An Idiot's Guide to World War Hulk: It's Here (C) Common

Now I know why the Posse needed me. If you go over to okayplayer.com right now, you can hear a lot of fools screaming that this issue gets an infinite smash factor. These are the same people who called Stillmatic a classic. The post-modern devaluation of standards of good and bad has now taken some of the greatest comics minds of my generation. For shame, PtP. For shame.

Figure 1: An Average Album

Not to get all Russian figure skating judge on you, but there are some clear elements of WWH that necessitate mandatory deductions. For one thing, the “puny human” and “smash” talk is overdone. Yes, it’s the Hulk and these are his signature lines. He doesn’t have to say them every page, and his adversaries don’t have to use them nearly so often. Should Ms. Marvel really be saying that Hulk smashed Black Bolt? That’s really her go-to verb in that situation?

More importantly, people need to get their fight standards up, because the fight with Black Bolt was just awesome, not insane, grotesque, over-the-top, the-Hulk-is-back-in-town-and-the-world-is-doomed awesome. Yes, watching Black Bolt’s voice peel back the skin on Hulk’s face transported me to a higher place Yes, the “I want to hear you scream” line was cold. Yes, waving his carcass around for the world to see was gangsta.

But can we please see the actual smashing? I need to know how Hulk got over on Black Bolt. Did Hulk take him down in a fair fight, or did he just get the jump on him with that flying leap and knock him out before Bolt could really get going? If it’s the latter, did he really do anything that cool? I could sneak up behind Liddell and smack him on the head with a 2X4, and I’ve won the fight. I demand this fight be given proper treatment in one of the side books this month, or I demand seeing Hulk throw Bolt around later in the series.

So let’s chill on the perfect smash factor talk.

However…

Man.

Man.

FUCKING A

There was some smashing.

Asteroids got smashed. It’s their fault for chilling out between Mars and Jupiter and not forming a planet like the rest of the rocks in its graduating class. And then Hulk jumped onto the Moon. This may be the underrated moment of the series. Only suckers dock their ship and use the airlock.

Let none of the preceding argument make the reader think that I do not recognize the fundamental coolness of how thoroughly Hulk smashed Black Bolt. Dude peeled back Hulk’s skin, and Hulk was on him three seconds later. My favorite moment of the encounter was cocky-ass Medusa talking up her man before the throwdown. We desperately needed a few panels with her afterwards, because now that he’s got his ass smashed, we all know there’s NO damn way she’s sticking with Black Bolt. After the fight Hulk was probably all like, “Woman, you like inhumans? This is my ace, the Brood.” Brood be like, “Sup darling? The X Men fucked up my thrown world. I gots to go fuck up their mansion, but how bout I holla at you on the way back?” And that’s how Medusa is gonna roll, because she tired of fucking her mute-ass cousin for all these years.

(Oh shit, son. Shelly knows some back story.)

Figure 2: PtP is for the ladies

And then there was the royal dicking Tony Starks receives on EVERY SINGLE PAGE of this book. Please don’t sleep on the feedback loop the Warbound sent straight to Tony’s dome. That’s absolutely critical, since it showed Tony he was not fucking with the same dumb Hulk of years gone by. Tony got his ass whupped so bad that Dr. Strange had to show up and TELL him he got his ass whupped. Damn.

Then there’s the fight itself. Legendary. Down by law. Everything you could expect from this series and more. I’ve got to say, Tony tried. That rocket fist is cool, and the ability to throw the Hulk through several buildings should not be underestimated.

However, two obvious mistakes doomed Tony to quick and brutal retribution. First, Iron Man punked himself with his pompous, Rumsfieldian “I will protect you” speech. That speech made me resolve to finally read Civil War, because I need to know what possible sequence of events could have made a tin can so gassed on himself. The writers deserve all the credit in the world for including the prototypical “bad guy talking shit halfway through the fight and making a really bad mistake in doing so.” I was really glad Hulk didn’t hear that speech, because he would have started laughing, which would have compromised his madness level.

But you really can’t blame Tony for getting himself smashed. The second, absolutely critical mistake that doomed him was not his fault. Right now, open a new tab, wiki “Iron Man’s Armor,” and note where it says that his brand new Hulkbuster Armor MKII has Tony “ready to tackle the Hulk upon his return from space.”

Ha.

Ha Ha

AHAHAHAA!!

“OH HELL...”

Figure 3: Oops

SOME STARKS FAN BOY RAN HIS MOUTH!!! HULK SAW THAT!! HIS SHIP HAS NET ACCESS!! NOW SOME BUSH VOTING STARK FAN BOY IS CRYING!!

Needless to say, Hulk slightly disagreed with Fan Boy’s assessment. Needless to say, Hulk SMASHED HIM THROUGH EVERY FUCKING FLOOR IN A 100 STORY BULDING. If we're honest with ourselves, we can say that WWH can end right now and we can’t complain, because we can't ask anything more than that. He took apart frickin’ Iron Man completely and in mere seconds.

But the folks at Marvel will deign to give us more goodness. Every time I think of that last panel, I crack a little smile, because I think of what Colonel Sanders and the rest of the Love Brigade must look like then they see Hulk coming out of the rubble even madder. They know their time is coming in Issue 2. I imagine this does not sit well with them.

Smash Factor: 4.33 out of 5. It's on.

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Worst Comic I Bought This Week: Uncanny X-Men #487

I spend a shitload of money on comics and while I wish they were all winners, odds are they are a couple of stinkers in the bunch. Every week, I'm going to post about the comic I wish I had left on the shelves. It goes without saying that there will be spoilers.

The Comic: Uncanny X-Men #487

Writer: Ed Brubaker

Artist: Salvador Larroca

Description: The X-Men are back from space! Well, half of them, anyway. The team is shattered, broken and separated. The group that has returned to earth is finding it much worse than how they left it-- especially underground. Attacks in the Morlock Tunnels immediately grab the X-Men’s attention. What do these attacks have to do with the future of the mutant race? Maybe special guest-star Storm can get to the bottom of all this!

Why It Sucked: Now that the mediocre "Rise & Fall of the Shi'ar Empire" which after 12 issues really didn't end, it just gave the editors a way to get Professor X his powers back (Once Magneto gets his powers back...or did that already happen...House of M will have been nothing more than an excuse to start three Wolverine origin minis and make everyone hate Brian Michael Bendis even more)...where was I? Oh yeah. This comic made no sense. The Morlocks are back and hatching some plan that involves hurting poor little Leech. Warpath flirts with Hepzibah over knives and Storm takes a break from her other two books (Black Panther - which should be renamed When Stormy Met T'Challa or Sleepless in Wakanda - and The Fantastic Six) because for some reason, Brubaker decides to bring up that old Storm used to run the Morlocks angle. That was the 80's, Ed. What kind of influence would Storm have over the Morlocks? That's like asking Jimmy Carter to end the Iraq War. Anyway, I'm going to pretend that Brubaker didn't write this shit.

Runner-Up: Countdown #47. Sure, Black Adam, murderer of maybe a million people, could hide out in Gotham and Batman wouldn't fucking know! Sure.

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An Idiot's Guide to World War Hulk: May Days

And off we go. The first two books of WWH are designed to get morons like me up to speed as to why Hulk will be smashing the good guys over the next few months. We get a lot of plot development with just a teeny tiny preview of the goodness that is to come.

The Incredible Hulk 106

The cover might be the smashingest thing about this book. Hulk looks more constipated than angry, so it won’t win any art awards, but it’s a solid concept. Hulk is grabbing the world, each hand significantly bigger than the gigantic low pressure system developing in the Atlantic. Fuck weather.

Once you open the cover, you’re getting a lot of She Hulk being remorseful and conflicted and degreened by head asshole in charge, Tony Stark. The panel where she smacks Tony upside the head is a nice precursor to what her cousin is going to do, and Tony’s cunning in using the head smack to his advantage actually has me a little worried he might be able to pull off something similar to the headliner. Reed Richards introduces himself to new readers as the kind of guy who seeks to capture little kids. Marvel even establishes a subdick, some guy named Dr. Sanders, who is clearly going to be the victim of a particularly gruesome smashing as a message to the head dicks. If this issue does nothing else, it establishes who the bad guys are, which the four little kids who still read comics will appreciate. WWH Commandment 2: Thou shalt not feel bad about the smashing.

Other than that, blah blah blah. I own a coyote, blah blah blah. I love my cousin but am conflicted about what he becomes, blah blah blah. The only real smashing that occurs are in the flashbacks to some of Hulk’s earlier, less notable ass kickings and when She Hulk punches Doc Sanders into the next county. I did ask for a little background, so I won’t complain too much. Yet we can reasonably expect this issue to contain the least amount of smashing for a long, long time.

SMASH FACTOR: 1 of 5.

World War Hulk Prologue

OH

SHIT!!!!

THAT’S WHAT I’M TALKING ABOUT!! HE HAS A SWORD HE DOESN’T NEED, BUT HE LIKES IT!! HE HAS A LESS POSITIVE OPINION OF SOME ALIEN SCAVENGERS TRYING TO JACK HIS SHIP!! HE THINKS THEY’RE ILLUMINATI AND HE THROWS REED AND DR. STRANGE INTO THE SUN!! THE TENSION MOUNTS!! ON WITH THE BODY COUNT!!

The sword should give us a lot of hope for the future of WWH. Hulk should remember how cool the sword is and either keep using it or come up with an even cooler and more unnecessary weapon. We can safely assume Hulk will employ cars, lampposts, and the rest of the usual suspects, but what if Hulk gets ahold of a chainsaw? I see no reason Hulk can’t tape a Glock to his back and put a couple slugs into the Thing at close range John McClain style. I’d also be open to some cut rate hero breaking Hulk’s sword, which would make him just that much more angry, because he likes it. The possibilities are endless.

The rest of the main story is pretty good with some nice flashbacks and old school Ironman pictures, but Mini Marvels steal the show. Anything that shows you don’t take yourself or your mega crossover event too seriously wins points with me, and it’s legitimately funny. For once I didn’t think Namor was dour and irrelevant, as his “the fish are good” line was one of the best. If Marvel wanted to do a four page Mini Marvel summary of every WWH issue, they’d have my support.

The only negative about the Prologue is that I’m starting to get real suspicious of Amadeus Cho and his potential to take up way too many pages that should be dedicated to smashing. So far he’s been fine and even a little entertaining. He’s got a mini-T.A.O. thing going on, and he seems to have the Hulk’s best interests in mind. But I do not need some kid executing Byzantine schemes in WWH unless they put Richards or Stark into compromising, green positions.

SMASH FACTOR: An enthusiastic 3.5 out of 5. I have vowed to give no issue of WWH more than a 5 of 5 Smash Factor, so I have to be careful with how high these early rankings go. The Prologue features some truly inspirational smashing that nonetheless felt like the last few pitches a reliever throws in warm up. Sure, they’re at game speed, but the real fireworks have yet to start.

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An Idiot’s Guide to World War Hulk: A Prelude

First off, the idiot in question is not you, my dear reader. I am an idiot for many reasons, two of which are particularly relevant for our current purposes.

One, I have been the foremost detractor of the Prep Time Posse since its inception. They can’t make a comics post over at okayplayer without me saying something cheeky about how they’re dorks, geeks, or some combination of the two. I hope it’s been clear that this is all in fun. It’s probably less clear (if only to me) that I was using my little jokes to pretend to draw some line between me and Comic Book Nation. As you can tell by my asking to write 10k total words for this blog, there is no line. For God’s sake, I read summaries on wiki of events that happened 15 years ago at least three times a week. It’s time to come out of the closet. The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.

Figure I: JRennolds

The second component of my idiocy is my ignorance. I don’t know comics very well, although I am trying to bring my knowledge up to speed. In that regard, the recommendations of PtP have proved helpful, but my true mentor has been an uber dork in the Philadelphia area that shall only be known as the Inscrutable Dr. Yamada (pictured). He’s the one who feeds me 100 Bullets trade paperbacks and Desolation Jones trade paperbacks and makes sure I understand what a trade paperback is. But remediation is a slow process and, really, I’m still pretty comics dumb.

Figure 2: The Inscrutable Dr. Yamada

The point of my ramblings: don’t expect a particularly nuanced view of World War Hulk. Don’t expect a discussion of how WWH is an allegory for fallibility of all human concepts of the good but that Watchmen did it much better. Don’t expect any attempt to place WWH in any kind of historical context. History is for bitches.

I’m not able to speak to any of that, and I don’t care about it in the least. Here’s what I want to see out of World War Hulk, in outline format.

I. Hulk Smash

A. Prelude (brief)

i. Why Hulk Smashes

ii. Who Hulk Hopes to Smash

B. Actual Smashing

i. The general public

ii. Famous landmarks

iii. Bitch Ass Tony Stark

iv. Reed Richards, former hero, now dick

v. Any other cool shit that gets in the way of smashing i-iv

vi. Hulk turning on and smashing lame extraterrestrial gladiator friends

C. Black Bolt gagged and tied to outside of weird ass spaceship

D. Angst among targets of Smashing (brief)

II. Heroes Smash

A. Ghost Rider using hellfire and big chains in a failed attempt to derail Hulk smashing

B. Stop or contain Hulk in epic smash escalation

C. Involvement of Thor

Figure 3: Komar gets it

Please note that “plot” and “themes” and any other wise guy shit are not in the outline. Frankly, if you need plot to enjoy a four month arc of Hulk smashing, you need to stop re-reading Ender’s Game and go to a strip club. The only standard on which one can judge WWH is whether it succeeds in its obvious goal of being the Tucker Max of 2007 Comics. Tucker Max is many things, but subtle isn’t one of them.

Figure 4: Lame as hell but captivating

But while you may be disgusted by my preoccupation with smashing and my disdain for anything even remotely intellectual, I do hope you appreciate the effort and standards I bring into determining whether the smashing is any good. For example, kindly note that I’ve clearly and accurately singled out the two gentlemen most in need of smashing. I hope we all understand that if WWH ends without Richards and Stark getting repeatedly and brutally smashed, it must be deemed a complete failure. I didn’t read Civil War as a point of pride, but I have figured out that Ironman has been accumulating about a year’s worth of Grade A smash-worthy karma. Even I understand that any time a comic character vaguely resembles a Republican, he’s running into a critical beat down sooner rather than later, which, as a Republican, he obviously deserves.

But the guy I want to see smashed the worst is Reed Richards, for a couple reasons. One, I have a crush on Sue Storm and Richards is way too much of an herb for her. Two, his character in Ultimate Alliance is one of the more overrated video game characters I have played. Those extendo fists are slow as hell, and there’s not a single attack he has that some other character doesn’t do more effectively. Yet all the FF dorks over at IGN keep telling me he’s “one of the best midrange characters in the game.” Whatever—those dudes suck dick for rocks.

Figure 5: You see it

But the most important reason Reed Richards needs to be smashed epically is that he has turned into a very effective and convincing dick. I have read the Illuminati, and Reed’s dickness in those issues borders on the sublime. Who tries to collect the Infiniti Gems? With a 700 IQ, you can’t figure out that’s a bad idea? And not using the Gauntlet to start wrecking shit and fucking Emma Frost just reinforces the notion that he’s somehow, amazingly, improbably, both a dick and a pussy. Now he’s trying to take out some kid who adopts coyote puppies? Man, this dude sucks. Marvel has done a brilliant job making him into the dour assistant principal whose only job is to hand out detentions and who becomes amazingly bitter and Machiavellian as a result. My assistant principal was Keith Godshall (not pictured), and, God, did he need to be smashed. I’ll be thinking of Doc Godshall every time a green fist literally flattens Richards.

Figure 6: Not Doc Godshall, but the closest Google Image could get me

My plan for the next four months is to buy everything with WWH on the cover except the Gamma Corps, which just looks retarded. I intend to write up my thoughts about every 4 issues, or whenever I get so terrified of my book manuscript that I need to do something else.

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