Hulk: Gray

This was a six-issue miniseries by the all-star team of writer Jeph Loeb and artist Tim Sale that was first published in 2003-2004. It’s an oversize comic, on the scale of Marvel’s Grand Design series, though I believe it came out before that series started.

I loved seeing Sale’s art blown-up to this size, though I could have lived without the wide side borders on every page. The full-page and double-page spreads are like movie posters and they’re used really effectively throughout. The Hulk is a big dude and he can fill a page any size. Sale has a great sense of space and he can move from epic vistas looking like Monument Valley to close-ups of the Hulk’s mouth full of rocky teeth. You can tell Sale had a lot of fun with those teeth.

As great as it is to look at, I’ll admit that after a while I was just turning pages without reading it very closely. I thought Loeb, whose The Long Halloween is probably my favourite Batman comic, really mailed this one in. It’s a tired story that basically retells the Hulk’s origins, covering the 24 hours after Dr. Bruce Banner was caught in the explosion of the Gamma Bomb. The Hulk steals away into the desert with Betty Ross, and first Iron Man (in his vintage yellow “tin can” suit) and then General “Thunderbolt” Ross (Betty’s father) chase after him. The whole thing takes the form of a flashback, with Bruce relating these events to the superhero shrink Dr. Leonard Samson. It’s a narrative device that didn’t serve any real purpose, as their back-and-forth didn’t add anything and the ending was the flabbiest part. I guess it’s a breakthrough for Bruce to realize that Betty Ross really loved him as both monster and man? I don’t know. It all seemed pointless to me.

So a great comic to look at, with nice lettering too by Richard Starkings, but the effect is almost like a coffee-table book that you just want to pick up and flip through. I ended up doing that a lot. But I wasn’t into reading it.

Graphicalex