The most recent volume of The Incredible Hulk has been a wild, gruesome, and impressive ride. Chock full of ghouls and goblins, occasionally touching and affecting, and always pitched toward an epic, metaphysical end, the book has taken the Jade Giant to superheroic horror’s outtermost edge.
In Monster Road, which concludes the book (though not the story), we find our hero finally come up against the Eldest, the force that has been dogging him since the book’s beginning. Born of a primeval force dating back to the formation of reality, the Eldest is the big sister to all the world’s dark and creepy monsters, a lineage that concludes with Hulk. Through very brief, cosmic exposition and end-of-issue text pages, Marvel’s creation myth is explored and deepened: the One-Above-All creating reality, the dark gods like Cthon and Set’s war against one another, and ultimately the One-Above-All’s fatal confrontation with the Eldest’s momma, Vinruviel – a sort of mother of all evil.
Marvel
If all of this seems too heady for a punch-em-up book about an angry boy, it might just be – though all that metaphysical myth rarely gets in the way of Hulk’s personal journey; he doesn’t care about the creation myth. He cares about his own freedom – freedom from society, freedom from Bruce Banner, and freedom from emotional attachments. Most of all, freedom from some nonsense prophecy foisted upon him by all those dark gods.
This volume has been conceptually massive, but it has also contained brilliantly compact, self-contained and impactful stories focused on smaller evils. In issue #27, Hulk finds himself befriending a small boy in the woods who is not what he seems; in the world of The Incredible Hulk, a story like this tends to be a morose ghost story, emotionally touching and sweetly realized. These brief moments away from the main plot of the book tend to illuminate a part of the Hulk that he desperately wants to deny: a good-natured heart and a tendency toward justice (however grim).
Marvel
As ever, one of the book’s truest highlights lies in its gruesome artwork, here provided by Kev Walker, Adam Gorham, and Nic Klein, all of whom commit to a shared aesthetic of twisted and monstrous forms, serene forests, and twisted, hellish landscapes. Even under the hands of three separate artists, The Incredible Hulk has managed a singular visual language that has remained in place for the book’s 30 issues.
Closing out the run, Monster Road touches on all the things that make this story great. It isn’t a conclusion – the story continues in the new book, Infernal Hulk – but it reaches a desperate and daunting cliffhanger. It’s a book as indebted to Creepy and Eerie as it is to the classic Hulk stories of the past, and that provides a sharp hook for even the most Hulk-averse of readers.
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