(I originally read these comics in mid/late August 2016)
I thought it was about time I picked up the Hulk again, more than a year after finishing the celebrated Peter David run. John Byrne and Ron Garney are the creative talent, but Byrne's gone within a year (no doubt due to another strop). Ron Garney is friggin' awesome but his art is better served when inked by Sal Buscema, as opposed to Dan Green. I bought these issues at the time.
Their run is a slow-burning one, heavy on captions, with the Hulk laying waste to a small town and downing a jet, resulting in the deaths of hundreds of people. The mystery is why Bruce Banner remembers nothing of it even as he sticks around to help recovery efforts. Turns out he has come under the control of an old foe who is utilising the Hulk's power vicariously like a virtual reality game. The annual is a post-Cold War retelling of the origin and is not bad in itself but is probably as canon now as Byrne's simultaneous (and superfluous) thirteen-issue rehash of Spider-Man's origin, ie, largely dismissed. Garney sticks around after Byrne has gone and their plots are tied up by him and Jerry Ordway.
Paul Jenkins comes on board next for a run which seems to have been well-received but largely left me cold at the time (causing me to drop the book) and I didn't much enjoy it this time around. Banner has contracted Lou Gehrig's disease and, knowing he's going to die, makes a pact with the Hulks (original, grey 'Joe Fixit' version and the amalgamated 'Professor' version) that they will take over his body when he dies. This leaves Jenkins free to use whichever Hulk he feels like using at any time (which I can understand being a plus from his POV) but he also introduces the idea that the three Hulks we've seen previously are just a fraction of potentially thousands, diluting the concept even more. (I was never a fan of the idea of multiple Hulks.) 'The Dogs of War' in issues 14-20 is the highlight of his run, introducing a military opponent who makes even 'Thunderbolt' Ross seem like a milksop in his fanatical zeal. The silly 'Hulk dogs' concept from this story unfortunately made it into Ang Lee's film. Jenkins' 'humorous' stories fail to hit the mark and read like Garth Ennis lite. There's a long overdue confrontation with the Abomination, Betty Banner's killer, in # 24-25, but Jenkins even has to burden what should be a cathartic slugfest with literary pretensions and tiresome psychological window dressing. Utterly rote art by John Romita Jr. doesn't help.
Jenkins (plotting only by this time) wraps up his run with # 32, with Banner miraculously being cured of his disease by another returning foe. (Clue: he's always been something of a bighead.) After a one-issue stopgap by Christopher Priest, succeeding writer Bruce Jones inherits a near-clean slate.
The 2000 and 2001 annuals are, respectively, a (best left untold) tale of the Hulk in heat wanting to boff his cousin Jennifer (seriously; blame Jenkins) and a retro clash between the Hulk and Thor by Erik Larsen and Jorge Lucas. This should have been a lot more fun than it is, though Lucas' Kirby style art is cool. The back-up strip by James Kochalka only serves to strengthen my opinion that 'alternative comics' are where writers and artists who can't write or draw get published.
Hulk (1999) # 1-11 and Hulk Annual '99 are collected in:
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Wolverine (1988) # 144 and Hulk (1999) # 8 are collected in:
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The Incredible Hulk (2000) # 12-20 are collected in:
Softcover:
The Incredible Hulk (2000) # 21-33, The Incredible Hulk Annual 2000 and The Incredible Hulk Annual 2001 are collected in:
Softcover:
The Incredible Hulk (2000) # 25 is collected in:
Hardcover:
The back-up strip from The Incredible Hulk Annual 2001 is collected in:
Hardcover:
Softcover:
The Incredible Hulk (2000) # 33 is collected in:
Softcover:
