Most of the heroes in Marvel series have undergone several changes after the significant events of Civil War but none as important as the Hulk! Now, after all those months that the green hot blooded menace spent away from us he’s coming back, and he’s really mad.
In the beginning of Civil War Nick Fury asked Bruce Banner’s help to deactivate a weapon satellite made by Hydra years ago, Banner accepted and Hulk was sent in outer space to destroy a potential threat to human kind. A threat that proved to have been created not by terrorists but by SHIELD and Fury himself, so after his mission was accomplished the situation changed dramatically. SHIELD found it convenient that Hulk would not return on Earth and the other heroes discovered a chance to get rid of him at last in order to protect civilian lives, so instead of bringing him back they threw him in a black hole to be left alone in a world empty of intelligent life forms!
Of course nothing worked out as planned and Hulk found himself on a planet scourged by war and death, a battlefield between imperial and rebel forces in a war he didn’t understand and didn’t want to be involved, but things change when he proves to be the savior a whole world waited for, the Green Scar, and a whole new chapter in Hulk’s history opened which you can follow in the storyline. But enough with that, Planet Hulk is over and the Hulk is coming back frustrated, betrayed, confused and very, very mad. They have sent him away when he tried to save them but he will never do that mistake again, the puny humans will pay for what they’ve done to him, Hulk smash!
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A common policy in the comics industry is that when sales go down events goes up! Especially if you are a Marvel fan you might have noticed something wrong with their main Universe, those old-fashioned issues where the good guy fought the evil one in a big battle, well no more of those, nowadays we have to read about cosmic, historical events every month. But is this the actual point or are they really afraid to drastically change something out there?
The Civil War is over, the super hero registration act has passed and as hard as I try to find what changed in the Marvel titles the only difference I see is Spider-Man being unmasked, his family in danger and him back in the black suite (for 4 months before he finds a new one I guess). Captain America dies in issue #25 of his own series and in Civil War – The Initiative we find out that nooo, Rogers is not really dead but hidden in a secret SHIELD facility, the X-Men are again on the run (big difference), Iron-Man is assembling a new team of Avengers (wow, innovative), only poor Hulk had to be thrown into a black hole (what, you thought he wouldn’t return? Check World War Hulk Prologue: World Breaker #1)! So is anything ever going to change, and do we want to?
This whole thing reminds me of similar events and how they too changed nothing, like the House of M and Infinite Crisis. It’s the perfect way to attract attention to your main titles by killing a couple of the secondary characters nobody would ever read about, present them like decent people and pretend it made a difference to the first class heroes. So DC killed the Blue Beetle, who gives a damn (except from those guys I met on line the other day creating a poll to make them bring him back)? Marvel killed Goliath and some other nobodies who might return anytime from another dimension or a gate Dr Strange will make or a black hole or something. Nothing’s ever going to change because deep inside we don’t want to; these heroes are our favorites for reasons that don’t allow them to change. You think otherwise? Well give Spider-Man 6 more months with his identity revealed and you’ll see!
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