The Incredible Hulk [2023] #17 - Marvel Comics

THE INCREDIBLE HULK No. 17, November 2024

Described by its New York City-based publisher as beginning ‘the crescendo to Legacy Issue Nine Hundred of Incredible Hulk’, Phillip Kennedy Johnson’s opening for “City Of The Idols” certainly should have utterly enthralled any Hulk-heads with a genuinely touching tale of two girls being lured to a truly unpleasant fate in Las Vegas. But whilst the destiny of the wannabe actresses easily holds the attention, especially once its revealed that they’ve inadvertently walked straight into the heart of an underground vampire coven, the rest of this twenty-page periodical’s plot is arguably far less surprising; “I knew you nearly four thousand years ago. We died together. Our bones were entombed together.”

For starters the titular character simply just walks straight through “the Entertainment Capital of the World” without so much as batting an eye, right up to the entranceway of Lycana’s subterranean temple, and is then rather disappointingly just invited down to meet Eldest. Such matter-of-fact penmanship undoubtedly allows the central antagonists to lock horns as quickly as possible. However, it must surely have made some readers feel the American author had missed a trick not to show the founding Avenger facing off against some of the foul fanged-fiends which he had just established litter the dark streets of the gambling metropolis.

Likewise, the actual battle between Bruce Banner’s alter-ego and his regrettably ordinary-looking female foe may strike some as being a rather ‘fight-by-numbers’ affair, seeing as it’s already been established in past instalments, and then reinforced in this actual publication, that the Hulk cannot physically hurt his opponent. This knowledge, driven home by Eldest’s disagreeable haughtiness, always points to the anti-hero’s human side caving in to her demands to sacrifice the Green Goliath so as to save poor Charlie Tidwell, and resultantly this book's narrative delivers no shock whatsoever when the gamma scientist does just that.

What does strike home though are Nic Klein’s layouts, which try to hold the audience’s eyes with a staggering buffet of physical horror, emotional despair, and bold-faced brutality. Indeed, in many ways it’s a pity the illustrator didn’t stick to showing Eldest in her more Lovecraftian-manifestation, rather than return to pencilling her as a simply smartly-dressed individual whose hands just happen to transform into pointy tentacles similar to James Cameron’s mimetic polyalloy T-1000 shapeshifting assassin.

Writer: Phillip Kennedy Johnson, Artist: Nic Klein, and Color Artists: Matthew Wilson with Nic Klein