At Last: The Monster & The Mercenary!

Compadres,

Have you ever seen story, or art, that needed attention? That's how I'm feeling right now. A while back I became aware of an artist's work--I first saw it, I think, in the Hero Initiative's Hulk 100 Project (available in softcover or hardcover from my local comic shop, Atomic Comics). This artist, whose name is hardly recognized in the U.S., has a crystal-clear appreciation for the work of early Hulk artists, particularly the great Sal Buscema, Ernie Chan, and other talents who had their heyday at Marvel during the 1970s. His name is Simon Williams (not to be confused with that other Simon Williams, Marvel Comics' Wonder Man) and to old-time Hulk fans like yours truly, his work is a revelation. He's also done some artwork on the DVD covers to all the Hulk's animated series in the United Kingdom--and done a bang-up job on each volume. I had to find more, and find it I did. Recently, I had the opportunity to read his sketchbook, Soulman Inc. Sketchbook: The Comic Artwork of Simon Williams.

In the tradition of those kooky 70s classics!

I know, I know: "Gary," you ask, "How do you read a sketchbook? Aren't you just supposed to look at the pretty pictures?" While that may be true with ordinary sketchbooks, this one has a special genesis. While taking a break from drawing comics, Simon would doodle from time to time, and as should be obvious, the Hulk is just about his favorite character. But he also holds the original bounty hun--er, "freelance peacekeeping agent" Death's Head in high esteem. So a series of sketches became a comic pitting the two characters against each other. It started over on Deviant Art, but soon mutated, until the finished product became available in this sketchbook, available at conventions the artist attended. I'm betting copies of it are long gone, but the story inside, well, it's a real treat.

Written and drawn by Williams, who freely acknowledges the work of many of the characters' greatest writers and artists, "The Monster and the Mercenary" is a 17-page smashfest. Its page count and overall tone echo the era in which the story is set, shortly following the death of the Hulk's beloved Princess Jarella (circa The Incredible Hulk #205). The tale is simple: still reeling from losing his love, the Hulk seeks solitude in the desert, but instead finds the first Death's Head, hired by persons unknown to off the Green Goliath. Along the way, Williams includes a some delightful cameos from other characters familiar to readers of both US and UK audiences, as well as nods to past and current continuity.

Why must Hulk always be alone?

What I found most thrilling about the story, aside from the artwork that is clearly the centerpiece, is the talent the artist has for finding the characters' unique voices. The savage Hulk of the 1970s and early 1980s has one of the most difficult "voices" of all of comics, with Death's Head not all that far behind. It's far too easy to treat the Hulk as a fool, a simpleton, and writers today have fallen into the sad habit of underestimating him (just like his foes). The Hulk in this story is savage, he's crafty, and in a word, he's incredible. Similarly, Death's Head has just the right tinges of humor in his dialogue that would make his creator, Simon Furman, proud. (Evidently, it did make him proud, because he provided the sketchbook's introduction.)

Overall, "The Monster and the Mercenary" is a great deal of fun, well deserving of a wider audience beyond the print run of the sketchbook. Fortunately, Williams' work on this sketchbook has led to a "real" battle between Death's Head and the Hulk in the March issue of the UK magazine Marvel Heroes. In fact, I've been able to interview Simon Williams about that particular 8-page adventure that's being printed in full color. If you're lucky, sometime soon after I post this little review, you'll be able to see that article as hosted by the good folks over at iFanboy.com!

Simon's an underrated talent deserving of wider recognition. You can see his Deviant Art gallery from the link up above, plus he's got a blog of his own here. If veteran inker Joe Rubinstein calls him one of the best Hulk artists he's ever had the pleasure of inking (and he's inked Sal Buscema, the Romitas, Herb Trimpe and Dale Keown!), then I think that really says something. Pay him a visit, ladies and gents!

That's gotta hurt, yes?

Oh, and by all means, spread the love everywhere you can online, and maybe the U.S. will see the new Death's Head/Hulk story. It could happen, yes?

~G.

The Ever-Changing Lyra, Daughter of Hulk! (Among Other Things, a SHE-HULKS Review)

Hulk & Thundra in the shadow of their daughter, from All-New Savage She-Hulk. Art by Alex Garner.

I daresay the Hulk-related portion of the Marvel Universe has exploded over the last few years. We've had She-Hulk get her own book again, then it got canceled. Then in the wake of World War Hulk came an arguable spinoff, Incredible Hercules, followed quickly by the introduction of Red Hulk, then the return of the Incredible Hulk, and some other series here and there centered around events like "Fall of the Hulks" and "World War Hulks."

Unfortunately, with the market being what it is ("unhealthy" is a bit of an understatement--sort of like all of print media) the line is due for contraction. The first casualty in these matters appears to be Lyra, the Hulk's daughter from a future timeline. Since her introduction in Hulk: Raging Thunder, where the Hulk first met Thundra and she scraped his cheek for DNA, she's been featured prominently in no less than three limited series of no more than four issues apiece. She's had some jarring status quo changes, and now it appears, barring a real outpouring of fan support, she'll be relegated to Greg Pak's Incredible Hulks series (not that it's a bad place, necessarily), if not altogether forgotten. But is it a real shame to see Lyra's star falling, or is it more a mercy killing? Before fandom en masse attacks me for that last comment, let's examine her brief history:

Hulk: Raging Thunder - Hulk, as we know, is Marvel's original man-monster, "the strongest one there is." This fact attracts Thundra, a warrior-woman from a future matriarchal society. In her era, men and women live separately and war with each other. The men are sterile from radiation exposure, and both sexes only survive through human parthenogenesis. Thundra travels to our present with the intent of conceiving an heir. Only one born of superior stock, she rationalizes, can have a hope of succeeding her when she grows too old to ably serve the United Sisterhood Republic. This means a fundamental change from the last several generations, in that her daughter will have both a mother and a father.

In the back of the All-New Savage She-Hulk #1, writer Jeff Parker mentions that it was his original intention to have the Hulk and Thundra actually sleep together to create Lyra, but that this idea got "downgraded to scraping cells from [the Hulk's] cheek." Page twenty, without the dialogue in later panels, can even be interpreted with the former explanation. True, the change could have come because editors thought Thundra wouldn't "sully herself" by direct contact (even though, in main continuity, Thundra had been involved with Arkon, if indeed this was not a divergent Thundra). It's more likely the decision had something to do with Jeph Loeb's Ultimate Hulk Annual, in which the Ultimate universe's Hulk slept with the Squadron Supreme's Zarda.

The first appearance of the then-unnamed Lyra, from Hulk: Raging Thunder #1.

Regardless of the decisions behind the as-yet unnamed daughter of Hulk's creation, it's revealed at the end of the story that she was the narrator of the entire story, with her "present" being established as twenty years after Thundra's return from meeting the Hulk. She is a conqueror, taking back the male-inhabited lands of this divergent future while her mother serves elsewhere. In her mind, males won't stop fighting until they all die off, a fact she doesn't fret over. She thinks once all men are gone and their atrocities forgotten by generations of women, that "maybe those women will decide that the Y chromosome can return to the world." She seems dignified and mature as well as battle-hardened.

"Daughter of Hulk" (from Hulk Family) - This brief vignette by Paul Tobin and Benton Jew showcases the again-unnamed Lyra in battle alongside her friend Nella, and explores the world of the men of the 23rd Century via Lyra's infiltration of one of their parthenogenesis facilities. The story also reinforces the dynamic that Lyra is different from her sisters in that she is the only one with a father. Just as she can be seen then as the inverse of a messianic figure, she can also then be seen as a devil of sorts, corrupted by the male species by virtue of her lineage. This story paves the way for what follows...

All-New Savage She-Hulk - After two stories, it's finally in the third story that writer Fred Van Lente gives our heroine a name. In the back pages of the first issue, Van Lente attributes the name to the protagonist in the 1971 story "The Femizons" from Savage Tales #1 by Stan Lee and John Romita Sr. He dramatically shifts the narrative of the Daughter of Hulk for the first time (but not the last) by having her follow her mother's path, time-traveling to "our" present during Marvel's "Dark Reign" umbrella event, wherein Norman Osborn rose to power and oversaw many security initatives like H.A.M.M.E.R. and A.R.M.O.R. The latter agency, the Alternate Reality Monitoring and Operational Response Agency, tracks Lyra's arrival on Earth-616 from Earth-9008. She abducts A.R.M.O.R. agent Alex Erde to use as a field guide on her mission to look for the time period's greatest hero, but soon encounters resistance in Jennifer Walters, the first She-Hulk, as well as Norman Osborn's officially sanctioned team, the Dark Avengers.

Van Lente makes some interesting alterations to Lyra beyond giving her a name, and the art, primarily by Peter Vale and Robert Atkins, provides the best vision of Lyra to date. She is charged with a mission by the Gynosure, ruler of Milago, to bring back technology that will allow them to again use the Cradle, the device that enables the parthenogenic processes that enable them to birth more women. To this end she is armed with Boudicca, an artificial intelligence she wears on her wrist like a watch. (Boudicca's commentary very often steals the show. It's a shame she's not still around...but I'm getting ahead of myself.) He also gives Lyra a weakness in, ironically enough, her anger, as the angrier Lyra becomes, the weaker she gets. Conversely, he also gives her "gamma vision," where she goes into a Zen-like trance and harnesses the gamma energy around her to perform superhuman feats.

Too much tongue? Lyra kisses Osborn, from All-New Savage She-Hulk #3.

In the final issue of the series, we finally discover the reason Lyra is tasked with meeting the era's greatest hero, who's stated to be Osborn himself: she is to collect his seed for the Gynosure, presumably to father another generation of women in the future. Interestingly, Lyra seems ready to collect the old-fashioned way, as A.R.M.O.R. notes that she's ovulating! Of course, she rejects those impulses, and rightly so, in the end teaming with Jennifer Walters to battle the Dark Avengers before teleporting away to A.R.M.O.R., where she becomes one of their field agents. Along the way, she discovers Boudicca has fulfilled their mission and left the processor the Gynosure needed in a location where it could be reached in the future. Hence, she is free to remain in the present. (Marvel now no longer seems to adhere to the principles of time travel set by Mark Gruenwald in the 1970s, else everything Lyra did since arriving would merely cause another divergence.)

A few more Van Lente-penned adventures of Lyra appear in back-up stories in Greg Pak's Incredible Hulk series from #600 through 605. In them, Lyra encounters the fruits of her meeting with Osborn, as he used her information about the future to set up the Origins Corporation, chaired by the Hulk's foe General Ryker and specializing in commoditizing superhuman powers. While trying to find the missing Jennifer Walters, she and Alex Erde are attacked by women with the powers of Zzzax, the Abomination, and the Glob. (This marks the fourth such woman imbued with the Abomination's powers--but that's a tale for another article!) Erde's unrequited love is cut short as Axon (the Zzzax analogue) causes the crash that leads to his death. Lyra swears revenge and kills two of the three women, while after her failure, Ryker gives the kill order for the third. She appears to be coming into her own as a She-Hulk, but that's before she's brought into the...

Lyra, from Fall of the Hulks: Savage She-Hulks #1 by Jelena Kevic Djurdjevic.

Fall of the Hulks: Savage She-Hulks - The next writer to handle Lyra is Jeph Loeb, in both Fall of the Hulks: Gamma (with artist John Romita Jr.) and Hulk #19 (with Ed McGuinness). As framed later in the three-issue tie-in to the main event by Lyra's co-creator Jeff Parker and Salva Espin, Lyra allies herself with the Intelligencia in order to attempt a rescue of Jennifer Walters, who has been their captive for several weeks. She mixes it up a few times with the Red She-Hulk, and even meets her mother, Thundra, who still hasn't returned to the future to allow the scientists to artificially inseminate her (or however their process worked). She becomes the fourth member of the Frightful Four, and while naked (!) defeats the Human Torch in battle, taking one of his 1970s-era red outfits to wear.

The Human Torch gets a fiery green eyeful. From Hulk #19, art by Ed McGuinness & Mark Farmer.

Lyra loses her companion Boudicca, destroying it (her?) to prove her loyalty to the Intelligencia, but its central processing unit is restarted remotely by Bruce Banner, who for the first time makes contact with his daughter (after learning about her in Fall of the Hulks: Red Hulk #1-2, also by Parker). During the siege of the Intelligencia's Hellcarrier, she makes a three-panel cameo in Incredible Hulk #608, meeting her half-brother Skaar (to whom she refers as "little brother") before Banner blasts her up "at least four levels" to rescue Jennifer. Jen accosts her over her opinion that Thundra "ran away" from her and hid in the 21st Century, confronting her with the truth that she nearly jeopardized her chances of being born. She also tells Lyra that, once the battles are finished, she will show her "what a normal life is supposed to be...and how wonderful it is," the earliest allusion to the upcoming She-Hulks series. After uniting with the Red She-Hulk, the three of them fight the legions of AIMarines-turned-Hulks as well as the Hulked-out heroes. Lyra records a message on the barely-functioning Boudicca and leaves it for Thundra to find in the future, telling her mother she is the greatest woman she has known.

The four-issue She-Hulks limited series, with covers by Ed McGuinness.

 She-Hulks - And that brings us to the post-"World War Hulks" portion of this entry, where writer Harrison Wilcox and artist Ryan Stegman (late of the ill-received Red She-Hulk back-ups from Incredible Hulk) contribute the most jarring changes to the young Lyra. That's the right describer, too: "young," as under Wilcox's pen, she becomes a teenager, molded to the role of a companion and "little sister" to Jennifer Walters, the original She-Hulk. Perhaps the shift is due to a stigma that's existed since Lyra's introduction; namely, the idea that she was introduced to eventually replace the original She-Hulk. It's a preposterous idea, certainly, as Jennifer has such deep roots in the Marvel Universe, as a solo hero as well as member of the Fantastic Four and the Avengers, as well as being a peripheral Hulk cast member. Perhaps Marvel believed the safe middleground was to team the two titanesses together and establish them as a generation apart.

I'm going to loosely state, although I have no independent confirmation, that Lyra's supposed to be roughly sixteen years old during this series. The de-aging of Lyra to high school age creates some interesting problems in her treatment under previous writers, certainly--chief among them that whole "search for the greatest hero of the 21st Century so we can procure his seed, and oh, wait, I'm totally ovulating" storyline, which in revision nearly reaches a "Gwen Stacy in 'Sins Past'" level of yuck. That goes double for Johnny Storm, who burned Lyra's clothes off and then made juvenile comments while she was in the buff. These are the two most irritating examples, although there's certainly also the Stockholm Syndrome-esque developments between Alex Erde and Lyra in Incredible Hulk #601, all of which add up to the conclusion that Lyra wasn't originally intended to be, for want of a better term, Teen She-Hulk.

Mourning that perfect prom dress? Art by Ryan Stegman & Michael Babinski.

Lyra has been stripped of much of the accoutrement she had since her first appearance, as well as much of the rest of what defined her in those earlier stories, right up to Fall of the Hulks: Savage She-Hulks. Her military bearing, which should be obvious as having grown up around Thundra and her soldiers, is almost wholly absent, as is her complex attitude toward the opposite sex from being raised in a society where men and women are literally at war. Furthermore, thanks to S.P.I.N. Tech (Super-Power Inhibiting Nanobots), Lyra no longer grows weaker when she gets angry, and she now has a smaller, pink-skinned form invented just for this narrative. The onslaught of changes made to Lyra in such a short time really makes it apparent that the powers-that-be don't really know what to do with her character. Here, it's like Wilcox took that aforementioned idea of "Teen She-Hulk," partnered her up with Jen Walters, and then sparsely fit bits of Lyra's prior history in the narrative where they could fit. The Lyra of She-Hulks bears little, if any, resemblance to all of her earlier appearances.

The dynamic of She-Hulks again really reads like, well, exactly what you'd think a series about a Teen She-Hulk would. Lyra is largely the center of the narrative, as we follow her time in school, her being coached by Jen, and the talks between Bruce Banner and Jen about her. Jen acts as an aunt of sorts to young Lyra, having her attend high school at Bruce Banner's urgings. (See? That pink-skinned form comes in handy!) The two of them live in a sweet Manhattan apartment, and Bruce has charged them with capturing the remaining free members of the Intelligencia, solving some very important loose ends from the "World War Hulks" story. In fact, Bruce Banner and the Hulk have a substantial supporting role in the series, headquartered at Gamma Base and using funds from the Olympus Group to finance the women's missions. The base also houses a detention facility where the villains are held once the She-Hulks capture them.

The book's lighter tone aids in Lyra's likability, and she certainly needed some lightening up in the wake of, let's face it, some rather dark showings in her first dozen appearances. (Often the Boudicca unit served as comic relief in the earlier series, as counterpoint to Lyra's "straight woman.") You might be thinking, "Having been transported to this new time period where she isn't surrounded by all the war and gender politics, why wouldn't Lyra lighten up?" It's a fair point, and one I'm sure the creators had in mind when developing this series. The original point of creating a second She-Hulk seemed to be making her different from the original, who had become something of a punchline in the Marvel Universe, with no one able to remove her from John Byrne's intimidating shadow. It becomes obvious why Lyra began as a warrior-woman. Apparently that paradigm didn't quite mesh, because now Lyra has lightened up and become absorbed into the first She-Hulk's world--humor, girl talk, boys and all. Again, quite literally, she's Teen She-Hulk, "Jen's li'l sis."

You're not the only one, Lyra. Art by Stegman & Babinski.

And I hate it. And I love it.

I didn't mean to suggest that the Wilcox/Stegman series isn't any good. It's actually an intensely pleasurable read if taken out of context of Lyra's earlier appearances. Yes, I know I spent six paragraphs disparaging the changes made to Lyra in this four-issue limited series, but it works and I can't explain why. She-Hulks is just a fun ride. Harrison Wilcox writes a fun interplay between Jennifer and Lyra, and his Bruce Banner and Hulk are on point. In addition, he's nailed the voices for all the villains. True, the final issue features an abrupt, forced message about tolerance and fearing that which people don't understand that seems more at home in an X-Men book than a Hulk one. Overall, Wilcox hits more than he misses.

Furthermore, if one creator had a real "breakout moment" in this series, it must be Ryan Stegman. The man needs a high-profile gig, as his work here with inker Michael Babinski is just tremendous. He's grown by Hulk-sized leaps and bounds since working on the aforementioned Red She-Hulk backup stories. I mean, take a look at this:

Yes, I want to buy this page and frame it. Alas, a blogger's salary...! Stegman & Babinski FTW!

This was only page two of the first issue, and the piece shows that Stegman just gets it. His pages are clear and action-packed. If he wasn't having fun drawing all four issues, he certainly fooled me. The fun factor comes through on nearly every page. Wilcox's script is filled with "big" moments and every time he's asked, Stegman delivers, whether it's the Hulk catching the She-Hulks' Gamma Jet, or the She-Hulks fleeing an avalanche, or fighting the Wizard in an awesome double-page spread filled with bikini-clad women. His facial expressions are a delight, as well. In short, Stegman's fun, energetic, and expressive style fits the She-Hulks to a T, and I'd really love to see him on another project--whether it be more She-Hulks or something else--in the not-too-distant future.

What are the chances of seeing a second volume of She-Hulks? I can see Marvel's cautiousness in this volatile market, in wondering if this series would truly find an audience. Initially solicited as an ongoing series, evidently orders weren't as high as Marvel had hoped, and news broke on Diamond's weekly shipping list that the book had been changed to four issues. (It wasn't until the last issue was solicited in Marvel Previews that the company publicly acknowledged the series was scaled back.) It didn't help that the first issue was priced at $3.99 (although subsequent issues were all $2.99). The backdoor cancellation announcement probably doomed the series in retailers' eyes, although luckily for fans, only the last issue showed any hint that the book was in fact a limited series. (Why luckily? Fans who don't read solicitations likely thought the series was ongoing, and somewhere in my messed-up mind, I like to think fans wanted to settle in for a long haul.) Sadly, the book received anemic pre-orders, with only 18,616 copies of the first issue distributed according to Diamond. Subsequent sales figures confirm that the series only fell from there, with a 21% drop in December, and another 12% in January, where orders were at an abysmal 12,926 copies. We can only hope that the book sells out at the retailer level, and the inevitable trade paperback collection is heavily ordered, otherwise we may never see another Hulk-based series that's this fun. Or, more likely, we'll see yet another revision of Lyra, and probably Jen Walters as well...again, not as fun.

After my initial resistance to the core concept of She-Hulks, I have to say I greatly enjoyed the finished product and hope more adventures of Lyra and Jen are on the horizon. It's a case of so-so ideas with incredible execution. However, it's going to take more than Jen's magic cure-all, a cup of hot cocoa, to get this duo to see another day...

Hot cocoa can cure a lot, but can it get us She-Hulks volume 2? More Stegman & Babinski.

'Nuff said,

~G.

Folly Of The Hulks: Too Many Hulks, Too Few Puny Humans?

Howdy ho, campers!

Did I ever say that The Powers That Be in charge of the Hulk books (since when were there Hulk books?) could do no wrong? Oh, I'm sure since you figure I've been following the Hulk for a good, long while now and have come to own every issue of his regular series ever published, you think there's nothing that could scare me away, right? Alas, I've been close to dropping the title a few times over that period. Peter David's Merged Hulk nearly bored me to tears as it just seemed like standard superheroics with a big green guy. (I hadn't really started "collecting" the title when Bill Mantlo did it with the Banner Hulk, in case you're wondering. And, rest assured--through the obstinacy of friends, I have learned to appreciate David's Merged Hulk era more.) Then, Bruce Jones blew all the goodwill he'd earned on his first arc, relying too much on the maxim that "sex sells" and a labyrinthine conspiracy plotline ripped off from "The X-Files" TV show, as well as a one-note characterization of Bruce Banner akin to the old Hulk TV show (but without an actor like Bixby being able to carry off the part on the four-color page).

And now, in spite of the stellar creative teams they've assembled, and in spite of the terrific trust I have in writer Greg Pak (whom I've aptly in recent days called "The Second Coming of Bill Mantlo"--and yes, Mantlo's my favorite Hulk writer), I've a feeling if we're not careful, they're all gonna blow it. You may think it's funny, but it's all part of a time bomb that's been ticking away since, let's be fair, Jeph Loeb & Ed McGuinness' HULK #1. But not for the reasons you think.

I want to forge headlong into this editorial with the following fact I found myself tweeting about just over a week ago:

Did you know that all the major characters introduced in THE INCREDIBLE HULK #1 by Stan Lee & Jack Kirby back in 1962--ALL of them--have now been gamma or otherwise irradiated into super-beings? Consider that we have Bruce Banner, having turned into the Hulk in that first issue, and his mutated adversary, Yuri Topolov, a.k.a. the Gargoyle, who was cured and killed in the same book. Banner's assistant, the Soviet spy Igor Drenkov, was mutated into an unstable protoplasmic lifeform by the Russian super-villain, The Presence, and shreds of him are floating around the Darkforce Dimension thanks to the Winter Guard (as of HULK: WINTER GUARD #1). General Ross, as everyone now knows, became the Red Hulk (in the 2008 HULK #1), and his daughter Betty became the Red She-Hulk (in HULK #15). Plus, Rick Jones, sidekick of sidekicks, has transformed into the new Abomination, nicknamed "A-Bomb" (in HULK #2). Those are some pretty heady statistics. There's not one "normal" human among the original six!

Over the decades since his creation, the Hulk has largely been a solo act, his mutation and the circumstances of his changes setting Bruce Banner and his monstrous second self apart from humanity. True, there were gamma-irradiated villains popping up from time to time, like the Leader and the Abomination, but gamma irradiation was kept a rarity throughout the 1960s and the 1970s. It wasn't until the arrival of Jennifer Walters, Banner's cousin, in 1980's THE SAVAGE SHE-HULK #1 that the Hulk wasn't alone on the "hero" front.

Still, the Hulk's own book reinforced the notion not everyone could become a Hulk. Senator Morton Clegstead died when an injection of the Hulk's blood turned him into a decomposing, crawling unknown (INCREDIBLE HULK #151). Rick Jones nearly died from trying to irradiate himself because "the world needs a Hulk!" in Mantlo's run (INCREDIBLE HULK #270), and the Leader adopted a catastrophic plan to put gamma in the water supply, which he admitted would kill most, but transform a very few into gamma mutates like himself, the Hulk, and the Abomination (HULK ANNUAL #11). Banner's own experiments with gamma to cure the sick resulted in Max Hammer's using the radiation, creating the possibility of mutation (which proved true with Hammer himself) or death (for at least one elderly woman), and could have been worse if not for the intervention of Rom, the Spaceknight (INCREDIBLE HULK #294-296). Even when Rick Jones did eventually become a Hulk-like creature, it was either due to the magic of the otherworldly Beyonder (ROM #72), or some freak accident that bled off radiation from the real Hulk (INCREDIBLE HULK #324--which even then was hastily remedied--hello, Peter David!). The billionaire Hubert St. Johns' fat body couldn't take the mutation, perishing soon after changing (HULK ANNUAL #14). And in Peter David's tenure, the Merged Hulk freely acknowledged that death was the predominant consequence if he chose to give AIDS-afflicted Jim Wilson a transfusion of his blood (INCREDIBLE HULK #420).

So, no doubt you're looking at the above, rather lengthy, listing of reasons why gamma irradiation is bad, and you're thinking how strange it is that the Hulk's titles are now filled to brimming with gamma mutates today! We've got, not just Jen Walters, the original She-Hulk, but also Betty Ross (formerly the first Harpy), and Lyra, the Hulk's daughter by Thundra (conceived via artificial insemination, of course, from HULK: RAGING THUNDER #1). We've got Bruce Banner as a Hulk, plus General Ross as a Red Hulk, and two of Banner's sons by an alien queen (these two, conceived the old-fashioned way). Rick Jones' wife Marlo turned into the second Harpy. We've even had legions of "hulked-out" A.I.Marines empowered by the Leader and M.O.D.O.K., as well as over a dozen "hulked-out" superheroes. Doesn't all the above fly in the face of conventional Hulk wisdom?

It's true, you could partially explain away the "hulked-out" characters having been made possible by the Leader's genetic engineering. (It's even been said that most of the characters who were so irradiated would've died if not cured quickly.) Certainly, if Bruce's DNA is predisposed to gamma mutation, why not his offspring? I can even go with the long-held belief by M.O.D.O.K. that persistent, long-term exposure to gamma-irradiated beings allows a certain tolerance that makes those exposed more pliable to mutation. (It's this theory that led to his first experimenting upon Betty Ross to become the first Harpy.) And nobody has been longer-exposed to the ambient gamma radiation produced by Bruce Banner than the major cast from INCREDIBLE HULK #1. (Although, granted, Igor? A bit weird.)

I'm not so much concerned by the short-term mutations of the A.I.Marines and the superheroes in "World War Hulks" as I am by what's coming up. Have you noticed that, since "Planet Hulk," the Hulk has increasingly found himself surrounded by freaks, monsters like himself? Virtually everyone around him is now nearly as monstrous as himself. Even Kate Waynesboro, a S.H.I.E.L.D. agent introduced during Bill Mantlo's tenure, has become empowered by the alien Oldpower. Now, in September, the INCREDIBLE HULK title becomes INCREDIBLE HULKS, promising the first-of-its-kind team book made up nearly entirely of gamma-empowered characters (okay, if you don't count GAMMA CORPS). It's the era Greg Pak referred to when his return to THE INCREDIBLE HULK was first announced, stating on the Broken Frontier website, "If all goes as planned, we’ll take him places you’d never guess, but when we get there, it’ll be exactly where you always wanted to go." Color me a bit worried.



Two fronts chiefly concern me. First, there's the matter that, with the stark exception of the Hulk's son Skaar (who uses the Oldpower on occasion, and enjoys weaponry), virtually the whole cast thus far--Hulk, Red She-Hulk, Korg, She-Hulk, and A-Bomb--are all what role playing culture calls "bricks"--which is to say, they're all characters with a power base that makes them reliant on brute force and hand-to-hand combat. (Yes, there's A-Bomb with his camouflage ability a la 1970s-era Nightcrawler, too, but...) Having all the characters with nearly the same powers can be boring, so I do hope that the group enjoys some diversity. Adding Kate Waynesboro could help in this regard, as her Oldpower is about as removed from brute strength as you can get. Even Lyra (who hasn't been publicized as part of the line-up at present) would be a (slightly) more refreshing entry. As it is, the only real diversity I see in the group is their personalities. They're a pretty motley bunch, and personality can carry a book, especially a Hulk book, far, but I'm leery of relying on personality alone. In this column, at least, I'm glad we've got Greg Pak as writer, because he has a real gift for dialogue and action.

The other, more overarching concern I have is that by including the Hulk in a group of characters so like himself, green skin (aside from Korg), super-strength and all, it risks isolating him from the human elements that have been so present in the book for the last several decades. For years, the Hulk surrounded himself with human supporting cast members and some antagonists, but now, virtually all those characters closest to the Hulk have become empowered. Ironically, by making the Hulk part of a family, it instead may have the added consequence of separating him from humanity all the more. I hope this isn't the case, but I have to say it makes it more difficult for Bruce Banner and the Hulk to become embroiled in more human pursuits and tragedies when he's cavorting with a group of monsters, some of whom don't even have human forms to assume.

I'm going to stop just short of saying "I don't see how this could possibly work," because it's conceivable based upon the success of "Planet Hulk" that writer Greg Pak could do a bang-up job with this new status quo. But, now that I've brought up all of the above, tell me, readers assembled...how do YOU feel about "THE INCREDIBLE HULKS"? Do you have your trepidations, or are you full-steam ahead for the new, smashtastic era?

~G.