Best of this Week: The Immortal Hulk #24 (Legacy #741) – Al Ewing, Joe Bennet, Ruy Jose, Belardino Brabo, Marc Deering, Roberto Poggi, Paul Mounts and Cory Petit
There are two people in every mirror.
The central theme of The Immortal Hulk has been the reconciliation between the two sides of oneself. For Bruce Banner, it’s himself and the many other personalities that reside inside his mind and body, most notably that of the Devil Hulk. Banner, knowing that because of The Hulk and his connection to the Green Door to Hell he’ll never be able to die or find true peace, has given himself all in to The Devil Hulk’s plan of ending the world as they know it. The Devil Hulk himself is a dark and menacing entity that has some kind of good intention, but a myriad of evil hidden under it.
With an unkillable Hulk and a massive ego, some people are trying to do whatever they can to bring Hulk down and save humanity. One such man is General Reg Fortean. Over the course of this series, Fortean has observed Hulk, taken measures to contain or defeat him time after time. His most recent effort of using Rick Jones’s body to resurrect that of Abomination seemed to work until Banner ripped Jones out of the Abomination shell, saving his old friend. Fortean, however, get s it back and transplants himself into the body of the villain.
This was his biggest mistake. There’s something about peering into The Green Door that corrupts the soul and Fortean cast himself into that rabbit hole with reckless abandon.
This book begins with an amazing shot of the end of all things, potentially the first. We see Galan of Taa, the future Galactus, bathed in the green glow of the Cosmos, the first sign that The Green Door has always been there and that at one point it was wide open. Soon after we cut to the accident that gave Bruce Banner his Hulk powers with the caption of there being two faces in the mirror, “the one you think you know…and the other one.”
Paul Mounts colors each of these of these pages with varying levels of green. The first of Galan with bright shots of green offset by other colors, most notably Galan’s signature purple, echoing back to his origin by Jack Kirby and Stan Lee. Banner’s accident, in the form of a double page spread, is drawn and coated in an overwhelming Green tint while the rest of the book keeps the sinister Green relegated to Hulk and several backgrounds. It gives off a dark feeling that the Hulk and the presence of the Green Door in general is always lurking about, Mounts does his best to sow that feeling of uncomfortability throughout the book with darkly vibrant colors.
Joe Bennett doesn’t let those colors go to waste as his pencils are as amazing as they have been for the entire run of this story. His art has been instrumental for the success of the story with its focus on body horror, general gore and the extreme sense of scale that makes you feel like intense weights are bearing down on you in every instance. Every shot of the Hulk talking with half of his face ripped off is terrifying as Cory Petit letter it perfectly, emphasizing that at the moment, Hulk has no lips to speak of. It’s fleshy and gross and made even worse as Hulk throws his removed face at another soldier and it sizzles, burning him.
Fortean also goes about using his Abomination bodies abilities to try and spit acid at Hulk. It splashes forth in all of its frothy, bright green goodness. Hulk dodges, it hits reinforcement soldiers and turns them into gross masses of boils, blood and bones as they scream, unable to stop what’s happening to them. Bennet makes you feel the pain and terror by drawing their mouths agape, teeth bared and eyes wide open in pain. Their blood is overpowered by the green of the acid spit and they just melt away.
By this point, Shadow Base’s second-in-command, Doctor Charlene Gowan reconciles with who she is and what she’s done in all of her efforts to contain The Hulk. she realizes that she’s enabled Fortean to become this monster and that she had many opportunities to stop him. She felt the need to serve under Fortean when her obligation to him was the fact that he got her out of prison, gave her a second chance, but that’s changed. His obsession had taken him over and he’s killed his own men and allowed himself to become the monster that he hates. She tells the other personnel to stand down, leaving only Fortean and Hulk to fight it out.
Fortean sort of manges to get the upper hand with a mean right cross and acid directly in the face, but Hulk plunges a finger into Fortean’s eye and ultimately his brain, killing him. They end up in the Below-Place, the realm of The One Below All and Fortean sees the error of his obsession. He sees the hellscape that his soul would be damned to every time he died and he panics. He is terrified, but there’s no time for him to correct what he’s done as Joe Fixit snaps his neck, killing his soul and any chance of him coming back to life.
It’s nihilistic. It’s dark. It’s a sign that once you cross that threshold, there’s nothing left for you but a hellish wasteland. Even at the end of all things, once everything has died and the new world is supposed to begin…there’s a flicker of green and a post credit sequence that spells doom for the future of the Marvel Universe, hell – every Marvel Universe, if The Green Door isn’t closed.
Al Ewing, Joe Bennett and the rest of this creative team have forged something evil. Something dark and twisted that Marvel hasn’t quite seen in years. I gleefully anticipate every issue of the Hulk to see just how dark things will get. There’s this cold certainty to every word that The Devil Hulk says and Banner’s father being the main demon of the Below-Place has this awful feeling of depraved destiny, that maybe the world was right to fear Hulk. Bruce Banner and his alter egos will end the world and it can’t be pretty. It will be violent, bloody and ultimately hopeless.
The other person in the mirror is the one you don’t want to see.
Ty Talks Comics 