HULK #8
Review by: flapjaxx
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Size: pages
Price: 2.99
This review contains spoilers, click here to read
[A man recently went to his "local" (an hour's drive away) comic shop and bought four recent back issues in the bargin bin. What follows is a review of one of these four, the first in a four-part series.]
This issue was purchased so that I could see just how bad this series supposedly is. On the other hand, I've read some contrarian opinions online, excusing Hulk's apparent mindlessness "because it's fun", and I've actually found quite a bit of sympathy for that viewpoint as well.
Though it's a quick read, Hulk #8 is a very hard comic for me to come to terms with. I think about the most difficult and the most disturbing works of art that I've ever tried to wrap my head around and form a conclusive opinion about: Ulysses, Finnegans Wake, all of Proust, Venus in Furs, the stuff Antonin Artaud wrote in the mental asylum, Citizen Kane, Inland Empire and Mulholland Dr. And now Hulk #8.
Judging Hulk #8, though there isn't much to it in terms of content, is like judging the fate of humanity. I start to form an opinion about it and before I know it the ramifications of that opinion become too far-reaching. Do I really want to be so hard on FUN? Or on the other hand do I really want to let such mindlessness slide? How can something so innocent seem so evil? Or how can something so evil seem so innocent? The question of Hulk #8 is harder to come to terms with than whether we should go back in time and kill Hitler as a baby, or kill his mother when she was just a girl. It's like playing God; you can see the cruelty of your own action even as you understand the universal traits--good and bad--of the thing weighing on the scale before you, waiting for you to damn it or send it to heaven.
What struck me first about Hulk #8 was the artwork, particularly the coloring. This is Arthur Adams and Frank Cho playing to the strength of a bright, crisp, cartoony coloring that's clearly been a premeditated. I don't know if the editor has made this visual style a mandate, or if it's just the whim of the colorist, but the artwork here seems so consistent. It jives well with the Hulk renderings of Ed Guinness that I've seen, though he's absent from this particular issue. Even the "HULK" logo looks fantastic, the way it's inked, the way it's colored. The whole thing looks great, a real collectivized, solid effort. They really know what they're doing, in how they present this book. It "pops". It pops off the page and it actually almost reminds me of an extension of Pop Art, that's how clean and surfacially attractive it is.
The writing knows what it's doing, too. Both stories are simply the next installments of what I assume are 3- or 4- or 6- or 8-part fight scenes. I assume that all the storylines in this series have been nothing more than fight scenes. Stories seem to be synonymous with fight scenes--more on that aspect later.
I was shocked, upon opening to the first page, to find that Hulk's "Joe Fixit" personality had returned. Wow, I thought Jeph Loeb these days was purely meaningless and shallow--yet here he's continuing something from Peter David's epochal run? Actually, though, upon reflection the reader discovers that there's no reason for the Hulk to be "Joe Fixit". (In fact, it seems like this Hulk changes identities when he gets punched hard enough.) I suppose the Joe Fixit-thing is an excuse to get Hulk in Vegas...but really, does it matter that this is "Las Vegas"? Couldn't the buildings be those of any other city? Likewise, in the back-up story Hulk fights some super-heroines in front of Mount Rushmore--but couldn't it just as easily have been in front of a mountain, or in front of any other monument? The culture of where Hulk is doesn't really matter beyond the very surface. "Hey, we're in Vegas!" "Hey, we're on Mount Rushmore!" You could easily make a new comic from this one by changing the backgrounds slightly and altering a few place-names from a few word balloons: "Hey, we're in Paris!" "Hey, we're on the Tower of Pisa!" It wouldn't matter to the story at all, because there isn't much of a story.
So, since it doesn't really matter what Hulk you've got (Red, Green, J. Fixit Gray) or where he is, it comes as no surprise to discover that heroes opposing Hulk don't matter either. In the first story it's Hulk vs. Sentry, Moonknight and Ms. Marvel. It may just as well be Hulk vs. Thor, Daredevil and Rogue, or Hulk vs. Hercules, Wolverine and Venom. It does not matter. There's nothing particular or story-driven about who Hulk fights. In the second story, in all fairness, there are like two word balloons in which She-Hulk references the fact that she's a "Hulk" too and she's related to Bruce Banner--those words add, if not depth, then at least the semblance of there being a narrative rationale for her to be written in a Hulk story.
It's easy to dismiss Loeb's Hulk because it's just a series of fight scenes. On the other hand, as mentioned above, you can just excuse the fight scenes as "FUN" and then feel free to enjoy them. I was opting to do the latter, until a strange unease set in just before I finished the issue. I started to think, Aren't fight scenes generally what we expect to be the "payoff" of other, better comic series? People clamored to watch Superman face Darkseid at the end of Final Crisis: "THIS SIMPLE FIGHT will justify all the difficult, unenjoyable pages Morrison has put us through!" That is what many were saying before buying Final Crisis #7. Recently people cheered Old Man Logan when he fought and decapitated the Red Skull in Wolverine #72: "Sure, the issue only took four minutes to read, and we waited three months for those four minutes of reading time, but--DAMN that fight was AWESOME! TOTALLY WORTH IT!!! 5/5!!!"
All Loeb's Hulk IS are these fight scenes. Sure, on the one hand, that reflects poorly on Loeb's Hulk, because it shows us the value of leading up to fight scenes; when these scenes are absent, the "story" seems juvenile and stupid. But on the other hand doesn't this also show us how stupid fight scenes are, period? With other contemporary comics it's like we bide our time, run our eyes over tedious hipster dialogue and scenes full of paper-thin (literally) villanous masterminds slowly building their imaginary forces in a way that seems very pseudo-smart and methodical...all toward the end, in the final issue, of letting these motifs fall by the wayside so we can watch a stupid fight. It's like acts 1-5 of a 6-part comic series may as well be a mix of: 1) scenes from a television sitcom (that a young adult would watch), 2) scenes from a television drama (that a young adult would watch), or 3) scenes from a science-fiction story (that it'd take an adult writer to write)...but then in the final act the whole thing pretty much devolves into a childish fight scene, the storyboard version of what a 5-year-old would do with his action figures. And this is the "pay off", remember. We pretend to be a little bit more adult for 5 acts in order to justify being outright children again in the 6th act.
And then we say Jeph Loeb is wrong for just giving us what we REALLY want upfront. Maybe Loeb's cut too close to the bone. "No, comic books AREN'T just stupid fight scenes!" we yell, insulted. "I don't read comics for the fight scenes at all!" And yet all our stories build toward them, and so many of them are just Loeb Hulk stories at heart, with a little more dressing around them to hide that fact. Is this cruel truth what Jeph Loeb is really showing us here, perhaps unintentionally?
I don't know; it makes me uneasy.
I just looked at a sales chart and this series is no longer selling 100,000 copies a month, like it was six months ago. It's dropped down to like 75,000, which I guess provides a little bit of comfort for me within the broader, very unsettling nature of my glimpse into Jeph Loeb's Hulk.
This issue was purchased so that I could see just how bad this series supposedly is. On the other hand, I've read some contrarian opinions online, excusing Hulk's apparent mindlessness "because it's fun", and I've actually found quite a bit of sympathy for that viewpoint as well.
Though it's a quick read, Hulk #8 is a very hard comic for me to come to terms with. I think about the most difficult and the most disturbing works of art that I've ever tried to wrap my head around and form a conclusive opinion about: Ulysses, Finnegans Wake, all of Proust, Venus in Furs, the stuff Antonin Artaud wrote in the mental asylum, Citizen Kane, Inland Empire and Mulholland Dr. And now Hulk #8.
Judging Hulk #8, though there isn't much to it in terms of content, is like judging the fate of humanity. I start to form an opinion about it and before I know it the ramifications of that opinion become too far-reaching. Do I really want to be so hard on FUN? Or on the other hand do I really want to let such mindlessness slide? How can something so innocent seem so evil? Or how can something so evil seem so innocent? The question of Hulk #8 is harder to come to terms with than whether we should go back in time and kill Hitler as a baby, or kill his mother when she was just a girl. It's like playing God; you can see the cruelty of your own action even as you understand the universal traits--good and bad--of the thing weighing on the scale before you, waiting for you to damn it or send it to heaven.
What struck me first about Hulk #8 was the artwork, particularly the coloring. This is Arthur Adams and Frank Cho playing to the strength of a bright, crisp, cartoony coloring that's clearly been a premeditated. I don't know if the editor has made this visual style a mandate, or if it's just the whim of the colorist, but the artwork here seems so consistent. It jives well with the Hulk renderings of Ed Guinness that I've seen, though he's absent from this particular issue. Even the "HULK" logo looks fantastic, the way it's inked, the way it's colored. The whole thing looks great, a real collectivized, solid effort. They really know what they're doing, in how they present this book. It "pops". It pops off the page and it actually almost reminds me of an extension of Pop Art, that's how clean and surfacially attractive it is.
The writing knows what it's doing, too. Both stories are simply the next installments of what I assume are 3- or 4- or 6- or 8-part fight scenes. I assume that all the storylines in this series have been nothing more than fight scenes. Stories seem to be synonymous with fight scenes--more on that aspect later.
I was shocked, upon opening to the first page, to find that Hulk's "Joe Fixit" personality had returned. Wow, I thought Jeph Loeb these days was purely meaningless and shallow--yet here he's continuing something from Peter David's epochal run? Actually, though, upon reflection the reader discovers that there's no reason for the Hulk to be "Joe Fixit". (In fact, it seems like this Hulk changes identities when he gets punched hard enough.) I suppose the Joe Fixit-thing is an excuse to get Hulk in Vegas...but really, does it matter that this is "Las Vegas"? Couldn't the buildings be those of any other city? Likewise, in the back-up story Hulk fights some super-heroines in front of Mount Rushmore--but couldn't it just as easily have been in front of a mountain, or in front of any other monument? The culture of where Hulk is doesn't really matter beyond the very surface. "Hey, we're in Vegas!" "Hey, we're on Mount Rushmore!" You could easily make a new comic from this one by changing the backgrounds slightly and altering a few place-names from a few word balloons: "Hey, we're in Paris!" "Hey, we're on the Tower of Pisa!" It wouldn't matter to the story at all, because there isn't much of a story.
So, since it doesn't really matter what Hulk you've got (Red, Green, J. Fixit Gray) or where he is, it comes as no surprise to discover that heroes opposing Hulk don't matter either. In the first story it's Hulk vs. Sentry, Moonknight and Ms. Marvel. It may just as well be Hulk vs. Thor, Daredevil and Rogue, or Hulk vs. Hercules, Wolverine and Venom. It does not matter. There's nothing particular or story-driven about who Hulk fights. In the second story, in all fairness, there are like two word balloons in which She-Hulk references the fact that she's a "Hulk" too and she's related to Bruce Banner--those words add, if not depth, then at least the semblance of there being a narrative rationale for her to be written in a Hulk story.
It's easy to dismiss Loeb's Hulk because it's just a series of fight scenes. On the other hand, as mentioned above, you can just excuse the fight scenes as "FUN" and then feel free to enjoy them. I was opting to do the latter, until a strange unease set in just before I finished the issue. I started to think, Aren't fight scenes generally what we expect to be the "payoff" of other, better comic series? People clamored to watch Superman face Darkseid at the end of Final Crisis: "THIS SIMPLE FIGHT will justify all the difficult, unenjoyable pages Morrison has put us through!" That is what many were saying before buying Final Crisis #7. Recently people cheered Old Man Logan when he fought and decapitated the Red Skull in Wolverine #72: "Sure, the issue only took four minutes to read, and we waited three months for those four minutes of reading time, but--DAMN that fight was AWESOME! TOTALLY WORTH IT!!! 5/5!!!"
All Loeb's Hulk IS are these fight scenes. Sure, on the one hand, that reflects poorly on Loeb's Hulk, because it shows us the value of leading up to fight scenes; when these scenes are absent, the "story" seems juvenile and stupid. But on the other hand doesn't this also show us how stupid fight scenes are, period? With other contemporary comics it's like we bide our time, run our eyes over tedious hipster dialogue and scenes full of paper-thin (literally) villanous masterminds slowly building their imaginary forces in a way that seems very pseudo-smart and methodical...all toward the end, in the final issue, of letting these motifs fall by the wayside so we can watch a stupid fight. It's like acts 1-5 of a 6-part comic series may as well be a mix of: 1) scenes from a television sitcom (that a young adult would watch), 2) scenes from a television drama (that a young adult would watch), or 3) scenes from a science-fiction story (that it'd take an adult writer to write)...but then in the final act the whole thing pretty much devolves into a childish fight scene, the storyboard version of what a 5-year-old would do with his action figures. And this is the "pay off", remember. We pretend to be a little bit more adult for 5 acts in order to justify being outright children again in the 6th act.
And then we say Jeph Loeb is wrong for just giving us what we REALLY want upfront. Maybe Loeb's cut too close to the bone. "No, comic books AREN'T just stupid fight scenes!" we yell, insulted. "I don't read comics for the fight scenes at all!" And yet all our stories build toward them, and so many of them are just Loeb Hulk stories at heart, with a little more dressing around them to hide that fact. Is this cruel truth what Jeph Loeb is really showing us here, perhaps unintentionally?
I don't know; it makes me uneasy.
I just looked at a sales chart and this series is no longer selling 100,000 copies a month, like it was six months ago. It's dropped down to like 75,000, which I guess provides a little bit of comfort for me within the broader, very unsettling nature of my glimpse into Jeph Loeb's Hulk.
Story: 2 - Average
Art: 4 - Very Good
Art: 4 - Very Good
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