph Loeb, Arthur Adams, Frank Cho, Herb Trimpe & various (Marvel)
ISBN: 978-0-7851-2884-7
Once upon a time, military scientist Bruce Banner was accidentally caught in a Gamma Bomb blast of his own devising. As a result, stress and sundry other triggers regularly caused him to transform into a gigantic green monster of impossible strength and fury. Alternately – often simultaneously – cast as both mindless monster and unlikely occasional hero, he rampaged across the fictional landscape for decades, becoming one of Marvel’s most successful comicbook features and multi-media megastars.
An incredibly popular character in global pop culture, the Hulk has periodically undergone radical changes in scope and format to keep his stories fresh and his exploits explosively compelling…
In recent years the number of Gamma-mutated monsters stomping around the Marvel universe proliferated to inconceivable proportions. The days of Banner getting angry and going Green at the drop of a hat are long gone, so anybody taking their cues from the TV or movie incarnations will be wise to assume a level of unavoidable confusion. With assorted Hulks, progeny proto-Hulks, She-Hulks, Abominations and all manner of ancillary atomic berserker roaming the planet, be prepared to experience a little confusion if you’re coming to this relatively cold. Nonetheless, these always epic stories are generally worth the effort, so persist if you can.
Even if you are familiar with Hulk history, ancient and modern, you might be forgiven for foundering on the odd point of narrative, so this book, collecting a more-or-less self-contained episode of gamma-generated chaos and calamity from 2008-2009, offers a cathartic dose of destructive diversion, with lashings of tension, suspense and even laughs with a minimum of head-hurting continuity conundrums.
What you need to know: a new, intelligent and ruthlessly efficient Red Hulk has been spotted throughout America – clearly not Bruce Banner but nevertheless quite able to hold his own against such powerhouses as The Abomination and even Thor. His origins and intentions unknown, the Rubicund Rogue guards his human identity with terrifying ferocity…
This will all eventually be revealed as part of an overlong, ongoing plot by the world’s wickedest brain-trust to conquer everything (latterly revealed in the epic Fall of the Hulks sequence) but here and now the action and mystery are all that matter…
When released as monthly comics, the issues in question (Hulk volume 2, #7-9 with portions of King Size Hulk #1) ran as “split-book’s†featuring short separate instalments of both the Magenta and Jade Juggernauts, and this titanic tome opens with a 3-parter by scripter Jeph Loeb and artists Arthur Adams & Walden Wong. In ‘Where Monsters Dwell’ an appalled Dr. Banner grimly comes to accept that there’s another unstoppable horror on the loose spawned by his long-gone dabbling with Gamma rays. Meanwhile inCanada the subject of his researches has a brief, brutal and decidedly final encounter with the cursed and cannibalistic once-human creature known as the Wendigo before heading south. Little does the Crimson Colossus realise that there is more than one…
The second chapter found Banner in hot pursuit and tracking his torrid target to Nevada in time to encounter a plague of Wendigos in the city’s casinos, prompting a fortunate flashback to the physicist’s Gamma-grey alter-ego Mr. Fixit and a catastrophically destructive “team-up†with Avengers Moon Knight, Sentry and Ms. Marvel that ends with him turning green, mean and moronic in ‘What Happens in Vegas’ …
The cataclysmically chaotic clash of unlikely protectors and proliferating people-eaters in ‘World’s Finest’ leads to a spectacular fighting finish and another off-kilter guest-shot for the exceedingly eccentric Brother Voodoo before the crisis is contained in the concluding ‘Jackpot’…
Meanwhile the subject of Banner’s search had been detained elsewhere. In ‘Wait until Dark’ (limned by Frank Cho) the Sensational She-Hulk was brutally beaten and brought to the brink of death by the sadistic Scarlet Savage, but resilient and undaunted called in a few friends for a rematch in ‘Hell Hath No Fury…’
Backed up by S.H.I.E.L.D., She-Hulk, Thundra and the Valkyrie trail the Red Devil to Mount Rushmore and seemingly overwhelm the bloody brute but, as seen in ‘…Like a Woman Scorned!’, the devious deviant is more cunning than any previous Hulk and turns ‘The Revenge of the Lady Liberators’ (augmented at the end by Invisible Woman, Storm, Black Widow, Spider-Woman, Tigra and Hellcat) into an opportunity to recruit a willing accomplice for his long-term goals…
Also included in this collection is a terse, gripping eulogy to a despised and departed villain as Loeb and Emerald legend Herb Trimpe detail ‘The Death and Life of the Abomination’ an assortment of covers and variants by Adams, Cho, Trimpe, Sal Buscema & Chris Sotomayor and Ed McGuiness, pages of unlinked pencils and layouts from Adams, and ‘Hulk Web’, ‘Hulk Airport’ and ‘Hulk Ice’- a selection of bonus comedy strips by Audrey Loeb & Chris Giarrusso.
If staggering, blockbusting Fights ‘n’ Tights turmoil is your fancy, a Hulk of any colour is always going to be at the top of every thrill-seeker’s hit list…
© 2008, 2009 Marvel Characters, Inc. All Rights Reserved.