The Immortal Hulk #30 - Marvel Comics

IMMORTAL HULK No. 30, March 2020

Chock-full of more Kaiju than even the most ardent Japanese giant monster film fan could arguably ever imagine, Al Ewing’s script for Issue Thirty of “The Immortal Hulk” must have seemed like ‘manna from heaven’ for the majority of its 45,233 readers. For although the twenty page-periodical initially begins with a somewhat disconcerting discourse between Gamma Flight’s remaining members, as Puck, Titania and the Absorbing Man play cards over the refrigerated corpse of dead team-mate Walter Langkowski, it’s plot quickly shifts gear to cover “four giant monsters on the rampage -- including the one… destroying the Route 60 Interchange.”

What follows is just phenomenal action-packed penmanship, with the British writer cutting loose upon Phoenix with a quartet of fearsomely fanged behemoths, and drilling straight down to the enthralling terror the common person must feel when faced with such overwhelming destructive power. Indeed, despite this comic containing some awesome-looking, pulse-pounding pugilism from some of the Marvel Universe’s heaviest hitters such as Doc Samson and Mary MacPherran, it is arguably poor elderly Murray’s terrifying headlong flight down the darkening stairwells of the Arizona Herald building which is perhaps this publication’s most horrifying highlight.

Of course, there are some seriously spectacular moments to behold elsewhere within this book, not least of which is Titania choking a giant, lava-spewing amphibian with the crushed remains of an aeroplane, or Leonard striking another huge bullfrog-like entity so hard with his fists that “that sound -- like a clap of thunder -- that was its skull cracking --” But these sense-shattering sequences don’t quite convey the utter panic of the city’s pedestrians, as they desperately flee for safety, some with babes in their arms, whilst being ruthlessly eaten alive by large leech-like organisms; “I -- I can’t describe what I’m seeing --”

Packing each and every panel with dynamic pencilling is Joe Bennett, whose attention to detail makes the utterly insane obliteration of the metropolis even more engrossing as its demolition unfolds. Many artists would debatably be happy with simply depicting such memorable titans of annihilation such as Roxxon Bio-Asset #PXK004: “Bradbury”, but the Brazilian takes his work even further by dutifully picking out every individual ceiling lighting unit inside the numerous floors of each fast-falling multi-storey office building…

The regular cover art of "IMMORTAL HULK" No. 30 by Alex Ross