The Immortal Hulk Volume 3: Hulk in Hell

This series is yanking me up and pulling me down. I thought the first volume (issues #1-5) lacking, but the second (issues #6-10) very good. Expectations raised, I was ready to enjoy Hulk in Hell, which kicks off with skinny Hulk and various tag-alongs having passed through the sadly unerotic Green Door and winding up in some sub-dimension of evil. But I was in for a disappointment.

Writer Al Ewing feels like he’s channeling Alan Moore (bad Alan Moore) with a sporadically literary pastiche of psycho-mythology. Thus the explanation for what’s going on here: “Gamma radiation is science. It’s measurable, predictable, it has rules . . . until it doesn’t. Until it makes Hulks and Sasquatches and Leaders. Metaphor people. Until it’s magic. When the first gamma bomb went off, it unleashed forces beyond our control. Unified forces. It opened a door, deep down into the pit of reality. Into the lowest hell. And any high concentration of gamma – that’s a door too. Including gamma people.”

What does all this add up to? Just another example of the old trope of a portal to another dimension that our heroes have to close in order to save the world from an evil invasion. Except that the Hulk himself is a door. So “What will the Hulk be? The accuser or the adversary? Khamael or Satan? Is he of Geburah or of Galachab?” Etc. The Hulk’s abusive father again puts in an unwelcome appearance, which is an angle I care for less and less. And the way things are going it looks as though immortality is a side-effect of all the gamma energy flowing everywhere, as various characters – Crusher Creel (Absorbing Man), Thunderbolt Ross, Doc Samson, Betty Banner, Rick Jones – start climbing out of their graves. Throw in the usual shadowy government agencies who are up to no good, epigraphs drawn from the Bible, Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky, and Camus, and I thought it all a lot too much. There’s even a “Devil Hulk” which is the big green guy’s id, and a Moore-ish master plot about the Hulk (the basic model) wanting to destroy humanity in order to save it.

Still, I can’t help thinking there’s something here worth sticking with. So I’ll see what volume 4 has to offer anyway.

Graphicalex