subplotkudzu | 2011 books 55-63

55) the Incredible Hulk #314 -19 by John Byrne: Byrne took over Hulk with much fanfare on issue 314 and proceeded to take the book in a radical new direction – the Hulk at this time was ‘brainless’ with the Banner personality completely submerged, and in Byrne’s run Doc Samson managed to capture the Hulk and physically separate the Banner and Hulk personalities. Outraged that the government intended to kill the Hulk body now that Banner wasn’t at risk, and believing that the Hulk was now a blank slate and therefore innocent of his previous actions, Samson broke the Hulk out only to learn that the Hulk was now permanently angry and a walking engine of destruction. Samson swears to kill the now mindless Hulk, as does Banner who, in a nice inversion, is now leading the Hulkbusters in the fanatical pursuit of the creature that drive General Ross insane. Byrne also restored the supporting cast members of General Ross Rick Jones and Betty Ross, finally wed Betty and Banner, and keeps Samson around in an almost starring role. The book shifts between the soap opera aspects of events at Gamma Base with the coldly clinical Banner wooing Betty, the hunt by the Hulkbusters and the hunt by Samson, who is in a pointless, deadly rivalry with the Hulkbusters. The actual Hulk exists only as a motivating entity for the other groups, making the titular character secondary to his own book.

All of this is incredibly rushed: Betty returns to the base, she and Bruce are married 3 issues later; we’re introduced to the new Hulkbusters, who are a laughable Challengers of the Unknown ripoff, get two panels hinting at a past relationship between Parmenter and LaRoquette, and an issue later Parmenter is killed in a pointless fight against Samson, so that some of the Hulkbusters want to kill Samson as well to keep the silly rivalry that is the books secondary plot driver going. Byrne is fast tracking tons of character changes in preparation for…well, Lord knows what, really because he jumped ship after 6 issues to take over the post crisis Superman reboot. Hell, I would too, but it left the Hulk in a mess.

56) The Incredibly Hulk 320-330 by Al Milgrom: Milrom took over the book quickly to fill Byrne’s absence and clearly didn’t know what to do with it. He makes a game stab at keeping some parts of Byrne’s ideas for a few issues but then starts a long slow unwinding to get Hulk and Banner back in the same body. Interestingly Byrne split the characters in 1 issue and it takes Milgrom 8 issues to re-integrate them, which tells you a lot about how the two men plot. Milgrom is very old school, reiterating things for the audience and having some poorly laid out big fight scenes with all off the Avengers forgetting that they can’t beat the Hulk if the Hulk’s name is on the masthead. Once the two are reintegrated he gets weird, culminating with Banner briefly as the Grey Hulk before being depowered altogether and Rick Jones as a sort of Teen Hulk roaming the desert in the classic Hulk mode. All told it’s not very good, but it did fill the monthly void of Byrnes Departure until a writer who actually wanted the book could take over.

57) Incredible Hulk 331-346 by Peter David and Todd McFarlane: This is really a breakthrough book for two of the major talents of the 1990s. For all of their later animosity David and McFarlane work together very well on this book. David as a continuity geek sensibility, constantly pulling up forgotten bits of the character (like how Banner used to irradiate himself when the Hulk was needed in the early days) and, by sticking with the grey, savage, intelligent Hulk, and started really paying attention to the book’s metaphor and focus. The Hulk was always about two things – the duality of mans nature between reason and anger, and the atomic bomb’s utility vs. threat. By making the Hulk intelligent and nocturnal he could pit Banner’s reason against Hulk’s cunning in a back and forth battle, while showing them as a multiple personality disorder and illustrating how the two of them needed each other to really function – Banner is all but passionless without the Hulk, sabotaging his marriage, while Hulk keeps needing to find ways to access Banner’s superior intellect and technical skills. The plot that gets the two of them on the same team? The army has been building and stockpiling Gamma Bombs. Bam! Both parts of the metaphor! The real enemy? the Leader, the Hulk’s primary enemy over the years. What are the heroes doing? moving around the American South and Midwest one step ahead of the Army. For all that David and McFarlane were doing something new, they were building it on top of the absolute classic design of the character, and it works really, really well. Seriously, if you can get this run on the book somewhere, do it.

The other major advantage David has here is Time. No one else wants to write this book – it’s his as long as the sales don’t plummet. With a hot new artist at his side that’s not going to happen, so he can take time to develop things, lay subplots, foreshadow, and otherwise investigate the characters psyches. And it shows. There’s no rush, but it’s not slow. We get time inside each of the characters heads, and can spend an issue with Betty and Hulk talking about Bruce. We get one issue with the Leader dictating parts of his ‘but before I kill you Mr. Bond’ tape that gets played at the climax, where if you flip between the issues you can read the whole tape, proving that David really did know where he was going. It’s sad that I have to praise that in comics, but it’s rare enough to warrant it.

58) Incredible Hulk 347-359 by Peter David and Jeff Purves: in this sequence David gives us a wonderful inversion on the character – a Banner-less Hulk has created a life for himself as a legbreaker in Vegas until the forces that kept Banner suppressed start to fade. Now Hulk is trying to hold a life together and Banner has the ability to disrupt it, and we get another interesting round of the conflict between the two personalities. Purves artwork is solid enough with a nice style, but it becomes clear over his run on the book that the deadlines are just getting away from him. But that isn’t until the next arc, so his work is good all the way through this, giving Hulk’s Vegas a crisp, quirky style.

59) Incredible Hulk 360-377 by Peter David, Jeff Purves and Dale Keown: This is something of an interim arc (and lets think about this – David is so comfortable with his timing that he has an 18 issue interim arc), where the focus is on a slow burn between an out of Vegas Hulk and Banner, with more evidence of the Leader’s big plan, the introduction of a new major villain and Hulk/Bruce coming to terms enough to go looking for Betty. But while all this feels somewhat minor the conflict between the two minds in one body shifts, expands, shifts again and concludes with the clever idea of Doc Samson using hypno-therapy to integrate the three parts of Banners MPD (Banner, Grey Hulk, Green Hulk), ending with a permanently green, super-strong, highly intelligent, very cunning hero. It’s clear that David had been playing with and working towards this for about four years, and it marks a turning point on the book. Artistically Purves falls further and further behind the curve, but Dale Keown’s takeover gave the book a new look that, while it owed a lot of McFarlane and lacked Purves distinctiveness, fit nicely with David’s work.

60) Incredible Hulk 378-400 by Peter David and Dale Keown: Lets take stock – Peter David has, over 4 years, initiated a major change to the character which now avoids, for a bit, both of the original metaphors of the character – he’s no longer a dualistic struggle of control, he’s no longer an engine of destruction that is occasionally required to preserve a greater peace. He’s much more of a traditional superhero, and in this arc he joins a super-hero team, albeit one that David just created from whole cloth for this arc. Four years, compared to Byrne’s one issue shift to totally change the book’s direction, and we still have seven years left on David’s run. This is the advantage of time.

The Pantheon has lots of neat subplots and a sprawling cast, but unlike Byrne’s run on the book the Hulk is never relegated to being supporting cast in his own book – instead we see the effects his presence has on the previously functioning but not really stable super-spy super-human agency. If not for this group, however, you could easily see this Hulk re-join the Avengers for a while. But while it’s more of a classic super-hero book here it’s a really done super-hero book, and this arc picks up some Leader related threads that David started on his second issue of the book.

61) The Long Arm of Gil Hamilton by Larry Niven: This was a reread, read out loud to my son in my part of the nighttime ritual. He’s 7 months old at this juncture, and at this point his sister was listening to the Amber cycle, so hey, it’s all good. I just want to know why no one has licensed the Gil the Arm stories for movie treatments, as three of the four are tightly done SF mysteries with nice social SF explorations in them that would translate to the screen easily, at least in my opinion. (ARM wouldn’t as it’s a muddled mess, though some parts of it could be mined to fill out the other stories. But _Death by Ecstasy_, _The Defenseless Dead_ and _Patchwork Girl_ should all work fine).

62) The Planets by Dava Sobel: another reread, but it’s just so damn pretty. Zachary was hearing this one too. Get it, read it.

63) The Atrocity Archives by Charles Stross: This was recommended by many people, and it was a fun read. I’m hard pressed to recommend it to non-SF fans as it’s so genre referential that I wonder how much a non-SF fan would really get from it. This isn’t a problem, as all genre fiction has the element of the author being in conversation with other writers in the genre, but it was very strong in this one. Still, the central conceit was a very nice one, and the book was peppy and fun.