The Immortal Hulk Volume 7: Hulk is Hulk

Well, that was interesting.

Apparently Xemnu, I’m not sure how, was creating a mass illusion among the entire human race that had everyone believing he (Xemnu) was a cuddly figure from a children’s television show that never actually existed. And implanting other false memories as well. It’s the Mandela effect except on a universal scale. The point of this exercise in mass delusion being to absorb people and repurpose them as mechanical offspring. He’s even got deep inside Hulk’s head . . . but not deep enough as things turn out. You see, the Hulk knows who he really is. Hulk is Hulk.

That’s another good premise to start with, but there was so much other stuff going on that I felt a lot of it sort of got lost in the mix. It’s like Al Ewing has attention-deficit issues and doesn’t want to spend too long developing any particular storyline too much. I mean, I really liked the Minotaur from the previous volume, but when his time is up he gets disposed of quickly here and I never did figure out just what his plan for global domination was.

There are longer story arcs that we return to. The Leader is still up to something relating to the planet Hulk crushed a while back, and he’s also being connected to the Hulk in Hell mythos and something to do with Bruce Banner’s father. I have to say I’m not grooving to all the psychomachia stuff and Dr. Banner’s dissociative identity disorder, but the subplots are working for me and even though the eating-people and skin-shedding tropes feel overused (they both come up again here) I do like the punctuation of the “Hulk Smash!” double-page, hammering-time spreads. In other words, all the meat-and-potatoes comic-book stuff. Do I care about the Hulk’s battle with his personal demons? Not yet, anyway.

Graphicalex