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Incredible Hulk #601 Posted 14 Sep 2009Writer: Greg Pak (Hulk feature); Fred Van Lente (She-Hulk backup)
Reviewed by Adam McGovern |
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Notwithstanding its leading man’s thundering tread, The Hulk has always been on its firmest ground when it’s treated as a world apart from most of the Marvel Universe – a strange modern-day wilderness narrative with an untamable pre-civilized protagonist not in some mountain refuge as in the days of Fenimore Cooper but in the midst of advanced (and mutually hostile) society. Of course, great creative sparks fly when the two worlds collide, as in Greg Pak’s World War Hulk event and especially the accompanying urban-insurrection issues of the regular Incredible Hulk book. That book is back, with the green golem and Pak, perhaps his greatest sidekick ever, together again as of this issue.
“Banner is now like a super-Daniel Ellsberg, thwarting the government with the too-much he knows.”
But true to the legacy described above, the regular rules don’t apply. The Hulk isn’t in this book, though Bruce Banner enters into an uneasy team-up with the Hulk’s son Skarr, who’s currently not starring in his own book. Pak – and his Incredible Hercules partner Fred Van Lente, whose solo Savage She-Hulk backup series makes this one of the more deservedly successful specimens in Marvel’s experiment with the extra dollar – each know how to inject the fresh thrill-ride feeling of these series’ silver-age source code with no loss of modern depth or complexity. Banner, temporarily bereft of his inner/outer demon, returns to the Manhattan his alter ego flattened, and is met with a welcoming committee of Marvel’s most muscle-bound (Colossus, Hercules, Giant Cassie Lang, etc.) assembled by Reed Richards just in case; when Banner goes along quietly, he’s greeted inside the Baxter Building by a coterie of Marvel’s smartest (Richards, Hank Pym, T’Challa, et al.) offering confirmation of his cure – it’s a clever materialization of this strip’s eternal head/hardbody tension, in the form of event comics’ typical cast-of-thousands choreography.
It also shows (as did Pak’s superb Planet Skarr Prologue) that, whenever Hickman & Eaglesham’s promising new run on Fantastic Four concludes, that book should go to Pak next – I foresee an opening arc were Reed uses his incomparable intellect to explain Incredible Hulk’s numbering scheme, but seriously, Pak knows these characters’ voice and purpose so well that you feel you know them as real people. As for the personality of Banner, it befits his Hulk incarnation’s role as the ultimate military adversary (all those decades of flattened tanks) that in his new mortal persona he’s like a super-Daniel Ellsberg, thwarting the government with superior technical brainpower and the too-much he knows. He manipulates the system to advance a tense truce with Skaar, another once-removed consequence of what Banner unleashed with his weapons-design years ago, in an alliance between raging youth and regretful maturity that has a purpose of strangely tender self-destruction whose secret I’ll leave to readers of the book, which should be everyone.
Van Lente’s Savage She-Hulk mini was perhaps the surprise of the year, taking a contrived character with a flimsy premise and building an utterly fascinating alternate history and ingeniously crazy psychodrama around her and her world. A 15-page followup was the best thing about the otherwise filler-ish Incredible Hulk #600, and to see Van Lente jump into an ongoing version at the back of this book is most welcome. The series’ tropes established, the story ramps right into a breakneck string of perils, with renegade super-agents colliding from many sides, more great xeno-anthropology (an embittered She-Hulk – not Jennifer Walters, but the alt.reality in-vitro daughter of Thundra and Hulk DNA – vows to some still very alive opponents, “I am looking at dead women”; a bizarre conjugation of doom that well draws her alien thought-system); and a cliffhanger reintroduction of the hulkbusting General Ryker, whom I briefly mistook for Major Ryker from the original Rich Buckler Deathlok run. You can’t blame me in an issue where the lead story reintroduces Bruce Banner’s mid-’60s red armor(!) – Pak and Van Lente each specialize in checking the deepest reaches of Marvel’s filing cabinet and bringing back things as good as you remember and better than they were; both sides of the new Incredible Hulk promise no less to look forward to.