Al Ewing, a comic writer I hadn’t heard of before until I saw some hype surrounding his stuff, seemingly wrote one of the most revered Hulk runs of recent memory that ran for 50 issues straight from 2018 to 2021 and a couple of one-shots that fit in the run as well, all collected in another of those massive omnibuses (1600+ pages) in 2023.
After having heard so much hype about this I was expecting great things and it started splendidly. What he did was introduce ideas that explain a superhero comic cliché (no hero or villain who dies stays dead) for all gamma-related characters in the Marvel universe while tying it to some even bigger concepts.
Apart from that he managed to shift the mood from mere action to genuine horror in parts due to the excellent art by Joe Bennett who redefined the visuals of Banner-to-Hulk shifts and vice versa. The combination of brilliant visuals with the deft storytelling by Ewing made for a great mix that felt like it genuinely did a lot of new things with the Hulk and his entourage while managing to weave in a lot of callbacks to previous Hulk lore.
But at the halfway mark I felt like the story, which seemed to hint at something big it was building toward, was stalling and using filler content like the conflict with the Roxxon minotaur boss to not progress naturally toward where it should have been heading. From the start, I expected to find out what the One-Below-All was planning for the Hulk, and I expected a kind of conflict between them that led somewhere meaningful.
Instead, the entire series ends on a whimper that, if you aren’t religious, feels overly pretentious, pointless, and boring. Some comic runs are more about the journey than where it all leads to, but the way Ewing had hinted at things from the start of his run this felt like it was building toward something. And when his resolution to it wasn’t really interesting or meaningful in any way it somewhat spoiled it for me.
It’s still really well written with lots of great moments and I liked a lot of what was going on along the way (Betty as the Harpy, Joe Fixit, the Devil Hulk) but ultimately this feels like another Bruce Jones moment. Started great but the ending is kind of a let-down.