This was, if nothing else, an interesting read for the spooky season. From page one it states "There are two people in every mirror" and if you know me by now, you know that's enough to get my attention. Really, applying the notions of duality and dark mirroring to the Incredible Hulk sounds kind of obvious when you put it on paper like that, but over the 24 issues of The Immortal Hulk so much more happens than just that. I don't know how long I'll talk about those things for, but we can get a post out of it so... let's start from the beginning. This ain't a happy fun punching Marvel comic book, it's all dark and visceral and introspective and shit. Its opening moments have a gas station holdup gone wrong, with three dead... including one Bruce Banner. Once night falls, the gang who put the robber up to it find a green monster ready to enact vengeance like some unhinged Batman. (Okay, maybe not that different from how Batman would have done it, actually.) The portrait painted of the undying Bruce Banner and his other selves, the green thing on the other side of the mirror, is that of a wanderer seeking atonement for past sins. That's the vibe the early issues give, and #3 is a lovely little Rashomon-style affair of different people being interviewed about a Hulk sighting, with different art styles for every vignette. Still, there's a whiff of something here. Something more... and soon enough, it rears its head.The gamma radiation which created the Hulk and the other beings like him has some seriously weird implications to it. It is at once scientific and alchemic, at once a form of radiation and some sort of alchemical qlippothic hell energy. A green door between our world and the hell of this gamma world, with things wanting to come through and run havoc... and, for deep introspective reasons, taking the form of Bruce Banner's horrible father with which to do it. Issue 6 culminates with the Avengers coming in to sort Hulk out, and #7 is a straight-up whole-ass brutal fight with the Hulk versus a bunch of them. Hulk makes a wisecrack at that Captain America Hydra agent kerfuffle and rips the shit out of the Hulkbuster Armor. It makes Age Of Ultron look tame in comparison. Of course, then Tony Stark nukes the entire place from orbit with a giant laser, Banner's dead, and he gets dissected and put into jars at the behest of a shadow organization. Yeah. I said this was visceral, and it's a major part of why this is in the marathon. The imagery can be supremely fucked up, along with a lot of the concepts. A still-living Hulk, dissected into parts, who then reforms by breaking out and regenerating around the scientist who trapped him. The transformations in these books are brutal as well, and shit is absolutely horrific at times. Having an immortal protagonist and pals means you can fuck them up, and the books don't skimp on that.
Then all hell breaks loose, literally, and we have what feels like the point of the whole thing, despite it only being the halfway point. Banner and Hulk are but two people reflected, and there are so many more facets and duplicities to them... but, even in the depths of gamma hell, Hulk finds a way to help Banner heal. As the issues go on, even more wild stuff goes down, but the first 13 issues are where it was best for me. Things pick up in a more visceral way when the Abomination shows up, an absolutely horrific thing killing indiscriminately, begging Hulk to kill it, and vomiting acid that Hulk can't regenerate from. Still, the mirror imagery is subtle enough in that middle stretch that it's interesting. All in all, this was a good read. It's supremely fucked up, and full of themes I didn't even get to poke at in a brief little post. If you don't mind seeing Hulk guts and other gory shit illustrated, it's worth your time.
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