Best of Marvel Week of October 23rd, 2019

Best of this Week: The Immortal Hulk #25 (Legacy #742) – Al Ewing, Germán García, Chris O’Halloran, Joe Bennett, Ruy José and Paul Mounts

At the end of the Universe, there is only the Breaker of Worlds.

Many issues of Immortal Hulk have tackled the horror of what comes next, the existence of an apocalyptic Green Hell for those touched by Gamma radiation being the most terrifying. This issue, however, doesn’t focus on what comes AFTER life, but what is coming for the last flickers of it that will exist at the end of time.

Following an alien being of some sort, named Par%l, we join hir as they travel to the last known vestige of the Universe’s knowledge. A planet called O%los, a beautiful planet with chromatic seas, crystalline superstructures and a general feeling of happiness. Par%l hopes that by beating the Breaker-Apart to O%los, that they might be able to warn the nine billion souls that live there or save the knowledge stored therein. From what we learn of hir interaction with another being of her kind, every other planet in the Universe has been destroyed by a monster of some kind.

These pages are characterized by García’s use of otherworldly visuals and O’Halloran’s use of warm and pastel colors. Par%l and her companion Farys look almost microbial with extended “necks,” long, almost tube like bodies, capped with heads that contain crystals of some sort in them. It’s abstract in a way that signifies that humans have long since been annihilated and that the beings at the far end of the universe are pretty much all that’s left.

The pages before this have been characterized by bright and lively colors. Warm oranges and yellows have signified life and the hope that knowledge could be saved. The multi colors of O%los even brim with light and a feeling that everything will be all right. O’Halloran makes sure to set the mood of the unknown before ripping it away at the very last moment.

As Par%l arrives to the orbit of O%los, in the distance, they spy a green light.

In an instant, O%los is beset upon by the form of The Immortal Hulk. He floats through space, not speaking a single word, but saying everything he needed to with a clothesline.

He obliterates the planet.

Par%l observes his every movement. From his crashing through several moons and lifeless planets, winding up his fist, to the impact of the hit. The crystals of O%los are spread across the vastness of space, the planet is turned into a combination of glass, dust and death as nine billion beings are killed and all of life knowledge if destroyed. What was once a colorful environment is then replaced with a bright green and the darkest blacks as the destroyed remains of O%los float around hir.

Par%l doesn’t understand and gathers the words for all of the things they’re seeing. They have never seen hands or arms before, but she finds the words, she has never seen a face before and above all, she had never seen a smile until the Breaker-Apart looks upon her minuscule and insignificant form. Hulk is terrifying here as he has now become planet sized or larger, able to shift his size enough to crush stars and even suns. He doesn’t have regular eyes as they just glow with evil Green Door Energy.

When Par%l tries to communicate with him, simply asking “Why?” They are met with horrors unimaginable. I’d imagine García is a fan of Jeff Lemire and Andrea Sorrentino’s Gideon Falls because the next few pages are beautiful double page spreads of Eldritch terror in a similar style. It’s not fair to draw comparisons, but in my opinion they are absolutely prevalent.

The shots of thousands of people with their eyes blotted out, screaming in fear without any words or even sound as they’re coated in an evil green and black is more than mind numbingly scary. The next shot of The One Below All showing his fleshy, mucus-y visage under the guise of Hulk’s horribly distorted and ripped apart body with the background showing a city razed to the ground is terrifying. The red lettering by Cory Petit only stands to make the scene more scary as he’s able to convey what The One Below All says in a way that makes him seem out of this dimension.

He is powerful in a way that is incomprehensible. This is shown even more on the final spread where he is shown with tunnels where his eyes were as he’s surrounded by faces in the melted flesh of the Hulk’s body. He says that he has eaten all of the selves that were in the Hulk and that the mystery of his own existence frightens him, but he will kill all of life to be alone.

Par%l is unable to take it and hir shell cracks, forming a fly containing all of hir knowledge of the future. Somehow it travels through time into the hands of one of the Hulk’s oldest enemies.

To say this book had me terrified would be an understatement. As I turned each page, the horrors only became more visceral, more dreadful. The Hulk will destroy the world, not just one, but all of them. Of the many futures that Marvel presents, I believe this one. The One Below All is written as if they are the truth. They will kill everything and there is nothing any living being can do to stop it. Maybe Par%l landing in the hands of who it does will be the catalyst to avoiding that future, but like Thanos, The One Below All might just be inevitable.

Germán García’s art was phenomenal here, just beautiful to look at with a page turner everywhere. It had vast a detailed visuals when things seemed to have an upswing, but when the time came for Hulk to appear and collapse the entire idea, García hammered home just how hopeless things were. Chis O’Halloran colored this book like a champ and really sold the desolation that The Green Light brought with it. He’s able to easily elicit a feeling of fear with such a simple and common color through his use of a particular shade, kind of a toxic color accentuated by a whiteness in the center.

What’s most enjoyable about this is Al Ewing’s ability to weave a tale that goes beyond the initial premise of an unkillable Hulk, to one where an interdimensional God using the Hulk’s body sniffs out every last light in the universe. There’s so much story potential and it’s a wonder where he could possibly go to reach this point if it’s not stopped.

This book is absolutely fitting of the horror of October and is a definite Scary Recommend.

Best of Marvel: Week of October 16th, 2019

Best of this Week: Absolute Carnage #4 – Donny Cates, Ryan Stegman, JP Mayer, Frank Martin, Jay Leisten and Clayton Cowles

God is Coming and Eddie Brock is ready for him.

Things have not been looking good for Eddie, Peter and the rest of the heroes of New York. Carnage’s brutality and efficiency has seen him gain the upper hand at every turn imaginable, allowing him to snatch up codices from almost everyone he’s encountered. Ghost Riders haven’t been safe, Spider-People haven’t been safe and even girls with magical powers over hell haven’t been able to stop Carnage’s warpath.

The last issue saw him take the appearance of Eddie Brock to infiltrate The Maker’s lab to steal the codices from Captain America, The Thing and Wolverine, taking everyone by surprise and seeing the Hulk use the Venom Symbiote himself. This issue follows up on that excellently by showing us the fallout of Hulk merging with Venom, Eddie dealing with the loss of his other again and the heroic efforts he makes to protect his son.

The book begins with an amazingly drawn and explosive punch by Venom Hulk. Carnage is laughing as he’s being put through a wall while clawing at Hulk’s eyes. The Symbiote is barely able to contain all of Hulk’s massive musculature as it appears to be tearing apart around his fist and forearm. The use of blur around the edges of the page sell you on the velocity of the punch and all of the rubble flying out as they go through the wall shows just how heavy and impactful the blow was. For added measure, there’s even a pigeon just flying by as it all happens.

As the fight is going on, Eddie and Peter take Normie and Ethan to The Maker’s armory to protect the kids from the Symbiote Zombies and Norman Osborn himself. Eddie is dead set on protecting the other heroes, but Peter tries to convince him to stay down with the rest of them. This issue gives us one of the best glimpses of the inner heroism of Eddie Brock as he looks at Spider-Man with the most desperate look possible, one eye stitched closed and asks him to let him do this. Spider-Man does and Eddie gathers Cap’s shield and maybe some kind of electric glove to go and protect everyone. Presumably, the events of Amazing Spider-Man #31 take place while Eddie is out fighting.

The next few pages are just strings of awesomely paced and spectacularly drawn fight scenes. Eddie, armed with the shield, fights his way through Carnage’s hordes and Miles Morales as an infected symbiote re-emerges. (Sorta ignoring the events of Miles’ own tie-in) Elsewhere, Venom Hulk and Carnage continue their romp around the warehouse district as Carnage is surprisingly holding his own against the black and green giant. Frank Martin and the various inkers really set the mood for the fight. The fires glow bright in the backgrounds with a vibrant red and white coloring to it, almost like a fiery mist. Rain crashes down around them and the inks are dark in the perfect places, really bringing out the deep red in Carnage’s color scheme as well as the black veins that now coil around his body. As Carnage mushes Hulk into a wall, you can feel his expression of pain and rage, accentuated by the glowing green of his eyes.

Pinned under Cap’s shield with Miles bearing down on him, Eddie decides to use the shock glove to blast the symbiote off of the young Spider, allowing the two to finally re-team as Miles runs down what he learned while hearing Carnage’s thoughts. He warns that if he gets Hulk’s Codex and the Venom Symbiote, he’ll be unstoppable. In a surprise upset, Carnage overpowers the mind of the Hulk, turning him back into Banner and rips his spine right out as Eddie and Miles show up. It’s a disgusting scene as they always are with Cowles making sure to put as much emphasis as he can by giving it a nice “SHRIPP” sound effect in big, bold, red letters over an entirely black background.

Before we know it, Carnage is covered in the Venom Symbiote, becoming an ultra badass. Ryan Stegman has done a lot to redesign some of the elements of some symbiotes, but this Black Carnage is somehow so much cooler and so much better. He looks like a demon knight with the pauldrons with spikes, an improbable neck guard/collar and Maleficent-esque horns all crackling with hell energy. Eddie begins to lose all hope upon seeing him, but that feeling is washed away when Captain America, The Thing and Wolverine all show up to help in the fight.

Miles grabs Eddie and tells him that the Maker’s machine that was supposed to destroy the codices did no such thing and instead saved them all. The last moments of the book show the Doverton Avengers fight a losing effort against Carnage while Eddie punches the machine, giving his own inner monologue about how he feels something creeping up inside of him. The hope that he thought was lost. Surrounded by all of this blackness and despair, Carnage and all of his bringers of Death, Eddie punches his way to the light.

As the penultimate issue to Absolute Carnage, have to say that this event and the various tie-ins that have accompanied it have been absolutely amazing to read. I usually decry back to back event stories, especially since we had just come off the heels of War of the Realms, but Absolute Carnage fit the aesthetic of everything I love in stories. It’s dark, it’s bleak and it’s Absolutely Brutal.

Ryan Stegman can do no wrong here as his art style is amazing from start to finish, he has an eye for action scenes and makes great use of single a double page spreads to bring out the most in every scene. Even when the fighting is confined to a few panels, he manages to spring as many infected as he can into the space, making things feel claustrophobic and dangerous. Frank Martin’s colors give this book life, however, when they’re burning with darkness or glimmer with small glimpses of hope. They complete the amazing package by pulling the emotion out of you, whether you’re terrified or you have a bit of hope only or it to be ripped away.

JP Mayer and Jay Leisten help him by making sure that the pages have the perfect amount of darkness to them. The inks are phenomenal and really help to give off that feeling of hopelessness and danger in every scene, even better that most of this story takes place at night so the mood is always set.

I love that Eddie Brock is starting to be seen less as the villain who used to eat people’s brains and more as this responsible every-man that’s been caught in an extraordinary situation. When he got the Symbiote back at the end of Lee Price’s time in All-New, All Different Marvel, I never expected him to get this much heart. That’s the main thing that Donny Cates has contributed to this character, that feeling of heroism.

Eddie’s becoming a much better person than he ever was in the past, but at the same time, we know that he can never fully escape who he was. Even at the end of this issue there was a transcription of his first time in jail when he first met Cletus Kasady and it was so weird to see how unhinged Eddie was not too long ago.

As Absolute Carnage draws to a close (and with Venom Island on the horizon) I can’t wait to see what direction his story takes and how Eddie Brock could possibly see Avenger status in the far future. High recommend.

Best of Marvel: Week of October 2nd, 2019

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.