New Comics Reviews: World War Hulk #1

 

Yow, lookit that hand! Hulk could use some lotion.

Thursdays are New Comics Days here in Lubbock, so let’s start digging through this week’s haul. First up tonight is the first issue of the new “World War Hulk” limited series from Marvel.

Yowza! It’s a good one!

Backstory first: About a year or so ago, some of the Marvel Universe’s bigwigs — Iron Man, Dr. Strange, Mr. Fantastic, and Black Bolt — decided that the Hulk was just too dangerous to the planet, so they sneaked him into a spaceship and zapped him into outer space. Hulk ended up on a distant planet where he was forced to serve as a gladiator, but later ended up being crowned king. He got a wife, had a kid on the way, and then the spaceship he traveled in blows up, kills his wife, and destroys most of his adopted planet.

Unsurprisingly, this angers Hulk, who grabs some of his drinkin’ buddies and sets off back for Earth to, more than likely, beat a large number of superheroes into fairly squishy goo. Hulk scares the golly-gee-whilikers out of everyone on the planet and takes on Black Bolt and Iron Man, emerging mostly unscathed and angrier than ever.

Anyway, like I said, it’s a good one. John Romita, Jr. handles the artwork while Greg Pak takes care of the story. With Romita working the pencils, the action is absolutely wonderful. We get treated to multiple scenes that are entirely jaw-dropping in intensity. Even with all that fighting, we get some good writing and dialogue work in, too. Hulk’s first words in his broadcast to the planet (“Puny humans. I’ve come to smash.”) are both familiar and chilling — this version of the Hulk is a great deal angrier, more intelligent, and a lot more dangerous than most of us are used to.

This one gets a big thumbs-up from me, and I expect I’ll be picking up the rest of the series, too.