The Immortal Hulk Volume 4: Abomination

At the end of Hulk in Hell I mentioned how immortality seemed to be catching, with characters like Rick Jones and Betty Ross climbing out of their graves. They’re both back here, reborn as the Abomination and Harpy respectively. How could you imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in this quiet series? I mean, Harpy even tears the Hulk’s heart out and eats it here, not in order to destroy him but as a way of giving him a “hard reset” that will jump-start his healing after he’s basically been dissolved by the Abomination’s acid reflux.

Aside from this, the roller coaster I’ve been on with the Immortal Hulk series continues even within this volume, which abruptly mixes good and bad. In the latter parts we get blocks of exposition with repetitive art as characters try to give us some idea of what is going on. Which helped a bit, though I was still confused even when Bushwacker held up a helpful chart on which he’d broken down the different Hulk identities in play. On the plus side though there’s a pretty good three-way battle between the Hulk, Abomination, and Harpy. The main monster motif throughout this series is a plasticity in form that recalls the shape-shifting monster in John Carpenter’s The Thing. The Hulk can get big or skinny and even displays the faces of victims he’s eaten when he transforms. Inside the head of Abomination he sees various smaller heads. Bushwacker’s very body is some military-grade plastic and can transform into various weapons. All these bodies keep melting and reconstituting over and over, Thing-style. This means that the fight scenes get really messy, even though given that no matter how badly characters get torn apart they keep coming back it plays out less as horror than as a sort of gory kaiju.

On the strength of the monster mash stuff I’d recommend this. I still don’t understand what’s going on with the “Cosmic Satan,” the “one below all” who’s coming through the green door, and I have a suspicion that I’m not going to be terribly impressed when I find out, but it’s a series worth sticking with a bit longer.

Graphicalex