The Marvel Universe has never been wanting for bleak, post-apocalyptic futures and their grim warnings for our beloved heroes. From Days of Future Past to Earth X to Age of Ultron, the House of Ideas has presented a dizzying number of horrible outcomes, cautionary tales of what might – but is not guaranteed – come to pass. Hell, the recent Krakoa Age gave us not one but two such future hellscapes, back to back. One delightful aspect of these stories is that they can mostly be read alone — single-serving ‘What If’ stories for a lazy afternoon’s reading.
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Some of these stories go on to be better regarded than others, and a few are considered downright classics; 1992’s Future Imperfect is one such nightmare. Released through writer Peter David’s monumental 12-year run on The Incredible Hulk, Future Imperfect built on preexisting psychological drama established in the main series, integrating itself nicely into the ongoing monthly continuity; thankfully, it does so without relying too heavily upon that continuity, most of which has been shuffled off into the dimly-remembered continuity closet in the intervening thirty-two years.
The Hulk is a character to whom continuity has a hard time sticking, as each creative team returns Bruce Banner and the monster to whichever state they find most compelling. The struggle between the Hulk’s two halves necessitates constant reconsideration to provide lasting conflict. Hulk has, perhaps more than any other Marvel character, been frequently made unrecognizable from earlier incarnations. Phillip Kennedy Johnson and Nic Klein’s current gruesome monster-of-the-week struggle couldn’t be further from the handsomely stoic best man at Rick Jones’s wedding.
The wedding had some other notable (if unlikely) guests.
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That wedding – and all of the contextual continuity collected in Incredible Hulk Epic Collection – Future Imperfect – has been forgotten, no matter the landmark nature of its creation. Smart Hulk is in league with a clandestine organization named The Pantheon, which is at odds with the Avengers, S.H.I.E.L.D., and the rest of the heroic status quo. One of The Pantheon’s number is abducted to space, necessitating a team-up with both the Silver Surfer and the Starjammers. There is a heaping helping of supporting cast drama, mostly in the lead up to Rick’s marriage to Marlo Chandler.
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Nearly every issue here is nearly flawless in its construction; any one of these issues could be presented as a guidebook on how to craft a good superhero comic of the early ’90s, and penciller Gary Frank delivers page after page of tight, beautiful line work that stands shoulder-to-shoulder with the work of giants like Ron Lim or Alan Davis.
But it’s that thankfully anchorless quality of Future Imperfect that stands as the lasting legacy here. Illustrated by George Perez (hot off the heels of the Universe-defining Infinity Gauntlet), the book presents a radiation-soaked wasteland, a dystopia named, impossibly, Dystopia. It provides scrappy young freedom fighters, and it provides a truly frightening despot: Maestro, a Hulk driven mad by loss and radiation poisoning.
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Future Imperfect isn’t quite timeless: the writing drips with a uniquely ’90s take on linguistic speculation (every character in the future speaks in vaguely-futuristic slang. One ‘scans’ instead of sees; people are named things like Pizfiz and Skooter). There are several ‘yikes’ moments of implied sexual assault (which causes a trauma that, compellingly, follows Hulk into the main series).
But for all those dated and troubling aspects, the story provides all the things that make a ‘what if’ scenario stand out. It sketches out a just-feasible-enough society, gives its villain truly horrible sins, and fits itself into the fabric of the extant Marvel Universe in meaningful ways. In one memorable two-page splash, Perez wordlessly answers any lingering question as to what happened to the beloved heroes of our present.
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This volume of the Epic Collection provides a service unique to the series: it provides that forgotten context that a reader seeking to read just Future Imperfect would certainly skip over, inspiring a more concerted reading of incredible old material. This volume makes a reader want to explore further – to seek out the context for this context. For all of Marvel’s forward-looking apocalyptic classics, there is an important underlying bedrock of history.
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