Review, kindly written for us by Gary Hollingsbee
Hulk’s had a difficult time of late. He’s been betrayed by his friends and shipped off across the universe where he was forced to play Russell Crowe in Ridley Scott’s epic Gladiator. Then he came back to Earth with a gang of friends to take part in Gangs of New York before, this Summer, being possessed in The Exorcist and went about hitting people with a hammer. He even ended up in a side project as Van Helsing in Coppola’s Dracula. And on top of that he’s been franchised – by Walt Disney, no doubt – into a spectrum of different colours that rival the range of Care Bears. No wonder he’s more than angry… he’s well-and-truly fed up and has dumped Bruce Banner (literally, out of his head at one of the many ends of Fear Itself #7) before going off and growing a beard. A beard? you ask. Yes a rather stylish 60s beat-like shaggy beard. He’s also gone for a Mad Max III-outfit sporting some nifty-looking necklaces. After all, he’s Hulk and he can do what the hell he likes.
Hulk’s a difficult character to sell. He’s a giant green monster who, well… smashes things. There’s only so much a writer can do to before the trope of monster-with-a-heart-who-is-misunderstood-and-smashes-things reasserts itself and the title becomes tired again. Jeph Loeb’s had some reasonable success with his multicolured War of the Hulks recently but arguably that success was down to the novelty factor and Loeb’s skills as a writer rather than anything inherent in Hulk as a character. Personally, the only Hulk I can remember enjoying was the strange black and white Rampaging Hulk title from the 1970s when I was a kid and first reading comics. Read More »
The Grinning Demon 