The Immortal Hulk #42 - Marvel Comics

IMMORTAL HULK No. 42, March 2021

Featuring both the disbandment of Gamma Flight under the blinkered leadership of Henry Peter Gyrich, and the departure of Jackie McGee from the Arizona Herald following the newspaper’s appointment of a faceless interim editor, those readers able to navigate their way through Issue Forty-Two of “Immortal Hulk” certainly couldn’t argue that the comic doesn’t make some progress in telling Al Ewing’s ongoing narrative for Bruce Banner’s alter-ego. But the fact that the titular character doesn’t even appear within the entirety of the twenty-page periodical probably made quite a few Hulk-heads think that way just the same.

Indeed, just what the point of the British author’s sedentary script is for “A Game Of Consequences” isn’t particularly clear, unless of course the former “2000 A.D.” writer was simply desperate to pad out an entire publication with disinteresting conversational pieces in preparation for the return of the U-Foes as agents of the American government; “The Hulk is the most dangerous gamma creature to exist - - and Gamma Flight just walked out on their responsibility to catch him. But who needs them? Am I right, Doctor Utrecht?”

Admittedly, the book does still manage some moments of tension, such as when Doc Sasquatch threatens to lethally cut through one of Alpha Flight Space Station’s windows following his new commander’s threat that he’d “drain the gamma out of you” and “maybe take your pelt” to make a rug out of it, if Leonard didn’t remember the location of Shadow Base Site G pronto. But such well-penned scenes are regrettably few, and easily get lost amidst all of the dreary, dialogue-heavy deliberations which this comic’s formidably-sized cast spout on about throughout the rest of the book.

Debatably this magazine’s greatest weakness though must surely lie in editor Will Moss’ decision to utilise a quartet of different artists with which to sketch its interior layouts. All four illustrators, especially regular Joe Bennett, would seem perfectly capable to pencil a prodigious-looking panel or two. Yet because their sequences are scattered across the entire comic somewhat piecemeal, the audience is disconcertingly forced to momentarily readjust their eye for every other page.

The regular cover art of "IMMORTAL HULK" #42 by Alex Ross