DC Versus Marvel Omnibus Pt. 16: The Incredible Hulk Vs. Superman #1

This was actually the first and only of the many DC/Marvel crossovers contained in this collection that bought off the shelf and read when it was originally released. 

My interest was piqued by artist Steve Rude's dynamic painted cover, which seemed to feature not the regular comic book version of Superman, but, instead, the "real" Superman, the figure that directly inspired other interpretations, like the Fleischer cartoons, the 1950's TV show from Nick at Nite, the cartoons of my youth and even the '90s comic books I had read. 

Rather than just another drawing of Superman, it looked like the Platonic ideal of Superman on that cover, smashing boulders being heaved by what looked like the original, Jack Kirby-designed version of the Hulk. 

A quick flip-through of the slim, 48-page volume, offering panel after panel and page after page of Rude's sleek, beautiful pencil art inked by Al Milgrom sold me: This was a comic book that a comic book reader needed to have standing on his bookshelf, even one as young, inexperienced and as Marvel ambivalent as me (At the time, DC Versus Marvel and All-Access were among the only Marvel-related comics I had ever bought*).

Re-reading it about 25 years later near the very end of the DC Versus Marvel Omnibus, I was pleased to find that it still held up quite well, and I'm as happy to recommend it to anyone now as I would have been back when I was still in college. 

Much of that is due to the work of Rude, whose work I've seen far too little of in the years since, but, along with a handful of other artists, I've always considered to be an ideal superhero artist. Like, when I close my eyes and imagine a comic book superhero, I'm quite likely to see a figure as drawn by Rude. 

Rude's lay-outs for the book consist of many six-panel pages, with regular breaks from the format to keep it from becoming monotonous, but nothing too radical. There's a stately, classic look and feel to the pages of the book.

I've used the word "ideal" more than once to describe his work already, but that's really what his Superman looked like to me—and continues to look like, even if now I can see more specific influences in it. 

While Rude is very much working in his own particular style here, he, more than any other artist in this collection, also seems to be inspired and influenced by the work of the two characters' creators and, in Superman's case, later artists (and non-comics portrayals), to give us classic, original takes on the characters, characters that were, like all superhero comics characters, in constant flux and which, by the end of the '90s, didn't really resemble their original iterations all that strongly. 

The script, by Roger Stern, rather cleverly anchors the book in the modern day of 1999, while setting the majority of the story in some nebulous past, which I guess would probably be somewhere in the early 1960s or so, based on the looks of the fashions, cars and settings...and on the particular statuses of the featured characters.

Stern builds in a framing sequence that is set in the apparent "now" (or the now of 1999, anyway), with Lois Lane sitting on a couch watching a documentary about "Doctor Robert Bruce Banner-- --and the curse of the Incredible Hulk."

"Hi, Honey! I'm home..." Superman calls and, after entering through the window, the pair kiss and chat briefly, before the Man of Steel notices what she's watching. 

This leads to a bit of reflection, as Superman notes that both he and Banner have lead double lives ("Double Lives" is actually the title of the story) and he briefly re-tells their origins mostly for the benefit of the readers.

He then says, "I can't begin to imagine what life must have been like for Banner..." as a series of three panels zooms closer and closer to the Hulk's face, and, in the last panel in the sequence it looms large over the silhouette of a sleeping figure, crying "No! No!!" The words "...ALL THOSE YEARS AGO", apparently the end of Superman's sentence, run like a bridge beneath the panels and draw the reader into the story that will fill most of the book's pages.

At the end of that story, we return to Lois and Clark's living room in the present, where they reflect on the "ending" of Bruce's story, with his marriage to Betty Ross, his identity becoming public, and her death. They note how troubled Banner and Betty's life was, and how lucky they themselves are, and then, when Superman wonders where Bruce is now, the scene shifts to a row of television sets in storefront window, with Banner's reflection watching the final scenes of the documentary about his life, before turning and walking off, an image of the Hulk in the sky above his tiny figure. 

In between? Well, in that vague past that Stern sets his crossover in, Banner awakens from a nightmare—he was the sleeping figure in the abovementioned sequence, of course—in a hidden lab, and transforms into The Hulk, to the surprise of his friend and confidante, Rick Jones. 

Hulk storms off, eventually landing at a barbeque in Arizona, where the hungry brute avails himself of the chicken.

Meanwhile, reporter Clark Kent is at a midwestern college, interviewing a Professor Carson about his new breakthrough, a "triangulating seismograph" capable of predicting earthquakes. It's this machine that alerts Kent of something happening in Arizona, resulting in a big panel occupying two-thirds of a page, in which Superman stands atop a rock ledge, hands on his hips, to confront The Hulk, who is busily stuffing chicken into his mouth with his bare hands.

"So you're the big shot from back East, huh?" The Hulk says, as Superman floats down to him. "Well, I wouldn't say that--!" Superman replies. "Neither would I!" The Hulk says, throwing the first punch. Sick burn, Hulk!

After a brief scuffle, The Hulk throws Superman into space and, by the time the Man of Steel returns, The Hulk has moved on (I suppose it's worth noting that, in this story, the pair are much more evenly matched in terms of strength, as opposed to the first time they came to blows, way back in 1981's Marvel Treasury Edition #28). 

Back at the Daily Planet office (where the computers seem to suggest this is actually taking place sometime in the earlier '90s, as retro as so much of the rest of the book may look), Lois sees that Clark is researching The Hulk, and worried he's going to get another superhero scoop on her after his breaking the Superman story, she beats him to editor Perry White, asking him to assign her a story on The Hulk.

Clark, now needing a new assignment to cover his investigation of The Hulk as Superman, pitches a profile on Dr. Bruce Banner. At the time, the fact that Banner actually is The Hulk isn't common knowledge, but Banner is associated with The Hulk and seems to be in the general vicinity of him most of the time. 

They're not the only citizens of Metropolis heading to the American southwest, though. After Rick manages to track down The Hulk and toss some special tranquilizers down his mouth, Banner returns to the army base to meet with a corporate VIP that General Thaddeaus "Thunderbolt" Ross is hosting: Lex Luthor, who Rude draws as middle-aged, a little on the heavy side, and with notable red eyebrows and a fringe of red hair around the side and back of his bald head.

Luthor, a major army contractor, wants to recruit Banner for Lexcorp, which he is fairly obvious about, and, less so, The Hulk to battle Superman, and he has therefore come on something of a charm offensive...coupled with some espionage. 

Luthor's plotting ultimately involves a robot duplicate of The Hulk, which naturally leads to the real Hulk and Superman coming to blows again, this time for a longer, more drawn-out fight than their earlier skirmish. And before the two can manage to make nice, as battling superheroes inevitably do, Luthor turns Banner's massive Gamma Gun on them both.

Stern spends plenty of real estate on getting the two casts together in various configurations throughout, not just the title characters fighting, but their secret identities chatting, their love interests sharing a car ride and being imperiled together, Luthor and Ross talking about The Hulk and military might, and so on (Like Lois, using the sex appeal Rude gives her to try to get Rick's attention for an interview about the Hulk, for example).

While I'm certainly not as familiar with The Hulk as I am Superman (particularly this earlier, original iteration of the character), I have to imagine that with Stern and Rude doing so right by the characters, they also did right by their respective fans. 

This was, of course, one of the last few crossovers DC and Marvel would manage before they quit cooperating on stories again, so I'm glad that their collaboration lasted long enough to give it to us this particular crossover. 

Next: 2000's Batman/Daredevil: King of New York #1

*Oh, and The Ren & Stimpy Show #1 and #6.

DC Versus Marvel Omnibus Pt. 4: DC Special Series #27

Superman and Spider-Man made perfect sense as candidates for a DC/Marvel crossover. Both were the flagship characters of their respective publishers; not only the most popular, but something of signature characters, each representing elements common to their respective fictional universes. 

They also had similar elements in their backgrounds, like the fact that their secret identities both worked for big city newspapers, for example, that made them somewhat fun to compare and contrast.

Batman and The Incredible Hulk, on the other hand, were an odd pairing, not only a particularly unbalanced match-up physically, with Hulk being one of comics' most powerful characters while Batman didn't even have any superpowers, but seemingly having nothing in common with one another aside the first name "Bruce." 

So how was it that the two became the focus of the third DC/Marvel crossover, the first to not feature Superman and Spider-Man...?  

The answer is, apparently, quite simple: They were, according to Paul Levitz in his introduction to the DC Versus Marvel Omnibus, "perceived at the moment to be the next most familiar characters to the general public."

In other words, it was basically a popularity contest, with Batman and the Hulk both coming in second behind Superman and Spider-Man.

However it came about, it worked, a fact for which we can probably credit the book's creative team.

This one was a DC in-house production, being officially published in 1981's DC Special Series #27 in an over-sized, "treasury" format, the same larger size afforded to the two DC/Marvel crossovers that preceded it. 

DC's Julius Schwartz had apparently approached writer Len Wein to handle the script, a smart choice given that Wein had by that time written runs on both characters (In fact, in his introduction to the crossover, reprinted from the pages of 1991's Crossover Classics, Wein says that his two longest regular runs were on those particular characters, and he counts them as his favorite from each publisher).

As for the artist, DC chose the incomparable Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez, an artist so good that, the following year, DC would have him draw their official style guides. He would be inked by Dick Giordano (who also served as editor on the book). Giordano had previously inked the initial Superman vs. The Amazing Spider-Man crossover five years earlier, a task he was chosen for because, in the words of Levitz, he was "regarded by both companies and most of his peers as the premier inker in the field."

Obviously the book would look good then, and, with Wein at the helm, the two lead characters should be accurately depicted and feel true to their past characterizations...however it was that Wein ultimately decided to bring them together.

Just as integral to these crossovers as the heroes and creators are, of course, the villains, and for a Batman foe, Wein chose the most obvious one, The Joker. As for a Hulk antagonist to feature, Wein went with a far less likely choice, The Shaper of Worlds, who first appeared in the pages of the Incredible Hulk in 1972. 

If you're wondering why Wein didn't choose a more popular Hulk villain, like The Abomination or The Leader, do note that both did in fact appear briefly in the proceedings; the Shaper's particular powers seem fairly integral to the plot, and his status as a godly cosmic being made him somewhat more compatible with The Joker...or, at least, their alliance made sense in this story, and it's not always easy to make sense of The Joker as a team player.

As with the previous crossover, the book opens with two parallel columns of text with black and white illustrations, here detailing the origins of the two Bruces (I thought it odd that a sentence of Batman's origin was devoted to his proficiency with disguises, saying "He devoted himself to the art of disguise, until he was virtually a human chameleon who could assume a thousand different faces--", but throughout the story Batman adopts several disguises). 

After the title page depicting the characters facing off, with the villains in the background and the title ("The Monster and the Madman") and credits below, the 64-page story officially began, opening with two bizarre scenes. 

In the first, a Gothamite is thinking cool thoughts to help himself fall asleep on a 90-degree summer night, only to awaken to find his apartment was now full of snow and his nightclothes replaced by the sweater, parka and boots he was previously wearing in his fantasy. (Look closely at his walls, and you'll see a Superman poster hanging on one, and a Captain America on the other; this story, like the first two DC/Marvel crossovers, apparently takes place in a shared world, rather than either of the respective universes, the borders of which have apparently not yet solidified.)

And then the scene shifts to a movie theater, where two young lovers are occupied by making out and completely ignoring the monster movie playing on the screen in front of them...only to disengage and find themselves surrounded by bizarre monsters.

It's an intriguing beginning, and one that will eventually be made clear to the reader, but not for some time.

Meanwhile, The Joker, wearing a purple overcoat and wide-brimmed hat over his classic ensemble, is gathered in a waterfront warehouse with his gang, negotiating with someone kept off-panel, the tails of the unseen character's dialogue bubbles terminating in darkness ("You must act quickly--the pain is growing unbearable!", the voice says and, later, "Go quickly, Joker--Time is running out!")

Though Wein and Garcia-Lopez play coy about who the voice belongs to, with one of Joker's men referring to the character as "that freak in the warehouse" once they're outside, a blurb on the cover has already spoiled readers to the fact that The Shaper of Worlds would be in this story, and the character is briefly depicted, if not named, on the title page.

A splash page then introduces us to "Dr. Robert Bruce Banner", working undercover doing grunt work at the Gotham branch of Wayne Research, where the scientists are working with an experimental gamma-gun, which Banner hopes can be his "ultimate salvation!" 

Though working under an assumed name and wearing a uniform shirt and security badge, that shirt is tucked into a pair of Banner's signature purple pants, so perhaps it's not the greatest disguise in the world.

Suddenly, everyone starts laughing uncontrollably, and the quick-witted Banner dons a radiation suit with its own air supply, curing him of the sudden urge to laugh himself. In strolls the Joker and his men, intent on stealing the gamma-gun, and Banner manages to sound an alarm before he's tackled and wrestled to the ground, violence which, of course, summons his worse half.

Hulk's emergence is followed two pages later by the arrival of Batman—a svelte, athletic, dynamic figure under Garcia-Lopez's pencil—and Joker is able to talk The Hulk into smashing Batman. "If anyone around here is your enemy, Hulk," Joker says pointing, "it's HIM!!"

That, of course, brings us to the The Two Heroes Fight One Another part of the crossover ritual. The Hulk vs. Batman should not be a very interesting fight, as Hulk could and should crush Batman the second he gets his big, green mitts on him. And, remember, this is the 1981 Batman, not the 2024 Batman; this is a version of the character that far predates the prepared for any eventuality, master-planner version of the character who seems to have always manage to pak his utility belt with whatever he'll need to take on any character he might have occasion to throw hands with, including some Kryptonite should he need to take on Superman.

Of course, the one-sidedness of the fight is exactly what makes it so fun, as Batman is clearly facing an opponent he can't overpower. It only lasts about four pages, but they are fairly panel-packed pages, with Batman's racing thoughts appearing in clouds above his head, narrating about just how much trouble he's in.

He dodges Hulk's assaults ("You are fast, Pointy-Ears-- --But Hulk is strong!"), throws a few useless punches as he searches for Hulk's non-existent weak spot and, after an exceedingly close call, ultimately resorts to sleeping gas from his utility belt, a surprise kick to Hulk's solar-plexus forcing the jade giant to breathe it in. That knocks him out...for a few moments, anyway.

As to why The Joker wanted the gamma-gun at all, it is because The Shaper of World requested it, thinking it could heal him, as he is currently losing his dream-absorbing powers, and his mind. The Shaper, a character I am meeting here for the first time, is a pretty weird character, especially for a Batman narrative. 

In appearance, he looks something like a giant vampire from the waist up, although some of his body parts seem mechanical. From the waist down, he's a big square of mechanical parts, perhaps meant to resemble the 1970s idea of a giant, high-tech super-computer...? 

He explains his powers, origins and current predicament in a three-page sequence; the gist of it is, he has the power to manipulate reality, but he personally lacks any form of imagination, and thus siphons off the dreams of others to power his creations (The weird fantasies that became realities at the beginning of the book? That was obviously his doing). Caught in a supernova, he found himself losing his ability to absorb dreams properly, and thus a way to guide his creation powers. He struck a bargain with The Joker—who has "a mind unique in all the universe!"—to help him, in exchange for...well, we'll find out.

The next attempt at a cure for The Shaper's condition is to kidnap The Hulk, who also possesses potentially healing gamma energy. The Joker's men eventually succeed, finding Banner working in a special lab on a boat three miles offshore of Gotham, a lab outfitted to him by Bruce Wayne, who is funding his search for a cure for The Hulk (Wayne has even lent Banner the aid of Alfred, who is present on the boat to help police Banner's temper and keep him from Hulk-ing out.)

Capturing Hulk and holding him are two different things though, and Hulk escapes, with The Joker eventually turning to Batman to help him track down the green goliath (Their teaming up here reminded me of the recent-ish miniseries Batman & The Joker: The Deadly Duo, and I wondered if its creator Marc Silvestri had read this crossover before...although Batman and The Joker have of course teamed-up on several other occasions, too). 

This leads to another, brief Batman/Hulk battle, one which the Dark Knight manages to survive but not win, before Batman and The Joker eventually resort to trickery to get The Hulk to return to The Shaper, this time with Batman at his side. 

On the way, The Shaper's out-of-control powers summon manifestations of the pair's villains, which appear to fight them for the space of two pages. It is here we see The Abomination and The Leader, as well as Marvel's The Rhino and Batman villains Two-Face, Scarecrow and...Killer Moth? Huh.

Anyway, this time The Shaper is able to absorb enough of Hulk's gamma radiation to restore his powers and mind, and to fulfill his bargain with the Joker. "Whatever The Joker now dreams," The Shaper intones, "I shall make live!"

That's right, The Joker gets the power to alter reality to suit his whims. "From this moment on--," he screams as his attire transforms into that of particularly fancy court jester, "I'm KING OF THE WORLD!!" (For a second time, I found myself thinking of much later comics and wondering if the writers were inspired by this one, in this case the Jeph Loeb and company Superman story arc from 2000, "Emperor Joker," wherein The Joker acquired near omnipotent reality-altering powers from Mr. Mxyzptlk.)

Though brief in terms of page-count, the sequence is a bravura one, allowing Garcia-Lopez to cut loose with some really fun artwork, as The Joker sails above our heroes on a magic carpet, turning them into clown versions of themselves. And then, responding to Batman's attempts to manipulate him, he gives the world an Alice's Adventures in Wonderland-inspired look, complete with "Tweedle-Bats" and "Tweedle-Hulk." Then there are a few pages of art-inspired transformations that homage Escher, Dali, surrealism and cubism, with a Batman and Hulk that look like they could blend into the crowd of characters in Guernica. 

Finally, Batman's goading the Joker on and on forces the madman into a brief enough fit of creator's block that Batman is able to punch him out.

"It is over," The Shaper declares, "The bargain has been fulfilled!" He then leaves Earth, The Joker and our heroes behind. Forever. (Or, perhaps, forever-ish, as I guess it's possible he met The Hulk in some future story I have never read.)

The Joker ends up in a straitjacket in a padded cell, and Batman tells Commissioner Gordon that he decided to let Banner go, to face his "living nightmare!"...which he will, but not in this or any other DC comic book. 

The final panel contains a little orange block containing the words "The End-- For Now!", which might have made 1981 readers hopeful that there might be a sequel, but this is the last time Batman and The Hulk would appear in the same story, at least until the '90s, when both would be players in the DC Versus Marvel miniseries (Although they, obviously, wouldn't be opponents in that series of inter-company match-ups).

Beautifully illustrated by Garcia-Lopez and Giordano, this book features what must be the Platonic ideal of Batman art, and I can only imagine how it must have blown minds all those decades ago, appearing on over-sized pages. (My favorite image is probably that on page 29, where Batman strokes his chin and thinks out loud, his other hand on his hip and his foot resting on the pile of criminals he has just knocked out...although those pages at the climax where the Joker is control of reality sure are something).

Their Hulk ain't too shabby looking either, although the Gotham setting and the appearances by Batman's supporting characters Alfred and Gordon make this read a bit more like a Batman comic book, or at least a Batman team-up, then it does a true DC/Marvel crossover (Hulk supporting characters General Ross and Doc Samson do appear as well, but only for a panel).

Overall, this is a pretty great comic, one that, perhaps, feels even greater given how random the very idea of a Batman/Hulk crossover feels...and must have felt at the time.

For the next DC/Marvel crossover, which would come the very next year, the publishers would choose two teams of heroes that seemed to have a lot in common in terms of make-up and their place in the comics market of the time.

Next: 1982's Marvel and DC Present Featuring the Uncanny X-Men and the New Teen Titans #1

Review: Planet Hulk: Warzones!

One savvy marketing element of Marvel's one million or so Secret Wars tie-ins, the various miniseries they published while they suspended the publication of all of their regular Marvel Universe tie-ins during the Secret Wars event series, was that many of them bore the titles of Marvel's past event series. (The publisher certainly had fun marketing Secret Wars, releasing images with the titles of their many past event series, and the recycling of those titles made a certain sense, given that Secret Wars itself was recycling the title of Marvel's first big event series.)

For some of these mini-series with familiar titles, the stories are set in slightly re-jiggered versions of the settings of those stories, but in others they simply seem to be attaching themselves to the titles, but otherwise having little to nothing to do with source material. Planet Hulk is one of the latter sorts. That doesn't make it a bad comic, of course, but it perhaps makes it a poor comic book to bear the title Planet Hulk.

In fact, it's just as much a Captain America or a Devil Dinosaur comic book as it is a Hulk comic, which, incidentally, gets to a key to the appeal to many of the better Secret Wars tie-ins: The publisher and its creative teams took the temporary status quo as an opportunity to tell stories featuring as unlikely combinations as, say, Captain America, Devil Dinosaur and Hulks.

The original "Planet Hulk" was a 2006-2007 Incredible Hulk storyline by Greg Pak. It involved The Hulk being tricked and shot into space by some of Bruce Banner's besties, and crashlanding on a planet of monsters and super-strong folks where he was forced into gladiatorial combat.

What does the Sam Humphries-written, Marc Laming-drawn Secret Wars version of Planet Hulk share in common with "Planet Hulk"...?

Well, let's see. There's a character called "The Red King," Captain America uses the term "Warbound" a few times (that is what The Hulk called his gladiator pals in the original), there's at least one scene and a back-story involving gladiatorial combat and...well, I think that's about it. There's a bunch of Hulks in it, but, oddly, none of Marvel's many Hulks, with the exception of a new and different version of a smart Hulk that goes by the name "Doc Green" (but he's not the Doc Green from the Hulk comics, though).

The most difficult difference between the two to get around is the fact that the miniseries is naturally set in a "domain" of Battleworld, one of the alternate reality-based nations that form the new, Doctor Doom-created and controlled patchwork version of Earth and not, you know, on its own planet. I guess Domain Hulk or Land o' Hulks just didn't have the same marketing cachet as Planet Hulk, and they must have thought better of using the actual name of the domain as the name of the series.

See, the domain in which Planet Hulk is set in is called...wait for it...Greenland.

So our hero is not a Hulk at all, but a version of Steve Rogers, who is here to Devil Dinosaur as Moonboy was to the original Devil Dinosaur in Devil Dinosaur. Dressed in a barbarian version of his star-spangled costume, Rogers and his "warbound" DD have just defeated a half-dozen Wolverines in Arcade's Killisieum, where Doom provides the bread and circuses for the citizens of Doomstadt. This is also where Ghost Racers is set, but apparently the Killisieum has room for more than one kind of bloodsport.

A rather big deal is made out of how awesome "The Captain and The Devil" are for winning their latest match, but I don't know; I think if you're partner is a Tyrannosaurus Rex, you're usually going to have the advantage in most bouts of hand-to-hand combat. (Don't bring bone-claws to a T-Rex fight, I believe the old saying goes.)

The Captain and Devil have a pretty awesome plan for capturing Arcade and forcing some information out of him–where their pal Bucky is–but their attempted revolt is thwarted, and Cap ends up before a silent god-king Doom and his mouthpiece, Sheriff Strange. (I really wish they had given Doctor Strange a badge in Secret Wars, maybe even a whole sheriff's uniform.) They give Cap the precise information he tried to scare out of Arcade, and then send Cap and DD on a mission into Greenland: They are to kill The Red King, who is keeping Bucky captive there.

That's the first issue, which ends with Cap meeting his contact and guide in Greenland, Doc Green. From there, the trio make their way through a harsh, sword-and-sorcery inspired world where everything is saturated by gamma rays, so there are deadly forms of Hulk flora and Hulk fauna everywhere, and even a battle axe-wielding Captain America and a fucking T-Rex occasionally find themselves in deadly danger. Genre-wise, this is actually fairly close to Weirdworld, the other barbarian comic that was part of the suite Secret Wars tie-ins. It's a comparison emphasized by the fact that Weirdworld artist Mike del Mundo drew the excellent covers for this series.

Among the various battles are flashbacks to this Steve Rogers' past, detailing his relationship with Bucky, and debates between The Captain and Doc Green about the true nature of all living things, and how the gamma of Greenland informs every aspect of the world, changing it for, if not the better, than at least the truer.

There are a few twists at the end, one more predictable than the other, but like many of the less-ambitious Secret Wars tie-ins, it is basically an exercise in time-killing, a simple Point A-to-Point B plot, with an unusual cast of characters taking readers through the sights of an unusual alternate reality, with the creative team trying to pack in as much cool shit as they can. They succeed; it is cool, but there's not much to it.

"Hulks and dinosaurs," the back cover reads. "What more do you want?"

It's a very honest assessment of the contents, because that's pretty much all there is here, but, let's be honest, for most of us, that's enough...provided the hulks and dinosaurs are drawn well (they are) and the writing isn't bad (it isn't).

Stuck almost at random in the story is an eight-page "back-up" story that appears to have been a back-up for the first issue of the series, so it appears after the first 20 or so pages. Entitled "Phoenix Burning," because it's set in Phoenix, Arizona, it's the origin of Greenland. It stars Bruce Banner and Amadeus Cho (neither of whom appear in the main storyline), as they find Phoenix being targeted by gamma bomb-carrying missiles. Cho makes a daring attempt to save the city and all its people amd sicceeds, but only by saturating them all with gamma and essentially Hulking out the whole city and the surrounding environs. This is written by Pak, providing another little link to the original "Planet Hulk," and drawn by Takeshi Miyazawa, whose are is as great as always, but a strange page-neighbor for that of Laming.

Review: Indestructible Hulk Vol. 3: S.M.A.S.H. Time

I'm afraid I can't quite figure out why this collection of issues #11-15 ofthe Mark Waid-written Indestructible Hulk series has the title it does. "Smash Time," without the former word written as if it were an acronym, makes more sense, as the story arc in this volume is about The Hulk traveling through time and smashing things; at the climax, the Hulk gets so angry, and/or is so strong, that he throws a punch that literally breaks the time barrier and travels a few decades into the future to hit a villain in the face.

The acronym "S.M.A.S.H." doesn't appear in the story at all, although I understand that there's a television cartoon entitled Hulk and The Agents of S.M.A.S.H., wherein the acronym stands for "Supreme Military Agency of Super Humans." The word "time," which is not treated as an acronym in the title, does appear in the story as an acronym at one point. "Dr. Banner, welcome to T.I.M.E.," Maria Hill tells Bruce Banner upon bringing him to a super-duper-secret S.H.I.E.L.D. lab, "Temporal Irregularity Management and Eradication."

So I could see "Smash Time" or "Smash T.I.M.E.," but I can't make sense of "S.M.A.S.H. Time."

After those puzzling two words on the cover, however, this is a pretty great superhero comic, start-to-finish. It's also something of a done-in-one trade paperback; there may be a "Vol. 3" on the spine, but this reads perfectly well as a standalone book. It's not an original graphic novel, but it reads like one; it may, in fact, be the most new reader friendly of the three volumes of the series so far, which is a little odd, I admit. The first volume wasn't a bad jumping-on point or anything, but it did deal quite a bit with establishing a premise and a new status quo for The Hulk and Bruce Banner. This introduces a conflict in the first issue, then spends four issues having the hero/es resolve that conflict, through a mixture of super-smarts and super-strength. There aren't really any plotlines from the previous volumes being carried forward here, nor is there anything of great left unresolved by volume's end).

The book opens with a really rather neat sci-fi scene, of the sort that maybe couldn't only be done in comics, but can certainly only be done in this precise way in comics. SHIELD's TIME division has sent a "chrononaut" exploring, but his protection suit is breached, and time ravages his body, aging and de-aging various parts of him. During the episode, he talks forward and backwards, the dialogue balloons the only clue as to what direction he's going in as he's tossed back and forth.

It turns out that, because time in the Marvel Universe is currently "broken" (something that was a long time coming, apparently, but the events of Age of Ultron were the straws that broke the camel's back), only The Hulk can safely travel through time, and SHIELD needs to send someone back through time, as extremely minor supervillain Zarrko, "The Tomorrow Man" explains to his SHIELD jailers that various bizarre goings-on are related to a villain/group of villains—The Chronarchist/s—manipulating events in the past in order to achieve their desired results. This, however, wreaks havoc, as, say, and an airport disappears because it was made to suddenly never exist...just as a plane is about to land. And so on.

After the better part of an issue is spent explaining the very comic book-y—but still rather clever comic book-y—plot and stakes, and preparing our heroes for their task. Because they need Hulk in Hulk form to survive time travel, but they need Banner's reasoning abilities in order to actually get anything done, they devise a way to download Banner's brain temporarily into a floating, indestructible, ball-shaped droid, and so Banner and Hulk can "team up" with one another.

They visit various time periods for various page counts, finding allies among the locals as they face different Chronarchists. So an issue is spent in the Old West, where Hulk and Banner teams up with Two-Gun Kid, Kid Colt and The Rawhide Kid to fight all the dinosaurs the Chronarchist imported to serve as muscle. The next issue is set during the time of King Arthur, where The Black Knight naturally aids our heroes (and we learn that the Ebony Blade really can cut through anything, just as later we learn that Hulk really is the strongest force there is, able to punch through time itself).

Much of the fourth issue has The Hulk and Banner hopping through various time-periods montage style. Here's Hulk fighting The Abomination on The Moon, here he is fighting The Sandman in ancient Egypt, and, as the saying goes, "In 1492, Hulk punched out Fin Fang Foom."

His final showdown with The Chronarchist occurs on the day Banner is set to test that fateful Gamma Bomb, and things get pretty weird, with The Hulk becoming The Hulk in the blast instead of Banner, so there's like, a Hulk squared (it's not a terribly good design, sadly; The Hulked-out Hulk just has long hair and some spikes for some reason, instead of being to The Hulk as The Hulk is to Banner).

The bulk of the art is the work of Matteo Scalera, who handles the majority of the first three of the five issues, and the last three are drawn primarily by Kim Jacinto (although Jacinto shares a "with Mahmud Asrar" credit for #14). The styles of the artists blend together fairly well, although it's clear when Jacinto and/or Asrar assume artistic duties. Jacinto has a much, much thicker line, and the characters and figures all therefore look a bit bigger, a tiny bit more static, and in much greater contrast to their surroundings. I liked Scaleara's art much better, however I suppose that may be in large part due to the fact that the story starts out with his artwork before changing.

That minor imperfection is really the only weakness to the book, though (And it's hardly one unique to this volume or this title; Marvel's accelerated shipping schedules has only furthered the primacy of writer over artist on most of their titles, to the point where books as associated with a single artist the way they are a single writer are fewer and farther between then ever before). Otherwise it's a pretty perfect superhero genre comic (That is, in other words, if you like superhero comics, you'll like this one; no need to start with Vols. 1 or 2...although those are pretty good too).

As much fun as the story itself is, Michael del Mundo's variant covers—included in the back of the collection—are better still. There's one of The Hulk punching the nose of the sphinx, another of the front page of The Bugle from the day The Hulk landed on the moon in 1969, another of The Hulk as the Mona Lisa, and my two favorites.

First, there's this:

"Puny Hancock, Hulk's is the biggest one there is!" Sadly, Hulk does not actually attend the writing of and signing of the Declaration of Independence, but how great a story would that have been?

Maybe in a Secret Wars tie-in...

And, secondly and finally, this one:

"Puny assassin, Abrahulk Lincoln smash!"

Review: All-New X-Men/Indestructible Hulk/Superior Spider-Man: The Arms of The Octopus

No, seriously, that's the title of this particular graphic novel: All-New X-Men/Indestructible Hulk/Superior Spider-Man: The Arms of The Octopus. Marvel left all of the participating characters' adjectives attached to their names, and included all of their names before the subtitle. You might think it would make more sense to just call this thing Arms of The Octopus, as it's not like there are any other All-New X-Men/Indestructible Hulk/Superior Spider-Man trades out there that they would need to distinguish this from, but you, my friend, are not involved in Marvel's trade program. Nor will you ever be, because you are a rational human being, and not a pack of rabid wolves with a ouija board, magic eight ball and dart board.

The reason the title is so unwieldy is that it is attempting to reflect the three books the "Arms of The Octopus" storyline originally ran through, All-New X-Men Special #1, Indestructible Hulk Special #1 and Superior Spider-Man Team-Up Special #1. They may seem like three completely unrelated titles from completely different corners of the Marvel Universe, and that's because they are, but Marvel's done similar big stories in seemingly unconnected books in the recent past. Previously, they would connect three annuals with a single story; here they went with "specials," perhaps because "annual" implies something that happens on a yearly basis, and that would mean they wouldn't be able to use a #1 should they do it again the following year.

The story is written by Mike Costa, a writer who had done quite a bit of work on IDW's various licensed comics (Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Transformers, G.I. Joe), and does a fine job of finding a way to connect these three rather disparate books and characters into a story that seems completely organic and logical. And while the fact that the story occurs in specials rather than the main books, and is written by a different writer than the writers handling the monthlies starring these characters (Brian Michael Bendis, Mark Waid and Dan Slott, respectively*), means that nothing too terribly important or meaningful to their overarching stories can occur, Costa does a pretty great job of making the stories feel somewhat important...if not advancing the various plots to any great degree, at least reinforcing some of the themes and conflicts from their home books.

The story is also pretty funny, I thought. It's a serious story played straight, but the way the characters interact with one another is quite amusing. Costa gets similar mileage out of the time-lost teenage X-Men from the 1960s in the 21st century that Bendis does, particularly Beast and Iceman, and their interactions with the "Superior" Spider-Man (Who, remember, is actually Otto "Doctor Octopus" Ocatvius's mind in Peter Parker's body) is great, as this Spider-Man is dour, arrogant, easily frustrated and given to supervillain-style speeches and outbursts.

The plot is this. The four original X-Men who haven't quit the Jean Grey School like Angel has—that is, Cyclops, Jean Grey, Beast and Iceman—journey to New York City to spend the time being teenagers. Beast meets an attractive grad student who is studying time travel related science under a professor of Beast's (from the past), and he goes back to her lab to meet his former teacher, Dr. Jude.

Suddenly, they're attacked by Doctor Octopus...a young, dumpy-looking Dr. Octopus in green spandex and with a bowl-cut haircut. This can't possibly be Doctor Octopus, as no one knows better than Spider-Man, who shows up to boss the teen heroes around and punch out what may be himself from the past.

They try to figure out what's going on with the Silver Age Dock Ock's sudden appearance, but can't study him too closely, as he's giving off incredible amounts of gamma radiation—a possible side-effect of time travel? Naturally, Spidey calls in the world's foremost expert on gamma radiation, Dr. Bruce Banner. While all the doctors are trying to puzzle things out, The (also dead) Abomination shows up and starts wreaking havoc, at which point it's assumed that somehow the X-Men's presence in the present is messing with the time stream, and they decide they have to check on their time machine before any more villains come through.

And then there's a bit of a twist, which Costa telegraphs just so. It's a neat twist; nothing mind-blowing, but enough to keep the story interesting, enough to keep it from being too predictable. Each chapter is narrated by a different brilliant scientist/superhero: Hank "Beast" McCoy, Bruce Banner then Octavius. And each is drawn by a different artist, all of whom are quite good, and all of whom are close enough in style that the changes aren't jarring...particularly the first two, who are extremely compatible. They are, in order of appearance, Kris Anka, Jacob Wyatt and Michael Dialynas. As I said, they are all good, but I think I like them in that particular order as well, with Anka being my favorite of the three and Dialynas my least favorite.

Despite the goofy title, it's actually a satisfyingly sizable, super-fun superhero comic, and one I'd recommend. Perhaps especially if you can borrow it from a library, as Marvel's charging $15 for the 120-page adventure.

Of course, it's not the only story in All-New X-Men/Indestrucible Hulk/Superior Spider-Man: The Arms of The Octopus. Included for no reason I can imagine other than that they needed to jack up the page count above 120 pages if they wanted to charge $15 for the trade, they've included weird-ass Wolverine one-shot Wolverine: In The Flesh #1 (which X-Men x-pert and fine writer Paul O'Brien reviewed quite well when it was originally released), a long-in-the-works Wolverine comic written by a celebrity chef I've never heard of, in which Wolverine teams up with said celebrity chef. I didn't read it yet, but I may before I return the trade to the library. It's such a weird place to find it though, as the only real connection to the story that it follows is the extremely tenuous excuse that, perhaps, Wolverine is an X-Men, and there are some X-Men in the preceding story. But with all the other places a Wolverine one-shot could be collected—like, say, a trade collecting any of the many comics in which Wolverine is prominently featured, perhaps a collection of one of the three ongoings with Wolverine in the title, perhaps Savage Wolverine, which is a continuity-lite, anything-goes anthology series featuring Wolverine comics by different creators.

But no, they just stuck it in the back of this trade because...they had some extra pages to fill, I guess?

Review: Indestructible Hulk Vol. 2: Gods and Monster

That's a great page, the final one of one issue of the Mark Waid-written Indestructible Hulk title, a cliffhanger that leads into the very next issue. As any Marvel comics reader can tell you, no one can pick up Thor's magic hammer, no matter how strong they are—and The Hulk is, as he likes to remind everyone, the strongest one there is—unless they are deemed worthy of doing so, which pretty much means "just Thor" (I think both Wonder Woman and Superman picked it up during DC Vs. Marvel and JLA/Avengers,  respectively though, and that Storm and Captain America were among the Marvel Universe folks to be able to lift it).

That sort of cliffhanger, in which Hulk is seemingly violating the firmly and long-established rules in a comic written by Mark Waid—a writer, if ever there was one, who knows all the old superhero rules—is of the sort that I bet it drove a lot of readers a little crazy, as Jeph Loeb regularly did when he was writing (Red) Hulk. And, had you read the issues serially, that's 30 days of wondering how on earth Hulk picked up Thor's hammer (For me, reading in trade, it was a few minutes).

When the next issue/chapter opens, we see Hulk flying through the air with mjolnir, smashing apart Frost Giants. It's not until a few pages in that it becomes clear what's what: Hulk just so happened to reach for the hammer at the exact same time Thor was calling his enchanted weapon back to him, so Hulk didn't pick it up so much as it picked him up, and took him for a giant-smashing ride on its way back to its master's hand.

That was pretty cool. (The only way that scene could have been improved? If, perhaps instead of "HRRAAARGH!", Waid had Hulk say "WHEEEEEE!")

The Thor team-up that gives the second collected volume of Indestructible Hulk its sub-title accounts for 3/5ths of the book, the rest of it being a team-up with Daredevil, a hero Waid is writing in his other (and better) Marvel monthly. For the first team-up, Marvel was lucky enough to get Walter Simonson, probably the artist most associated with the character after creator Jack Kirby, to draw it, and a quirk of the plotting even allows Simonson to draw a Thor with the costume he used to draw him in, rather than the newer, closer-to-the-film-version costume he wears.

See, Bruce Banner's team of super-scientists invent a portal to the dimension of the Frost Giants in order to search for exotic metals that could potentially be mined, but it's also something of a time machine, so when they end up in Eiderdurm, not only do they find themselves facing angry, giant ogres made of sentient ice, they also find a Thor who has not yet met Bruce Banner or The Hulk (though Banner is familiar with Thor). It allows for a more classic Marvel style team-up, as the characters are more-or-less meeting for the first time (The Hulk's relationship with Thor isn't exactly too terribly nuanced, you know?).

Chris Eliopoulos gets the only lettering credit in the collection, so I'm assuming John Workman did not letter the Thor story, but I think it worth noting that some panels of Simonson art without Workman art look wrong, and some look as if Workman had indeed lettered them, so I wonder if Eliopoulos perhaps was imitating Workman through some of the story, or if Simonson himself had not drawn his own KAKAROOMs and SKRAKOOMs into the panels himself.

The Daredevil team-up features nice covers by Paolo Rivera and nice artwork by Matteo Scalera. It too is a pretty straightforward team-up, although not quite as straightforward as the Thor storyline. The plot is pretty simple: SHIELD is using The Hulk as a battering ram in a raid to secure some super-science weapons on a ship outside New York City, and Daredevil shows up to help. When one of the weapons goes missing, the pair go looking for it, and find it about to be sold to Baron Zemo, who has a whole arsenal of super-weapons, including a few of the Hulk-hurting variety.

Beyond the action, the story is devoted to explaining Bruce Banner's usage of Matt Murdock as his lawyer, a layer of insurance against SHIELD ever screwing him, as Murdock also has whatever dirt on them that Banner has.

It actually reads more like an issue of Daredevil than one of Hulk, perhaps because Waid has been writing the former longer than the latter (and I'm more used to his DD than his Hulk), and perhaps because his Hulk run hasn't had a consistent artistic partner or visual style the way his Daredevil has.

It lacks a scene as awesome as his Hulk picks up Mjolnir—or does he?! scene from the first arc, but I enjoyed the one where Ol' Hornhead walks into a bar full of tough guys, and, instead of having to beat the hell out of them until he's able to intimidate them into providing information, The Hulk does the heavy-lifting by simply being there:

The collection includes 22 whole pages of not-terribly-interesting process material, which seems to be the Marvel collection-putter-together's solution to not having to put six issues' worth of comics in collections, but having them end up being about the same size as they would have been if they did.

Review: Indestructible Hulk Vol. 1: Agent of SHIELD

You've got to give it to Mark Waid—the guy certainly knows how to relaunch a tired, stale, stuck-in-a-rut franchise in a new, fresh and immediately appealing way.

He did just that with Daredevil by simply breaking with the last few decades of characterization of the title character as a brooding, doomed super-ninja whose loved ones were always getting murdered and who was always in an understandably foul mood (and he did so there without rebooting or retconning the character or his history, but simply by building a recognition of a need for change in outlook directly into the character's understanding of himself). (It didn't hurt that Waid was working with some of the best drawers of superhero comics in the industry on Daredevil, with Marcos Martin, Paolo Rivera and Chris Samnee drawing a lot of those comics).

When Marvel announced their "NOW!" initiative, in which they were putting all-new creative teams on all of their books, relaunching them with new #1s and giving them new, easy-jumping-on-point directions, Waid got the Hulk, a character who has been more than a little unmoored for much of the past decade (They shot him into space for a while, had him come back as the end boss in a line-wide crossover event story, they paired Bruce Banner with The Hulk's son, they replaced Banner and the green Hulk with a Red Hulk and, in the last Hulk comics I read, they had Hulk and Banner surgically and magically separated into two distinct beings).

So here's what Waid came up with: Bruce Banner is a brilliant scientist with some issues who occasionally turns into a semi-mindless, indestructible engine of unfettered destruction (as per usual), only Waid has his Banner come to terms with this fate as a more-or-less eternal and inevitable state of affairs. Realizing that there just isn't a "cure" for The Hulk, that The Hulk is truly "indestructible" (hence the new I-word adjective replacing the more traditional "Incredible"), he needs to quit wasting his time trying to rid himself of The Hulk and wasting his life (and considerable brain power) on running from, hiding from and fighting against the military.

So he offers SHIELD Commander Maria Hill, who after her one-note introduction in Mark Millar's Civil War has become quite a fun supporting character thanks to folks like Matt Fraction in Invincible Iron Man, a deal: Give him the resources he needs to devote himself to making incredible inventions to benefit mankind a la Tony Stark and Reed Richards while he's himself and, when he's The Hulk, use him to smash stuff for SHIELD ("Stop thinking of Hulk as a bomb," Banner tells her, "Think of him as a cannon. On those occasions when I do go green, it will be SHEILDS's job to point Hulk in a suitable direction.")

Waid also gives Banner a new mission statement/mantra: Hulk destroys, Banner builds.

The first volume contains the first five issues of the new series, and as inspired and refreshing as Waid's new take is, and as efficiently as he presents it, he spends pretty much the entire first issue laying it out in a maybe over-obvious, telling-more-than-showing sort of way (although Waid has Banner arrange it so that he meets Hill and makes his offer just before she's about to initiate a SHIELD raid where having the Hulk go in first would prove immensely helpful—this, then, is a far cry from the old Bruce Jones version of the title. We've got a Hulk by page 12, and he sticks around for a six-page fight scene).

The bulk of the script-side of this volume is set-up of sorts, as Banner and The Hulk have their job interview with SHIELD in the first issue, and then we see Banner slowly set up a lab, recruit a staff, be given a new, rather ironic new home, meet with and try to convince Tony Stark that he's a no longer the sort of threat that should be shot off of Earth against his will, and then face an underwater army commanded by Attuma (sadly, there's no Namor guest-appearance). While it does seem like the book is still settling in to its premise by the last page, it's hardly decompressed: There are new villains, conflicts fights in just about every single issue (or two, in the case of Indestructible Hulk #4 and #5).

For an artist, Waid is teamed with penciler Leinil Francis Yu (inked by Gerry Alanguilan and colored by Sunny Gho), and while I like Yu's art quite a bit, he's lacks the clean, smooth style of most of Waid's Daredevil co-creators, and their superior story-telling skills. He draws nice, twisted, highly emotive faces, science-fiction stuff (functional and smashed into junk) and big, gnarled Hulk muscles—He's a good choice for the title, really, but perhaps not the ideal choice.

All in all, this is very good superhero comics, and it's the sort of comics I'd happily read serially were Marvel charging $2.99 a pop for it, but this is one of the $3.99 books, or part of their You'd Be A Fool To Buy This Monthly Instead of Waiting Six Months To Read the Trade For Free From the Library line.

One thing I wasn't sold on was the Hulk's new "costume." When Marvel first announced their "NOW!" initiative, in the wake of DC's "New 52" reboot and branding initiative, they did so with a Joe Quesada-drawn image of a bunch of their characters, many of them given change-for-change's sake design tweaks. For example, Iron Man was drawn in yellow and black armor instead of his standard yellow and red, Thor was wearing a couple of swords on his back and the Hulk was wearing shiny metal pants and some armor which, on the face of it, seems as silly as, say, giving Superman armor (You know, like Jime Lee and DC did with their New 52 redesign of Superman).

I've heard Waid say on Twitter (I think it was) that the armor isn't there to protect the Hulk, but to protect Banner. In these first five issues, I've seen little evidence of the armor serving any real practical function, save for in the last two issues (the ones dealing with Hulk's fight against Attuma), in which it apparently generates some kind of breathable air for The Hulk and Banner. After reading the first volume, it seems that the armor was thought up by someone else—perhaps Chief Creative Officer and occasional variant cover artist Joe Quesada—as simply something different for something different's sake, a big, obvious, in-your-face clue that something was different now.

If that is the case, they need hardly bothered. It's clear something is different now. The Hulk's main comic stars the original green Hulk again, in a premise that hews close to the original conception while also being something new and a logical evolution of that original premise and, most importantly, it's really rather good.

And those are the best sorts of differences of all.

Meanwhile...

There's plenty of new Caleb-writing-about-comics content on the Internet today, just not here at Every Day Is Like Wednesday.

I have a review of Craig Yoe's awesome anthology Comics About Cartoonists at Las Vegas Weekly. It's just what it sounds like: A collection of comics covers, strips and gag-panels from a who's who of the greatest cartoonists in comics history, the subject of each being the cartoonists themselves (Some are autobiographical, some simply feature cartoonists as their protagonists, as in a Jack Kirby-drawn romance comic).

Speaking of Yoe, I have a review of The Art of Betty and Veronica, which he co-edited with Victor Gorelick, at ComicsAlliance. (Do click on that link, even if you don't want to read all my words about the book; it's well worth skimming just to see all that great art from the likes of Bruce Timm, Norm Breyfogle, Dan DeCarlo and others).

And, finally, at Robot 6, I wrote about Incredible Hulk By Jason Aaron Vol. 1, which is where the above image is taken from (I'd tell you who drew it, but I have absolutely no idea who drew it; there were something like 19 credited artists contributing to the comics it contained).

I don't know that the above sequence is the best part of the entire Hulk book, which has a lot of cool stuff in it, but I was pretty excited when that one character pulled out an adamantium chainsaw. Why doesn't the adamantium chainsaw guest-star in more books, or even have its own book at Marvel yet? They could call it Adamantium Chainsaw. If there is a more bad-ass title for a Marvel comic book than Adamantium Chainsaw, I'd sure like to hear it.

Review: Fear Itself: Hulk

This Fear Itself-branded collection follows the strategy of Fear Itself: Dracula—that is, it opens with a story that ties into Marvel's Fear Itself series/event, and then fills up the rest of its page count with material having nothing at all to do with Fear Itself.

The book contains five issues of the Jeff Parker Hulk series, which at the time of publication did not actually star The Hulk (at least, not the regular, green-skinned one that Dr. Bruce Banner transforms into when he gets angry), but the red-skinned Red Hulk that General Thaddeus "Thunderbolt" Ross turned into when...when he wanted to shave his mustache...? I only read the Jeph Loeb-written Red Hulk stories before this, so obviously I don't know much about the mechanics of the Ross-to-Hulk transformations, aside from noticing that when the mustachioed Ross Hulks-out, he loses his 'stache for some reason. (As to why the series is entitled Hulk instead of Red Hulk is beyond me; you'll have to ask someone in Marvel's marketing department).

The first two of those issues tie into Fear Itself.

In Hulk #37, we see the Red Hulk vs. Hammer-ed Thing fight previously seen in Fear Itself: Avengers again, this time drawn by artist Elena Casagrande and from the point-of-view of Red Hulk antagonists MODOK and Zero/One, a character completely new to me (But who seems to be part of the ongoing Ross/Red Hulk story that Parker was telling in his title before he had to link it up with Fear Itself for a few issues).

And in Hulk #38, MODOK, Zero/One and their respective forces interact with one another and ultimately fight against Red Skull's Nazi mech forces that are marching on New York City (the title character appears only on the last page, slowly waking up after being knocked into Vermont by one tremendous blow from the possessed Thing's evil magic hammer).

The next three issues, or the remaining 3/5ths of the collection entitled Fear Itself: Hulk, have nothing at all to do with Fear Itself, but instead continue to follow Ross/Red Hulk's struggle against Zero/One and an alien menace called Omegex, who looks like the Kirby-designed Destroyer seen in the Thor movie. A couple of Watchers, War Machine, Ross' childhood and his relationship with his daughter and Bruce Banner are all involved.

It's all well-written, and, to Parker's credit, despite knowing I walked in on a story already deep in progress, it was easy enough to follow. And even having just met most of these characters, the parameters of the conflicts were easy to understand and, more importantly, appreciate. The stakes of the Hulk's battle with Omegex are incredibly high, and Parker certainly sells a sense of tension to their conflict. It's very cosmic, very superhero, but as the book reached its climax, it seemed just as likely that the Red Hulk could die as his foe could be defeated (After all, Marvel's got another, better-known Hulk they could always have star in their comic entitled Hulk, you know?).

Longtime Parker collaborator Gabriel Hardman draws the last three issues, and it's worth noting that some pains were taken either in finding in Casagrande an artist whose style is similar enough to Hardman's that the book flows quite nicely and, if you weren't paying super-close attention or reading the credits, you might not notice the change, or pains were taken by Casagrande to work in a style that so closely resembled Hardman's.

On its own merits, this is a fine superhero story, one that delivers the exact sort of thrills one might desire or even expect from a superhero story in an effective and intelligent manner. But I don't think the packaging helps...anyone, really.

If you show up for the Fear Itself, then you're probably going to be disappointed in how little this has to do with Fear Itself. And if you were following Parker's Hulk comics in their collected format, you might expect them to appear in collections with titles like, I don't know, Hulk Vol. 1, Hulk Vol. 2 and so on.

At the end of this trade, there's a two-page ad/reading list for various Hulk-related comics and...man, I can't even begin to make sense of it. There are Hulk Vols. 1-6 listed, featuring the Red Hulk, but they're all by Jeph Loeb. There are unnumbered books seemingly starring the Red Hulk and written by Jeff Parker like Red Hulk: Scorched Earth and Hulk: Fall of the Hulks—Red Hulk, and there are Parker-written Hulk comics with no volume numbers like Hulk: Fall of The Hulks—Savage She-Hulks and Hulk: World War Hulks—Hulked-Out Heroes and then there are also comics called Incredible Hulk, Incredible Hulks, Hulk: Son of Hulk, Hulk: Skaar Son of Hulk...Guys, I just want to read Hulk comics! Why does it have to be so confusing? Why is it that even an ad explaining what Hulk comics there are by what creators is so goddam hard to make sense of...?! Can't you just, like, pick a title and stick with it? And demarcate volumes and reading order using something like, oh, I don't know, numbers...?

I'm not sure exactly when it happened, but Marvel's Hulk comic has spawned a franchise that is every bit as confusing and new reader repellent as their X-Men and Avengers franchises.

Review: World War Hulk: X-Men

Despite the title, the three-issue World War Hulk: X-Men miniseries only accounts for the first 66 pages of this 240-page trade paperback. Also included are two issues apiece of Avengers: The Initiative, Ghost Rider and Iron Man, with one issue of The Irredeemable Ant-Man. Each of these tied into the "World War Hulk" event/story, and are supposedly not alluded to at all in the title of the collection for the same reason they put Wolverine on the cover instead of the rest of the X-Men. It's what they think will sell the most volumes.

If you've never read it, World War Hulk was a 2007 five-issue crossover miniseries that pitted a righteously angry Hulk versus Civil War heavies Iron Man and Reed Richards, plus Blackbolt, Dr. Strange and the rest of the Marvel Universe, who wanted to keep the Hulk and his army of space-alien invaders from wrecking the world in their pursuit of the Iron Man. While it was plotted by group-think, with the Brian Michael Bendis-invented "Illuminati" getting the ball rolling a few years ahead of time, it was written by Greg Pak and drawn by John Romita Jr and Klaus Janson.

Unlike the similarly-sized Marvel crossovers that preceded (and followed) it, World War Hulk was pretty straightforward: Everyone fights the Hulk, although it was given a little more dramatic complexity by the fact that the guys he wanted to punish totally deserved it. After Civil War, who didn't want to see Iron Man and Reed Richards get their faces punched in? Also unlike the other Marvel event series, this one featured characters who acted like themselves, and thus much of it rang true.

This collection if basically just a big handful of the many tie-in series, seemingly chosen at random, and the stories themselves are fairly repetitive. In each one, the title characters fight the Hulk without defeating him; each ends either in a draw or the Hulk victorious, as the real story was of course occurring in World War Hulk itself, not some random issue of the tertiary Avengers book or an Ant-Man comic, and any and all major, dramatic beats would necessarily have to occur there.

I read three of these issues before, and talked about them before, so I won't talk abou them again here (Irredeemable Ant-Man in this column, if you wanna read what I had to say about it when it first came out, and the two Avengers: The Initiative books...aw, I don't feel like looking 'em up. There on the blog somewhere in some 2007-era editions of "Weekly Haul").

The sub-titular story is by writer Christos Gage and artist Andrew Divito, both of whom are pretty great at these sorts of superhero comics.

Gage has to engage into some labored set-ups to even involve the X-Men. Because Charles Xavier sometimes hung out with "The Illuminati" group that decided to shoot The Hulk into outerspace, the thing he's so damn mad about that he's returned for vengeance, The Hulk wants to track down Chuck and ask him how he would have voted on the issue of shooting Hulk into space, and punish him for it if he says he would have said yes.

Charlie could have always just said, "Oh no way Hulk, I totally would have voted to not shoot you into space," at which point the Hulk would go away, but, well, that wouldn't fill 66-pages with fighting.

And so after invading Manhattan and issuing an ultimatum to the world that they deliver Iron Man, Richards and Dr. Strange, The Hulk goes on a side trip to X-Men HQ in Westchester. He fights The Beast and the "New X-Men" characters for one issue—these are the new, teenaged heroes who go to school at the Xavier Institute—in order to get at Chuck (Who does offer to surrender, but the kids won't let him). Then, in issue two, the real X-Men swoop in to fight the Hulk—these are the guys who were then starring in Astonishing X-Men; you know, Cyclops, Wolverine, Colossus, Kitty Pryde and Emma Frost. The Hulk beats them all up, too.

Finally, the other X-Teams all come in to try and help out, so we get one more issue of The Hulk fighting the cast of X-Factor, The Juggernaut, Nightcrawler, Native American Stereotype Man and that space-cat lady someone at The Beat really likes for some reason. The Hulk wins, but is ultimately shamed into just going back to the Manhattan to continue with the plot of World War Hulk after he's shown a graveyard full of dead mutant kids.

As fight comics go, it's about as pure as you can get. Highlights, for me, included The Hulk throwing one character's limbs into Connecticut, punting another character to New Jersey, and removing some special Vibranium knives from his arms simply by flexing really hard and making them pop out.

The artwork looks particularly gorgeous when read in 2012, as Marvel's coloring hadn't gotten as computer effect-dominated at that point as it has today.

Daniel Way, Javier Salteres and Scott Hanna's Ghost Rider story is a fairly standard one about a human host wrestling for control with the parasitic spirit of vengeance housed in his body (well, standard for superhero comics, anyway). The Ghost Rider wants to continue chasing a demon or whatever from the previous issues of Ghost Rider (not collected here), while Johnny Blaze wants to use the Ghost Rider's powers to stop The Hulk.

They fight in a big, splashy brawl of the sort only The Hulk and a flaming skeleton demon thing on a flaming motorcycle can. Ghostie uses the Brooklyn Bridge as a ramp to fly into town and drops a building on The Hulk; The Hulk retaliates by throwing a subway car at him and then jumping off the top of the Empire State Building and landing on him. Eventually, the Ghost Rider takes control of Blaze, and rides away from the crossover and back to his own title.

The artwork is again quite nice, although the computer flame effects are a bit much, distracting from the otherwise very drawn, very comic book-y look of the illustrations. Salteres' Hulk looks especially human scaled and even handsome compared to the more gigantic, monstrous Hulk we see in the other stories, which is also a little on the distracting side. With five different artists—more if you count cover artists like Ed McGuinness—no two Hulks look a like in this book.

Finally, Gage and artist Butch Guice provide the Iron Man issues, which span a time period that begins before the other stories that precede it in this collection and ends after them. Since Iron Man is, at this point, Boss Of All The Superheroes and Hulk's target, this story should be the most important in this collection—it's certainly the most relevant one to the events of World War Hulk, so it's rather surprising to find it at the end of the collection, a collection which doesn't even mention Iron Man, but whose sub-title and cover makes it appear that this is simply a collection of a single miniseries.

At this point in the Marvel Universe, Iron Man was something of a high-tech, superhero-flavored espionage series, and this story is mainly concerned with how SHIELD responds to their director Tony Stark flying off to fight Hulk, and what they do when Stark is taken down and captured. It's serious in tone, much more so than the light-hearted, almost-silly X-Men mini also written by Gage, and Guice's realistic art is perfectly appropriate for that focus.

And that's that. As a collection, it's a real quilt of characters, art styles and storytelling, and the presentation's a bit of a head-scratcher, but it's not a bad batch of old-school fight comics, and none of the art is bad, nor any of the stories poorly-written.

It's been about five years since I first read that Ant-Man issue and was perplexed by all the Old Spice product placement (Old Spice billboards fall in the fighting, a shrunken Ant-Man finds bottles of Old Spice body wash in The Hulk's stomach for some reason), and it's still super-weird to me.

And now it's time for Toy Talk...

1.) Spotted on the shelf at Wal-Mart, and photographed before I was dragged away to look at Lalaloopsies. I did a doubletake when I first saw it, because The Hulk wearing khaki shorts instead of purple ones looks so wrong to me, akin to seeing Superman with a blue cape on. It's funny though; I just saw the movie the movie that this toy is associated with this past weekend, and I have no memory of what color pants Mark Ruffalo was wearing as Bruce Banner, or what color pants The Hulk was wearing during his two scenes.

2.) I spotted this poor bastard in a dollar store; I'm pretty sure it was a Family Dollar, but don't quote me on that. As you can see, he's a piece of sky-blue construction equipment allied with the Evil Decepticons, and looks like he may be a smaller cousin to the Constructicons. In vehicle mode, he' s a combination loader and excavator, so does he have a tough guy name like original, "G1" Constructicons Scrapper, a loader, or Scavenger, an excavator?

No. His name is "Pan-Handler."

Other Constructicons are named Hook, Bonecrusher, Long Haul and Mixmaster, but this poor guy is Pan-Handler, a term that refers to someone who begs for spare change on the streets. On the back of the box, you can see his robot form—

—he lacks hands, instead having big, scoop-shapes that would be impossible to hold a laser gun with, or push a button with, or hold the hand of the bot he loves with, and are suitable only for digging or holding out, upraised, awaiting spare change. Or spare energon coins, or whatever they use for currency on Cybertron.

I'm not very well steeped in Transformers lore anymore, certainly not like I was in fourth grade, so I can't be certain, but I think that, if his name indicates his role, Pan-Handler may be the first hobo Transformer. Which is strange, as I assume any hobo transformers would transform into a boxcar instead of a piece of construction equipment.

Perhaps Pan-Handler is a Transformer for the Recession? He has the ability to work, and work hard—his other self is, in fact, a vehicle that can only be properly used in the construction industry—and yet he can't find any work, and thus is forced to beg on the streets...?

UPDATE: Apparently Transformers, like Star Wars, is one of those things that's so thoroughly detailed on the Internet that there's no aspect of it that someone hasn't written more than you would reasonably expect to find out about it. For example, here's Pan-Handler's entry on tfwikilnet.

Apparently, Pan-Handler is:

as brave as they come. More, he's got the strength, durability and firepower to be a major force in any battle. Yet there must be a reason he remains at the bottom of the Decepticon ranks, homeless and unemployed.

Is it his hand deformity? And or his lack of thumbs?

No.

One probably doesn't need to look much further than his profound lack of skill, ponderous slow speed, and aboslute abysmal stupidity.

Poor Pan-Handler. I didn't realize he was actually homeless. I should have bought him from that dollar store, and brought him back to my apartment to live with me.

UPDATE 2: Although, now that I stop and think about it, is it strange that a robot that can transform into a piece of building equipment should be homeless? Couldn't he, at least, excavate his own cave or sod house or hobbit-house to live in?

3.) Finally, here are two Transformers toys that my sister and nieces got me for my birthday (Please pay no attention to Playmobil Saint Nicholas in the background there). They're from McDonald's, and came in HappyMeals sometime around March 11th. I assume they're tied to the Transformers: Prime cartoon, and that the gray, Decepticon space-ship looking vehicle is Megatron, while the red and blue semi is obviously Optimus Prime.

I was shocked—shocked I say!—when I discovered that neither of these vehicles actually transform into robots, however. That is, like, the bare minimum of what a Transformers toy must do in order to be considered a Transformer toy, isn't it? Transform? They need not be overly complicated. I remember getting a few Beast Wars Transformers from HappyMeals when I was in college, and those only had, like, three points of articulation, but they did technically transform from robot animals to human-shaped robots ("Point of articulation," by the way, is Nerd for "a piece of the toy that moves").

These do each performa special function, though.

If you push Optimus' environmentally unfriendly-looking exhaust pipe thingees forward, his headlights, Autobot badge and the interior of his cab all light up red. And if you push Megatron's gun or jet thingee mounted on top of him forward, it lights up green (pyew! pyew!) and if you push the button right in front of it, the purple bit at the front of him fires off.

Review: Hulk Vol. 3: Hulk No More

This comic filled me with a deep sense of existential dread. It is written by Jeph Loeb, so I expected some sort of negative feelings to surface during the reading experience (and be mitigated by the fact that this volume features the Defenders drawn in Ed McGuinness’ Masters of the Universe figures-filled-with helium style), but I wasn’t expecting to end up pondering the lack of meaning in comic book superhero adventures—heck, in life itself!—before I was half way through the collection.

I’m well aware that comic book characters like The Hulk aren’t really real in the way that you and I are real, and that what occurs in comic books featuring him is merely whatever the editors, writers and artists want to have occur to him. He’s a character, a license, a logo, forced to dance to the whims of whoever happens to be collecting paychecks in return for making him dance for our enjoyment in any given month.

To what end? Well, whatever other goals or motivations certain creators may have, it is ultimately to entertain readers, I suppose, enough so that they will pay another $3.99 the following month for more of the same.

That’s true of all corporate super-comics, but I can’t remember ever having read one that was as obvious about it as the opening three-issue story arc collected in this volume.

The Grandmaster, a cosmic god of the Marvel Universe, tells our hero that he can give him back a dead past love of his (Jarella, as referenced in a brief, three-page flashback) if The Hulk promises to fight to the death in a game of his.

The Hulk agrees, and hand-picks a team: Namor, Dr. Strange and The Silver Surfer, each pulled from the moment in their pasts where they similarly lost their lady loves, and given the same deal.

The Red Hulk, meanwhile, is playing for The Grandmaster’s brother, The Collector, and has put together his own team of evil opposites, The Offenders: Baron Mordo, Terrax and Tiger Shark.

They fight for a couple of issues, Marvel villains enter the fray, things occur with little rhyme or reason (for example, a two-page splash—of a $3.99 comic book!—is devoted to Tiger Shark chomping on Namor’s throat with admantium teeth, but the Avenging Son doesn’t even suffer a wound), and ultimately The Red Hulk kills everybody, and everyone then gets brought back to life with their memories wiped of the entire event.

So three issues later, nothing has changed for any of the characters at all, and it was as if the story arc never even happened.

At least I got to see McGuinness draw Namor though, and, of course, there’s this:

That is fantastic. Jeph Loeb got paid in U.S. dollars to write something like:

Two-page Splash.

Red Hulk is on the Silver Surfer’s surfboard, holding Terrax’s ax in one hand and shooting the power cosmic out of his other hand while flying through space.

RED HULK: Most fun I ever had with my clothes on!

That fact is honestly a more awe and wonder-inducing than any event that occurs within the story.

After the Defenders vs. Offenders trifle ends, Loeb and McGuinness get back to the business of teasing the Red Hulk’s origins. Incredible Hulk #600 was the issue solicited like so:

WHO IS THE RED HULK?! THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN IS GOING TO TRY AND FIND OUT! GREEN HULK! RED HULK! SPIDEY! SECRETS REVEALED!

Sort of makes it sound like it would be the one revealing Red Hulk’s true identity (Betty Ross. It has to be Betty Ross, right?), doesn’t it? It does no such thing.

“Seeing Red” opens and closes with Ben Urich, the only reporter in the Marvel Universe, in front of his type-writer, banging out a “This story will never see print” story, about how government conspiracy he stumbled upon, revealing that a military agency is actually the invention of MODOK and AIM, and dedicated the research of Hulks. Spider-Man, She-Hulk, Doc Samson and Rick “A-Bomb” Jones all guest-star. Red Hulk’s origin and identity remain undiscussed, but Bruce Banner loses his ability to transform back into the Hulk after all of his gamma radiation is sucked out of him.

Finally, in the title story, “Hulk No More,” Norman Osborn attempts to find out whether or not Banner can turn into the Hulk any more…by having Ares attack him.

These last two stories seem oddly disconnected from the first one, which has nothing to do with it save the presence of the two Hulk characters (and the creative team), so the book reads a bit like some sort of graphic novel version of a flip-book, rather than part of a unified, ongoing storyline.

Despite its soul-troubling meaninglessness and Loeb’s…Loeb-ishness, looking at McGuinness playing with Marvel character designs old and new isn’t a bad way to spend the better part of an hour. Of course, I say that as someone who read Hulk No More in a trade I borrowed from a library.

I imagine I wouldn’t feel the same if I dropped $16 on it, or the…let’s see…$21 it would have cost to read these stories in single issue format. There’s an awful lot of splashes and double-page splashes, and a real scarcity of story for such expensive comics.