{"id":9305,"date":"2012-12-22T08:00:43","date_gmt":"2012-12-22T08:00:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/?p=9305"},"modified":"2012-12-21T14:58:41","modified_gmt":"2012-12-21T14:58:41","slug":"hulk-red-and-green","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/2012\/12\/22\/hulk-red-and-green\/","title":{"rendered":"Hulk: Red and Green"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\nBy Jeph Loeb<\/strong>, Arthur Adams<\/strong>, Frank Cho<\/strong>, Herb Trimpe<\/strong> & various (Marvel)
\nISBN: 978-0-7851-2884-7<\/p>\n

Once upon a time, military scientist Bruce Banner<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n

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\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6<\/p>\n

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-Hulk<\/em>s, Abominations<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

What you need to know<\/strong>: a new, intelligent and ruthlessly efficient Red Hulk<\/em> has been spotted throughout America – clearly not Bruce Banner but nevertheless quite able to hold his own against such powerhouses as The Abomination<\/em> and even Thor<\/em>. His origins and intentions unknown, the Rubicund Rogue guards his human identity with terrifying ferocity\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6<\/p>\n

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 <\/strong>sequence) but here and now the action and mystery are all that matter\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6<\/p>\n

When released as monthly comics, the issues in question (Hulk<\/strong> volume 2, #7-9 with portions of King Size Hulk<\/strong> #1) ran as \u00e2\u20ac\u0153split-book’s\u00e2\u20ac\u009d 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’<\/em> 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\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6<\/p>\n

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 \u00e2\u20ac\u0153team-up\u00e2\u20ac\u009d with Avengers Moon Knight<\/em>, Sentry<\/em> and Ms. Marvel<\/em> that ends with him turning green, mean and moronic in ‘What Happens in Vegas’<\/em> \u00e2\u20ac\u00a6<\/p>\n

The cataclysmically chaotic clash of unlikely protectors and proliferating people-eaters in ‘World’s Finest’<\/em> leads to a spectacular fighting finish and another off-kilter guest-shot for the exceedingly eccentric Brother Voodoo<\/em> before the crisis is contained in the concluding ‘Jackpot’<\/em>\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6<\/p>\n

Meanwhile the subject of Banner’s search had been detained elsewhere. In ‘Wait until Dark’<\/em> (limned by Frank Cho) the Sensational She-Hulk<\/em> 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\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6’<\/em><\/p>\n

Backed up by S.H.I.E.L.D., She-Hulk, Thundra<\/em> and the Valkyrie<\/em> trail the Red Devil to Mount Rushmore and seemingly overwhelm the bloody brute but, as seen in ‘\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6Like a Woman Scorned!’<\/em>, the devious deviant is more cunning than any previous Hulk and turns ‘The Revenge of the Lady Liberators’<\/em> (augmented at the end by Invisible Woman<\/em>, Storm<\/em>, Black Widow<\/em>, Spider-Woman<\/em>, Tigra<\/em> and Hellcat<\/em>) into an opportunity to recruit a willing accomplice for his long-term goals\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6<\/p>\n

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’<\/em> 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’<\/em>, ‘Hulk Airport’<\/em> and ‘Hulk Ice’- <\/em>a selection of bonus comedy strips by <\/em>Audrey Loeb & Chris Giarrusso.<\/p>\n

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\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6
\n\u00c2\u00a9 2008, 2009 Marvel Characters, Inc. All Rights Reserved.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Hulk: Red and Green”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[98,79],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9305","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-hulk","category-marvel-superheroes"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4AFj-2q5","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9305","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9305"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9305\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9305"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9305"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9305"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}