The Immortal Hulk Volume 1: Or is He Both?

I don’t know how much credit to give them for saddling this first volume of the Immortal Hulk series with such an obscure title. It’s a bold move that may appeal to die-hard fanboys, but when I was a kid I had a reprint edition of The Incredible Hulk #1 – the cover of which asks “Is He Man or Monster or . . . is He Both?” – and even I didn’t make the connection here.

So much for the “Or is He Both?” part. How about The Immortal Hulk? Well, as things kick off the world thinks Bruce Banner/The Hulk is dead. I’m not sure how or when this happened. There’s a bunch of excerpts from different comics at the end of this volume that are less than informative on the subject, and I didn’t feel like doing any further research (and you can certainly find answers to all these questions, and more, on the Internet).

In any event, as you will have guessed, the Hulk isn’t dead. In fact, he can’t be killed. He can even get a giant hole blown through his chest and it fills back in again. This leaves Bruce Banner to “walk the earth” in a hoodie, righting the odd wrong and filled with existential angst because when he looks in a mirror he sees the big green guy glaring back at him. And before long the cops, the media, and even an old friend are on to him.

I have to say I didn’t care very much for anything going on here. The art didn’t strike me as anything special, even with the way they tried to change things up in issue #3 (different styles for different narrative voices). And the stories weren’t all that good. Instead of being triggered by anger, Banner turns into the Hulk now at night. I don’t know why. In the first issue the Hulk avenges the accidental killing of a girl in a gas station hold-up. Then he encounters a guy who turned himself and his son into glowing green Hulk knock-offs. Then he fights Sasquatch, who is another Hulk-wannabe gone bad. This is a theme that’s played on throughout, as the reporter tracking the Hulk confesses at the end that she wants to be like him too. But of course they don’t understand.

There’s also something going on about Banner’s father, but I couldn’t figure out what that was. I think he abused Bruce when he was a boy. So on top of everything else the Hulk has daddy issues.

I’ll probably give this run some more time to get its feet, but in the first five issues I didn’t get the sense that it was going anywhere, and to be honest I don’t find the Hulk that interesting, so I might not stick with it for long.

Graphicalex