I'm enjoying The Immortal Hulk. I'm all caught up now, having just read "The Best Defence". It's the best Marvel comic I've read since the Brubaker Captain America stuff (which feels like it came out a lifetime ago). It's well worth the time, expense and effort to acquire.

I'm enjoying the way Ewing harks back to the very beginnings of the Hulk while simultaneously taking him in a completely different direction, without that feeling you usually get when someone decides to mess with the core concept of a long-established character just for the sake of being different or edgy (or whatever it gets called when people do that). It feels like this is the 'real' Hulk and it doesn't feel as if Ewing's trying to shoehorn the concepts and characters into an ill-fitting paradigm that suits his own taste or agenda while abandoning the essence of what made the character great to begin with.

It's well written, and the extreme gore suits the tone of the story perfectly - it's essentially a monster/horror title now, with science-fiction overtones. Clearly I'm right in the target audience for this comic: I usually find myself reading newer comics in complete bewilderment, sure only of the fact that I've missed the point of why said comics are so well liked. I'm the fan that fandom forgot. Not so with Ewing's take on the Hulk, however. I'm along for the ride on this one.

I'm intrigued. I'll pick up a nice collected version of it once they get around to it.
The last "newish" collection I picked up was the twelve-issue run of The Vision from about 3 years ago.
I enjoyed that very much.

It really does seem the way for me to buy newer comics theses days: just wait/buy the HC collections
of the stuff that proves to be the higher quality stuff. I have shelves and shelves of New Dreck from
the last twenty years taking up precious space in my rooms.

I agree with that, Beachy. I normally do the same thing. I've sold most of my Showcase and Essential books for that reason. I have almost no comics now. I don't feel like I need them. The feeling/impression/influence of those Bronze Age comics is something that's a part of me. I don't need to re-read Werewolf by Night for the hundredth time or whatever. There's an overall impression or version of it that I've somehow incorporated into myself, if that makes sense. I know what I like when I see it, and I also know what I don't like. I don't feel the need to justify or explain it, or even express dislike for the stuff I don't care for, I just know if something is or isn't my type of thing.

As someone who freely admits that he doesn't 'get' 99.9% of what the Big Two are publishing these days, I can honestly recommend this. It's unlike anything else that's been done with the Hulk before, but still manages to be faithful to the source material in a unique and entertaining way. Far from feeling like an outsider who doesn't understand what's meant to be happening, Ewing's take on the Hulk has made me feel like I'm exactly the kind of reader he's writing for - that's extremely rare for me.

I’ve got a copy of the first TPB for my Christmas reading. Will say what I think after I read it.

I was wondering if you'd read Best Defense, which was also awesome. (The Hulk one shot more so than the others).

I must echo echo echo Simon's comments. I actually look forward to the trip to the comic book shop because of Immortal Hulk now.

Why don't you just read digitally for cover price, and then in the future acquire the inevitable premium hardcover to save?

I still enjoy the search for things that hearken back to those things that I've incorporated into myself.

By the way, you ought to read old The Destroyer paperbacks, and the early volumes of The Executioner (Mack Bolan). They have that thing you're carrying around inside you as well. I've been collecting them and enjoying them.

Also, see my thread on old comic strips (Rip Kirby, Flash Gordon, Prince Valient, Steve Canyon, Terry and the Pirates). They have that thing.

I have perused the series online. I will now read it more.carefully, based on the love shown here for it.

I've been looking at the comic strip thread with interest. I used to love Prince Valiant and Flash Gordon, but haven't read Steve Canyon or Terry and the Pirates or Rip Kirby. I'll have to look them up and remedy that at some point.

I'll look up the The Destroyer and The Executioner as well, if I get the chance. It's a minor miracle that I even got myself into gear to get the Hulk stuff. Things have been hectic. I suppose I could get the digital copies of Immortal Hulk, but it still feels a bit weird reading things on a monitor.

It's really cool if you get your hands on a vintage paperback. Only Don Pendleton for Executioner (the first 40). Whereas Warren Murphy stayed with the Destroyer (Remo Williams) for years and years.

I'll try and get my hands on Best Defense from the LCS later this week.

I'm finishing the Frank Miller Robocop omnibus -- more than halfway through the adaptation of the script for Robocop 3, and immediately I finish I'll get to Immortal Hulk.

Thank you, I'll remember this!

I didn't know there was such an omnibus!

There is, and it's rather quite good.

The collection includes the opening couple of pages from Miller's scripts for Robocop 2 and 3 as well as the first couple of pages from his first draft of a script for 2. The art in part one by Juan Jose Ryp is reminiscent of Geoff Darrow's, being hyper-detailed to the point of distraction from the flow of the story. The second artist -- name eludes me as I write -- has a simple style that aids storytelling for the adaptation of 3. It's worth a read. Miller's story is adapted by Steven Grant, whose work as far as I can make out is to conservatively transmediate from film script to comics; what Miller describes in his script shows up on the page and the dialogue is all his.

Re: The Immortal Hulk, I read the first TPB, "Or Is He Both?" and I must report that I enjoyed it very much. In particular, I liked the new angle Ewing took on the Hulk, which was literary, psychological, and philosophical. Whereas previous writers, including PAD, have played up the psychological angle, it has always been through the Freudian paradigm. In PAD's hands, Leonard Samson is a Freudian psychoanalyst, and his work with Bruce/Hulk derives from that model of the psyche. What's new here -- and appeals especially to me -- is the Jungian perspective. Ewing interprets the Hulk not as one man's Id, but rather as Bruce Banner's particular shadow -- the business with his father -- and more profoundly, mankind's collective, archetypal Shadow -- all the dark choices made by every other character in the series.

I'm in.

The imagery and discussion surrounding people's reflections is intriguing. Hulk's critique of Langowski's personality and motives reveals his surgically precise insight into the inner lives of others. Hulk is now analysing the world around him. He fakes people out. He outsmarts them. He even insults them intelligently and makes sure that what he says rattles them (the stuff he says to The Avengers is a good example). Then he laughs about it. No longer an easily confused 'Savage', he's dangerously intelligent. Even Joe Fixit wasn't exactly like this new guy, although they have some traits in common. The idea that he can 'smell lies' is also an interesting one; the most basic sense of all is one of the new Hulk's greatest strengths. Meanwhile, part of Banner's intellect has been subsumed by the Hulk (he's not the inventive genius he once was, as he points out), and the Hulk is explicitly described as a being of intuition who operates based on hunches and gut instinct. Hulk literally absorbs lots of stuff - like Banner's mind, among other things (I don't want to write any spoilers).

For years the average issue of The Hulk used to end with narration like "...and then the Hulk wandered off into the sunset unaware that his insanely violent rampage had saved the day despite the massive property damage he'd caused" (for example). Ewing's dispensed with all that and gone right back to square one, whilst expanding how much ground square one covers.

I like the sense of claustrophobically inevitable horror Ewing has created. You know things are going to go from bad to worse for Banner. He's in this terrifying situation and there's no escape from it. The Hulk is ever present to him. It reminds me of stuff like Morbius or Werewolf by Night, where the main character is a danger to everyone around them despite the fact that they're not inherently evil. At least, they mean no harm even if they cause harm. They're just struggling with a situation they can't control or even fully understand. There's a Steve Gerber element to it in my opinion; the character whose uncertain and painful existence represents a form of existential irony. Or maybe Steve Gerber was just part of the Bronze Age zeitgeist and it's simply an element from that era I recognise and appreciate.

The Hulk is a monster again, as he was originally, not the superhero equivalent of the village idiot. I like it.



That classic panel is used in Best Defence and it's extremely telling.

"Or is he both?" is an excellent title.
That's worth picking up a collection alone.

Someone post the goriest page from this series. If I can stomach it, I'll start reading the TPBs.

It's not constantly gory but when it is it can be graphically so.

There are people beaten so badly by the Hulk they'll never walk again, or people having their hands crushed to a pulp by him, along with huge monsters going berserk and killing people that Hulk has to stop, and some scenes are pretty detailed. You don't see all the violence taking place 'on camera', but you see the results. If you really dislike gore and extreme violence, you may find it hard going.

This is an example, but everyone's idea of how much is too much varies.

Thanks, Simon. Doesn't seem too bad. I didn't realize the art was so stylized.

In that issue (#3) different artists draw the same story from the perspectives of several different characters who witnessed the same events.

Here are some examples from the same issue, and the last one is drawn by the regular artist Joe Bennett -

I can't find a scan, but it would be the large shot where Absorbing Man splits down the middle, and his spinal cord and brain are poking up like a daffodil out of his split body.