The Immortal Hulk Volume 5: Breaker of Worlds

Another Immortal Hulk volume, another up-and-down ride. I liked the main storyline, which had the Hulk squaring off against the Hulk-hunting Shadow Base headed up by Major Fortean, who is now wearing the Abomination’s hide like a kind of symbiote. That was all well set-up and had some good action to it, albeit action of a kind that, if you’ve been following this series, is starting to feel a little stale. More bodies melting into grotesque forms and then getting killed but not really being killed because they just end up being sent to that limbo beyond the green door. Still, issues #21-24 were solid. But then issue #25 took off in another direction entirely, jumping “eons” ahead into the future with the Hulk eating the Sentience of the Cosmos and a giant Hulk becoming a god – the “Breaker of Worlds.” I mean, literally. He flies through space and crushes a planet. There’s a survivor of this Hulk apocalypse though and we’re left with the promise that veteran Hulk enemy the Leader has plans to address the situation. Which at this point you really have to wonder at.

I suppose this could all go somewhere interesting so I won’t outright condemn it. But I don’t personally care for Marvel titles when they go cosmic. I feel like they always lose the plot whenever a character becomes a god, from Dark Phoenix on down. I like it when they keep things simple. But there’s a sort of inflation built into most comic storylines, you also see it in a lot of manga, where you have to keep pumping things up until in some cases (like this) you get to a point where they collapse under the weight of some vision of infinite power.

That certainly seems to be what’s happening here. But I’ll continue.

Graphicalex