Incredible Hulk: Incredible Hercules

Collects: Incredible Hulk #106-11 (2007)

Released: May 2008 (Marvel)

Format: 152 pages / color / $14.99 / ISBN: 9780785129912

What is this?: Amadeus Cho, the seventh-smartest person on the planet, gathers a ragtag bunch to save the Hulk and prove he’s not a killer.

The culprits: Writer Greg Pak and pencilers Gary Frank, Leonard Kirk, and Carlo Pagulayan

The follow-up to Planet Hulk, which ran from Incredible Hulk #92-105, should logically run in Incredible Hulk #106-111. That just makes sense, right? Of course.

But Hulk: The Incredible Hercules, which reprints those issues, is not the logical continuation of the story. No, sir. That story is too big to be continued in Incredible Hulk, instead getting its own miniseries, World War Hulk.

So Incredible Hercules can’t tell the main story. What’s left for it to do? Tell a story in which the Hulk is a secondary character — maybe even tertiary. Bold! Daring! Perhaps incredibly stupid!

The protagonist is teenager Amadeus Cho, the “seventh smartest person in the world,” who can take out tanks with a pebble. Thanks to a chance meeting with the Hulk before Planet Hulk, Cho is certain the Hulk isn’t a monster; to prove it, he gathers a team including Namora and former Champions Angel and Hercules. They hie themselves to New York to stop Hulk from committing atrocities or maybe verify he isn’t doing so.

Writer Greg Pak has to be certain not to tread on the toes of the main story. He can reference Hulk destroying New York or capturing the heroes who shanghaied him to a gladiator planet or taking out Sentry, but he can’t delve into it as fully as one might want. He has to stay on the periphery of the story. Cho is his vehicle to do this, leading his team to prevent New York from blowing up and convincing the Hulk he’s not a monster. The estimate of Cho’s intelligence seems entirely too low; if he were a supervillain, he would be entirely too effective. Cho’s character is that of an irritant: he’s so smart he thinks he knows better than everyone else, and the most annoying thing is he’s right. It’s fun to watch him run mental rings about Angel; Hercules certainly thinks so too.

The pacing is entirely off. It takes Cho two issues to get to New York and confront Hulk, and the next (#108) is wasted on contrasting the attitudes of Rick Jones and Miek, the Hulk’s first and latest sidekicks. The issue feels like filler, a needless flashback, and it saps the momentum of the story: the conflict has been launched, and then Pak presents readers with two opposing visions of what the Hulk is, a philosophical argument in text boxes. Never mind that neither Rick nor Miek makes an important contribution to Incredible Hercules; their views are put forward as credible and significant. (NOTE: After writing this review, I learned the conflict between these two is important in the main World War Hulk story. Given that I had no idea about the tie-in, I have to feel this element of the story is a failure.)

The second half is divided between saving the collapsing rubble that is New York, Cho arguing with Hulk over the Hulk’s essential nature, and absorbing the spillover from World War Hulk. Either of the first two could have been an effective story, given the space and development afforded by this book. But with three issues to work with, and working with that spillover, there’s not enough room for any of those threads to support significant interest.

So the overall story is weak and disjointed. Does this work to launch the book in its new direction, a Cho / Hercules team up? Yes and no. Cho is definitely developed enough in the book, and although he’s an annoying little know-it-all, I could see him as a sidekick / partner in a book. However, Hercules is just one of his teammates, despite getting cover billing — perhaps the supporting character with the most screen time, but without anything other than a willingness to listen to Cho and an ability to believe the best in Hulk to distinguish him. This book doesn’t make me want to read a Hercules solo book. It doesn’t make me want to read a Cho book, for that matter; he’s just too annoying.

A sign of Incredible Hercules’s second-rate status is in the art: pencils are divvied equally between Gary Frank, Leonard Kirk, and Carlo Pagulayan. Marvel can’t even be bothered to make them in sets of two; Frank has the first two issues, then one by Kirk, two by Pagulayan, then the final issue by Kirk. They’re all good artists with connections to the characters — Pagulayan worked on Planet Hulk, Frank worked on several Incredible Hulk issues during the Peter David run, and Kirk is the definitive modern artist of Namora, given his work on Agents of Atlas. Still, three pencilers in six issues is never a good sign.

Despite the book’s many flaws, I can’t deny there are more than a few fun moments, with Cho’s calm contrasting against the panic of Angel and others. Although I don’t think Hercules is a strong enough character to deserve his name in the title, Pak does seem to have a soft spot for him, giving him the larger-than-life good cheer and brawling nature that has marked his appearances and adding a strong, stubborn streak of loyalty to both Cho and the Hulk.

There are some small gems in here. This story can’t support itself; to be mine those gems, you have to also read World War Hulk.

Rating: (2 of 5)

Agents of Atlas

Collects: Agents of Atlas #1-6, Yellow Claw #1, Menace #11, Venus #1, Marvel Mystery Comics #82, Marvel Boy #1, Men’s Adventures #26, What If? (v. 1) #9 (1947, 1948, 1950, 1954, 1956, 1978, 2006)

Released: June 2007 (Marvel)

Format: 256 pages / color / $24.99 / ISBN: 9780785127123

In the previous post, I said some reviews were easy, some were hard. This is one of the hard ones.

I really wanted to like Agents of Atlas. Really, I did. I’d picked up issue #1 from a quarter bin, and I’d enjoyed it. I’d heard good things about writer Jeff Parker, mainly about his all ages work in the Marvel Adventures line and X-Men: First Class, and his Spider-Man / Wolverine story was the best part of a recent What If? TPB. I wasn’t familiar with artist Leonard Kirk, other than a somewhat forgettable Hulk story from that same What If? TPB. But the art looked excellent.

But I’m not entirely sold on the actual product. Agents takes six rarely used, pre-Silver Age Marvel heroes (Jimmy Woo, Ken Hale the Gorilla Man, M-11 the Human Robot, Venus, Marvel Boy, and Namora) who were teamed for one issue of What If? and puts them together again. On one hand, it takes a rarely used area of the Marvel Universe — the Golden (ne Yellow) Claw and his Fu Man Chu-lite machinations — and gives them an explanation beyond mere vaulting ambition or power madness. It also takes his original adversary, FBI agent Jimmy Woo, and elevates him the job of stopping the Golden Claw.

There is an interesting and entertaining conspiracy story here, although I’m not sure about the payoff measures up to the mystery’s setup. Parker and Kirk obviously have great fun playing with these vintage, barely used toys. Ken Hale is obviously the most entertaining, getting all the good lines, and Woo, a man out of time after a death and resurrection, is compelling: he’s occasionally baffled by our bright new present, but investigating and stopping the Golden Claw is more important, keeping him from seeming like a baffled newcomer the entire book. Kirk, more than Parker, does an excellent job of making Marvel Boy, who lived for years on Uranus, look and feel alien. Kirk’s Venus is suitably beautiful, and M-11 is appropriately retro — in fact, there’s a retro vibe throughout the entire book, even in Hale’s clothing. In fact, the art is uniformly well done, with excellent storytelling and design.

But the action is sparse and the plot slow. It takes more than four issues simply to gather the team, and they had four of the six together at the beginning. This seems like wasted space, shifting time and attention away from the investigation and action. What should have been big action scenes, where the team rolls up several arms of the evil Atlas Foundation, is a disappointing montage — the most disappointing is a fight against the children from The Village of the Damned, with a page of set-up ending with the kids beating the snot out of the team, but a narration box explains Marvel Boy regained enough telepathic control to defeat them. The limited time really doesn’t allow Parker to develop the characters past their new origins, which is a shame; they’re largely unexplored, and it would be nice to get something of an arc for more than Woo and Venus.

To an extent, Parker’s story is obsessed with the past, which would be fine for an ongoing but merely complicates things in a miniseries. Namora must be resurrected. Marvel Boy’s presence must be explained, given his apparent death in a Fantastic Four #165. The contradictions in Venus’s appearances in the Marvel Universe must be explained by complicating / changing her origin. Even M-11 is altered, with the final pages of the series substantially changing his original origin story, which readers can read for themselves in the volume. The Yellow Claw sheds his horrible, racist name, which is frankly welcome. Still, that much retconning is never a good idea, and only Hale is left uncomplicated — which is perhaps why he’s the most fun part of the book.

Regardless of what Amazon says, this book is available only as one of Marvel’s Premiere hardcovers, so I put off buying it for a year, hoping there will be a paperback. (There won’t be.) There are extras in a hardcover that wouldn’t be in a paperback: reprints of the agents’ first appearances from the ‘40s and ‘50s and the team’s first appearance in What If? #9. The reprints are mainly interesting from a historical standpoint; the reasons superhero comics weren’t popular in the ‘50s go beyond cultural zeitgeist. The non-superhero comics — Menace #11, featuring the creation of the Human Robot, and Men’s Adventures #26, Gorilla Man’s first appearance — are the best, although I’m not sure they are the best of their genres for the decade. The issue of What If? is pretty good, though, with writer Don Glut having fun with a relatively inconsequential idea from Roy Thomas.

Also included in the Premiere version is a lot of promotional interviews and concept sketches detailing the creation of Agents. Sometimes this is interesting; it is always promotional material, though. A condensed version hitting the highlights would have been welcome. I’ve already bought the damn book; you don’t have to sell it to me again.

This book should be fun, given the creators’ enthusiasm and ability, but it isn’t most of the time. It’s tough to recommend this book, then; as a complete story, it falls short. The proposed ongoing series written by Parker might change that: as an opening arc, exploring these characters and moving them beyond their new status quos might be more entertaining and make this more palatable as a setup.

Rating: (2 of 5)