After a fairly humorous arc about the Amazons, and a one-shot about Herc’s origin story, the funny-business is over, as we head into the era of the Dark Reign and the earlier-trailed confrontation between Hera’s Olympian alliance and Athena and Hercules. Hera is the big bad of Hercules’ traditional myths, but she’s been largely absent from his modern adventures, perhaps to avoid too much trouble between her and Zeus; but Zeus is now dead, and she’s nominally in charge, which is the crux of the problem, as Athena’s convening of the Pantheon Council way back in #117 has got her all riled up. Athena, for her part, calls out Hera for being, well, Hera. However, the new God of Thunder has scored a rather unique achievement in the series so far: catching Athena off-guard by killing her champion, Aegis (given they’ll be visiting the afterlife in a few issues, one suspects he’ll be back). She’s usually set on Enigmatic, but she demonstrates a couple of different emotions here. On the Amadeus Cho front, there are a couple of important developments here: first, the revelation that the evil soap company that ran the contest in his origin is part of the Olympus Group; second, the return of Delphyne, who, as Queen of the Amazons, is one of Hera’s lieutenants now (though she’s surprised to find herself fighting him). That’s gotta hurt. There’s not a huge amount with Herc here. In the future plot developments department, it’s pretty clear Hebe is going to be persuaded into betraying Hera at some point. I was initially rather uncertain about the art for this instalment, but, one image of Herc aside, I thought it was quite good. This issue’s also ventures into one of the details of the MU that isn’t often brought up: that most people don’t believe the gods are actually gods. Norman Osborn doesn’t here, calling both Hera and Loki just crazy people (with superpowers); it makes a certain amount of sense, but, knowing what we the readers know, it seems a bit jarring.