Planet Hulk: review

Spoiler alert: some general plot devices revealed though not in too much detail.

I've never actually picked up a Hulk comic before this. I've only seen his exploits as part of other Marvel teams like the Ultimates and the Avengers. I tend to stay away from superhero comics in general, the genre has been done to death and reads like a soap opera more than anything else. It's a franchise, which means the suits are involved -and that means they're not really going to let the authors get too crazy. Unfortunately, too crazy is where great comics need to be.

Superhero comics are still my guilty pleasure though. Its the equivalent of the Friday night movie, sometimes you just want to see intergalactic space battles on a scale that makes you feel warm and fuzzy inside. I was reading an interview on the upcoming Green Lantern "Blackest Night" series and was impressed with where Geoff Johns was taking the Green Lantern universe. So I decided to head down to the local Borders to catch up on what's been happening with GL.

Alas, they didn't have any of the Geoff Johns GL story arcs. I started looking for other guilty pleasure comics, and that's when my eye fell on Planet Hulk. I'd heard about this arc ages ago: The Hulk saves the Earth from a killer satellite, only to find that his friends had seized the opportunity to blast his return ticket to an uninhabited planet. Along the way, a navigation error crash lands him on a different, war torn planet called Sakaar - said navigation error being caused by the Hulk going berserk within the shuttle once he finds out he's betrayed. Not GL, but still plenty of alien races and fighting, so I bought a copy and settled down to read it.

The first part of the story reeked of Ridley Scott's "Gladiator". It was pretty much the same story with intergalactic races replacing humans. A weakened Hulk is pressed into gladiator service, where he must bond with his friends and fight his way to freedom on a planet ruled by the oppressive Red King. My attention was waning. The main thing that kept me going through this part was the prophecies surrounding his arrival: they spoke of both a savior, the Sakaarson and a WorldBreaker. Take one look at the Hulk and you realize he obviously has the potential to be both. He has always been the mighty monster forever at the mercy of circumstance. Will he submit to his rage, or on a planet full of monsters, will he finally find the peace he has long sought?

With some help from the Silver Surfer, the Hulk and his friends break free from the emperor's grip and make a run for it. Some of his allies are wise and know where to draw the line so they don't end up becoming exactly like their cruel oppressors. Others, like the native Miek (a play on meek perhaps), oversimplify the Hulk's logic - often to tragic ends. This was the part where it got interesting.

The story is epic in scope. By epic I mean that by the time you finish reading this book and pick it up from the beginning again you will feel a sense of how far the characters have progressed from their beginnings. Neutral characters change to become malicious in some respect, benevolent in others. Either way you will feel they have landed in a very different place from where they started. It mirrors how life changes people, how their experiences alter their view of the world, and how they are part of a never ending cycle where changes in them will cause changes in others, and so on and so forth.

But though it is epic, it doesn't sacrifice fleshing out Hulk's character. The authors achieve this by using his ragtag group of rebels masterfully to explore Hulk's personality - they are attracted to the Hulk for different reasons. Miek looks up to Hulk's deep loyalty to his friends and his thirst for revenge, but fails to see that the Hulk has already seen the price of his wrath: and works to contain it. The Shadow warriors in the meantime see that this green monster has compassion, and follow him in the hopes that he might fulfill the prophecy. Still others come just for the protection afforded by his brute strength. By uprooting the Hulk and putting him on a new world, the authors have given an opportunity for his story to be told anew. This was perfect for people like me who hadn't followed the Hulk before. Behind every fictional character there usually are a couple of defining forces at work: struggling for balance. With the Hulk: this arc brings out clearly the monster looking for peace, fighting his own nature to try to achieve it, goaded on by circumstance. For all his power he is helpless to stop what fate has in store for him.

I loved the art. I think they were trying to go for an alien Conan universe. The Hulk is depicted as a bestial strongman, a look he wears with ease. Some of the flashbacks were told with a different visual style: I liked that. However, the epilogue had a different art style which I didn’t like so much. It was more anime influenced, and I prefer the clean cut art style used in the rest of the book. Some of the panel progressions were also a little confusing. I caught myself wondering more than once if I missed a page when the scene changed. But I didn’t mind this so much because I think the authors were going for a more atmospheric feel: you feel like you’re viewing a world from the sidelines, rather than a rehearsed drama that plays out before you.

The story itself is nothing to write home about, except towards the end. The oppressors are overthrown and a new reign is established. All is well for a bit, and then that's when things start to get interesting again. I didn't see the ending coming and I won't ruin it for you. But it plays into the Hulk's everlasting role as a tragic hero and the dual prophecy of the savior, the Sakaarson and the WorldBreaker. All in all it's a pretty entertaining read.

This is a good arc, but there definitely are some things that keep it from being great. It again comes back to superhero franchises and how they are the bread and butter of the graphic novel business. There’s a lot of cheesiness that hurts the experience – you keep getting reminded that this is a comic book instead of an epic tale. Since it was a limited series run, a lot of little nuggets about the Empire’s brutality and the torture of the “lesser” races on the planet is consigned to the guide book at the end. While so much emphasis is given to exploring the Hulk, some of the other characters are mere stereotypes. I felt the whole femme-fatale-becomes-Hulk's-lover plot line to be very predictable. The Red King could have been more nuanced, instead of the power drunk madman he turned out to be. There could have been more politics, considering this was an entire world the Hulk was trying to unite. These fallacies make the book fall short of what it could have been: a Hulk classic similar to what "The Dark Knight returns" turned out to be for Batman.

You know that feeling you sometimes get when you finish reading a great comic? When you look up and feel like you're coming back to the here and now from another world entirely. Somewhere towards the end of "Planet Hulk", you begin to get that. But it is so fleeting, it disappears almost as soon as it appears: I wish the book had hit that high note earlier and stayed there for longer.

Rating: Almost Great 7.5/10