The Immortal Hulk #11 - Marvel Comics

IMMORTAL HULK No. 11, March 2019

Revealed at the 2018 New York Comic Con’s “Marvel: True Believers” super-secret “photography prohibited” panel, and published after the sad death of Stan “The Man” Lee, this first instalment to Al Ewing’s “Hulk in Hell” story-arc must have raised far more questions with its loyal “Hulk-heads” fan-base than its debatably dialogue-heavy plot answered. Indeed, the twenty-page periodical’s narrative genuinely seems to enjoy conjuring up all manner of puzzling enigmas during Jackie McGee’s emotional walkabout through the empty wasteland alongside this book’s emaciated Green Goliath, as the pair bizarrely encounter the sightless shell of Rick Jones, the “late Mister McGee” and “Banner’s father-in-law” Thunderbolt Ross; “You wreck a city, and Doctor Strange looks for a retirement home for you. Iron Man looks for a paradise planet to put you on. Your anger… it’s indulged, Even respected. Mine is dismissed -- If I’m lucky.”   

Admittedly, these oft-times heart-wrenching conundrums do arguably help provide the Arizona Herald’s news reporter with some fairly interesting character development, even when they’re just used to either reaffirm her ‘ultimate’ desire to “step into a Gamma machine” or depict her uselessly appealing to Jones’ corpse to transform into his Hulk so as to help Bruce’s incarnation in a battle against Thaddeus’ Red version. But ultimately, nothing particularly progressively notable appears to occur within the British writer’s script until its very end when to McGee’s horror her enraged companion literally tears his blood-coloured assailant to shreds before the distraught woman’s eyes, and in the distance Doctor Brian Banner all-knowingly turns to his apparently captive son so as to inform him that he’s better off without his super-strong, ever-angry alter-ego.

Perhaps far more successful than this comic’s story-line therefore, is Joe Bennett’s dynamic pencilling, which quite mesmerizingly manages to easily carry the reader on through some of this book’s more mundane, overly-wordy conversational pieces, like when Eugene Judd manfully takes charge of a seemingly mentally defeated Crusher Creel or Ewing waxes lyrical as to what he believes Hell to be. In fact, the Brazilian’s atmospherically ruinous landscape of the One Below All’s netherworld is questionably only outdone as the bona fide highlight of "This World Our Hell" by his later gratuitously grisly artwork portraying the Hulk’s anger-fuelled fisticuffs with his heavily-muscled red-hued nemesis.

The regular cover art of "IMMORTAL HULK" No. 11 by Alex Ross