Green Screen: The Incredible Hulk #1 Review

EDITOR’S NOTE: This review is believed to be dead, and it must let the world think that it IS dead, until it can find a way to control the raging spoilers that dwell within it.

I’m probably not the best person to review Jason Aaron’s and Marc Silvestri’s The Incredible Hulk #1, because I am not the world’s greatest Hulk fan. Sure, I read Bill Mantlo’s stuff back when I was a kid, and I watched the Bill Bixby / Lou Ferrigno show religiously, because I HAD to. In the dark, pre-cable days of the late 70’s and early 80’s, if you wanted new genre TV you had two choices: The Incredible Hulk or Struck By Lightning. Well, I guess there was also Bosom Buddies, but technically that’s a whole different kind of genre.

Part of the problem was that, for a very long time, every Hulk story was the same: Banner gets agitated, turns into Hulk. Hulk reiterates a desire to “smash”. Hulk swings tank by gun barrel. Hulk jumps somewhere into Marlboro Country. Hulk relaxes and turns back into Banner. Banner avoids death by dehydration or copperhead bite to find more purple pants just in time to repeat it all again next month.

The last time I was excited by The Hulk was during Peter David’s 1988 Ground Zero arc, when Todd McFarlane was an exciting new artist and not comics’ most notorious ball cupper (What? The man collects baseballs). Because for the first time in my memory, someone was doing something different with The Hulk. He was cunning. He was gray. He LOOKED different. The book was exciting, because it felt new.

Problem is that David opened the floodgates on creative teams making Hulk whatever they wanted to serve whatever story they wanted to tell. In twenty-five years we’ve see Hulk as genius. Hulk as emperor. Hulk as medieval gladiator. Hulk as fucking Mafia enforcer (“Ever since Hulk can remember, Hulk wanted to be gangster. If we wanted something, we just SMASH it!”)

Hulk’s been green, gray and red, and at least one or two other people have been The Hulk. It’s like a stealth Clone Saga’s been going on in Hulk titles for a quarter century. For good or ill, there is no single “The Hulk” of which to be a fan, unless your only criteria for liking a story is “a big muscular dude of color”. In which case, I’m guessing that back in the 80s you were watching Bosom Buddies rather than The Incredible Hulk, but I digress.

This is a whole lot of words to spend on an individual issue of a comic book without addressing the book itself, but the preamble feels necessary, if only to make it clear that I don’t know if I can recommend The Incredible Hulk #1, because it is yet ANOTHER vector on the original story: The Hulk and Banner as separate entities.

At the end of Fear Itself, we saw The Hulk and Banner separated. How? We don’t know. Why? Who gives a fuck? Clearly Aaron wanted to write about the Hulk and Banner being separated and, in the best writing for the trade fashion, wants us to hang around for a few issues before we find out. So It Just Happened, and now the Hulk is living underground with The Moloids, who worship him for his strength. The Hulk provides for the Moloids by killing subterranean tentacle monsters for food…

…tentacle monsters who somehow also have a turkey leg…

…or else HULK IS EATING CTHUHLU’S ROASTED CLITORIS AAAAAAAAA

Anyway, then some armored soldiers attack Hulk, and an excuse for Marc Silvestri to draw a set of tits – I’m sorry, someone named Amanda Von Doom – tells Hulk that he must return to the surface because “Something has to be done about Banner,” who is apparently living on an island and doing experiments to create intelligent animals, because Marlon Brando’s too dead to sue for copyright infringement. Nah; Actually, he’s trying to recreate The Hulk (Dun dun DUNNNNN)!

Okay – the fact that I can find so many things to make fun of in a single comic book is probably not a good sign. But while the story has some problems, there is some stuff to like here. The Hulk finding peace on another world is a classic trope of Hulk stories dating back to Roy Thomas’s Heart of the Atom storyline, and Aaron could probably have done worse than to call back to a story like that. And the concept of what Banner might be like if he no longer had to be concerned about being calm and rational after his historical ability to effectively express anger is literally taken from him his an interesting concept that is probably worth following, at least for a while.

When it comes to the art, well, Marc Silvestri’s one of a stack of artists that blew up in the 90s by having a similar style to Todd McFarlane, which can be either good or bad considering that stack includes Rob Liefeld. Like McFarlane and Liefeld, Silvestri’s a fine-line artist who uses cross-hatching and detail lines in his art the way writers use commas, or the way writers like me use “fuck”.

There is so much line work in this book that it took three inkers to put the finish on Silvestri’s pencils, which isn’t what you’d call a cost-effective way to produce a comic book. So while having a McFarlane disciple pencil Hulk isn’t the worst way to staff a relaunch from a nostalgia standpoint, I wouldn’t fall in love with it, because I’m guessing he won’t stay on the book long unless Marvel ups the cover price to an even ten bucks to cover the extra inking labor… or to twenty if they want to cover the cost of the ink.

In the final analysis, there are some interesting concepts in this book that I’ll probably stick around for another issue or two to see how they play out. But I can’t actually recommend the book because it’s yet another decompressed story, and because there are so many silly little missteps that can drag you out of the story if you think about them for more than ten seconds.

Like… Banner’s doing animal experiments? But I thought he was a nuclear physicist. Who designed bombs. And if he’s mutated every animal on the island into monsters… what’s he eating? And where’s he getting a source of Gamma radiation on an island? Maybe it’s in his urine? Please God, let it just be in his urine… Goddammit, Aaron, you’re making me angry. And you wouldn’t like me when I’m angry.

Because you’re a good writer and I’m willing to give you a chance here, but if this shit keeps up, I’ll stop buying your book.