How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Hulk

The Marvel Universe is in a state of manic flux of late.

Bucky is alive and Captain America is dead. The Avengers have disassembled, reassembled, dissembled again, split in two, and are now, through the auspices of “The Initiative”, in the process of spreading super-hero police state glory to all 50 states.

The Civil War has codified the differences between super-heroes into two distinct camps: either you’re a good citizen who registers with the government or you’re a lawless vigilante who will be hunted down and tossed into a other-dimensional prison without such pesky concerns as due process (this dichotomy was always there…Captain America, agent of SHIELD versus Spider-Man, masked menace…but the differences are now separated by an angry, burgeoning chasm that is more bitter and poisonous than it has ever been.)

Millions of sentient beings have fallen victim to annihilation out in the cosmos while the mutant population on Earth has been reduced to a statistically insignificant species.

The United States government is at war with the Inhumans and with Atlantis (and not on the best of terms with Wakanda.) And apparently there are Skrulls everywhere.

And then there’s the Hulk.

Having by exiled off the planet by a covert group of self-appointed guardians of the world…Iron Man, Mr. Fantastic, Black Bolt, and Dr. Strange (the other members of their smug little cabal…Professor X and Prince Namor…were, respectively, not present for this particular decision and violently opposed to it ), the Hulk ended up on a violent world…Planet Hulk…where he became a slave gladiator, a rebel leader, and, eventually, a warrior king complete with a pregnant warrior queen (we suspend disbelief enough to go with the notion that beings from different worlds are biologically compatible enough to co-create children.)

But there are no happy endings in the life of the Hulk, of course. The ship that carried him to his new home malfunctioned destroying the world, his wife, and his unborn child and now, with the aid of the survivors of the cataclysm, the Hulk has come home…angrier than ever, more wily than ever, and more focused than ever. As Black Bolt has already found out, it brings a whole new level of meaning to the pithy phrase “Hulk smash.”

Planet Hulk was a grand story…an epic tale of triumph and tragedy…that worked so well because it was largely removed from the rest of the Marvel Universe goings-on (the over-sized hardcover collection of the storyline is a lovely thing indeed.)

World War Hulk has the potential to be a grand story…and its off to an engaging start for the most part…though its chances are somewhat mitigated by the fact that its editorial tentacles are spreading out so far (when we’re being “red skied” by a WWH branded issue of Ghost Rider that has nothing to do with the overall story beyond its final page, it’s an ominous sign.) We shall keep a good thought for the rest of the series just the same.

Hulk smash. Fanboys rejoice.

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