Xemnu, the Living Hulk, recrafts reality through the magic of television to position himself as the one true Hulk in this tale of forgotten identities by Al Ewing, Joe Bennett, and special guest artist Javier Rodríguez
Zach Rabiroff: Times Immortal in your dreams
Times Immortal in your memes
Times Immortal, Rob and Zach
Times Immortal, welcome back
Yes, it’s installment of Times Immortal, the World’s Greatest Amateur Hulk Commentary Column [Ed. Note: And we’re not even the only ones to think so!]! We’re here this week to talk about false memories, shattered psyches, and vile tentacle monsters reaching out from a stack of television sets. How are you, this fine, nightmarish spring, Robert?
Robert Secundus: Miserable, Zach. Thanks to coronavirus, I got the full text of “Whoso List to Hunt” tattooed all over my face, as a reminder. Hey, speaking of:
Wyatt, You
ZR: This issue’s epigram channels some of that sweet, sweet Tudor court zeitgeist
And from this mind I will not flee,
But to you all that misjudge me,
I do protest as ye may see,
That I am as I am and so will I be.
On its face, the poem is a statement of affirmation: the poet confidently proclaiming the immutability of his sense of self in the face of the world’s judgment. But there are darker shades here, too. More than an artist, young Sir Thomas was an operator; a political sweet-talker so skillful and convincing that he managed the unthinkable: carrying off an affair with Anne Boleyn [Ed. Note: ALLEGEDLY. I don’t want that Tudor heat] and living to tell the tale. So there’s a sense in which this poem is, in fact, the poet protesting a bit too much. Maybe that immutable selfhood isn’t as firm, or as constant, or even as definable as he wants it to be. Maybe it’s just whatever face the world wants him to wear that day. Or maybe that’s just too cynical an attitude for Xemnu’s New American Morning. What do you think, Robert?
RS: I think cynicism is entirely aligned with Xemnu’s Planet Hulk. That kind of reactionary, golden age thinking may frame itself in idealist terms, but behind those terms is the belief that progress is impossible, that all one can do is halt destruction, return for a bit to a time before things had decayed, and for a while, (to return to your terms and Wyatt’s story), survive. But I don’t think this epigraph itself is purely cynical either. I think there’s a tension here that mirrors the forces warring throughout the issue: the ideal unity of the narrator vs the shifty author; the cartoonish, even Seusian form of the poem, which sounds so much like Xemnu dialogue, vs the content of the poem, which so boldly demands that we take it seriously, that frames the speaker even in godlike terms. I am as I am and so will I be; I read that the first time and could only hear the sing-song. And then I reread and realized just how strongly it was insisting on identity, on identity as powerful as divinity [Ed. Note: “Sir, I exist!”].
ZR: Questions of identity — its permanence, its nature, and who has the power to determine it — are all over this comic, courtesy of Xemnu’s plot to rewrite history with himself at center. But I think we see it play out most clearly in the person of Charlene McGowan, whose conversation with Doc Samson is (for me, at least) the show-stopping moment of this issue. Last month, we learned via flashback that Charlene is a trans woman. This issue, we see that this is more than just a biographical detail: it’s the key reason for her ability to resist Xemnu’s influence when those around her fail. As she explains to Leonard: “This monster from the magic planet, this Hulk…it can look at me through a screen…it can force its narratives onto me, even into my head…and…I’ve had enough of that. Who I am belongs to me.”
It’s a tremendously powerful moment, and one that reminds us of the power of narratives (that is, of the stories we tell) in shaping our own control over ourselves and our society. In the 1960’s, sociologists first began to recognize that one of the most insidious methods of institutional bigotry was the internalization of inferiority by marginalized groups: women, people of color, and those with nonconforming sexual identities. By virtue of having been told a narrative in which their place in society was inferior or unacceptable, they came to believe it even without knowing the belief wasn’t their own: they wore a false mask of themselves without realizing it was a mask at all.
But Charlene has already fought that battle and won, and that gives her a kind of inoculation against any attempt to override her hard-earned knowledge of who she is. It brings us back to one of the themes we’ve seen emerge over and over again in this series: the way that the pain and trauma of our pasts can become a powerful force for either destruction or creation. Charlene, like the Hulk, is a creator. Her past pain makes for present heroism.
RS: Samson makes for a great foil here. In many ways he’s the height of privelege: a wealthy, straight, cis man who, when he got Hulk powers, just got buff and cool hair. He’s done some absolutely monstrous things in his history; he became a villain because he felt like an incel. And now he’s, like so many men like him, welcomed back, and his monstrous history simply dismissed. Of course he’d be susceptible to the BS baked into children’s shows, the news, the media at large: cishet men are told every day of their lives by those things a story about their superiority, about how they deserve to be superior. And he spent every day buying it. The moment he was forced to confront the possibility that all of that might be a lie, he turned to villainy, and, more specifically, a villainy where he doubled down on superiority-through-performative-masculinity. Charlene fought hard for her identity, and now exactly what is real, what is fiction, because she knows her own self. Samson’s never had to fight for his identity. He’s just passively assumed that, as he explains here, identity is a collection of memories. Of things that have happened to you, not anything that you are.
Hulk vol 2 #18
ZR: I wouldn’t fully characterize Samson as the model of majority privilege: he is, after all, one of Marvel’s handful of Jewish superheroes, and despite his periodic turns to villainy, he’s much more often been depicted as a force of compassion. In one particularly memorable Peter David story, for instance, he tried to save the life of a woman on death row who had been sentenced for defending the life of her friend against an abusive and powerful husband. There’s no question to me that he comes from a background of ingrained inferiority that he’s struggled to overcome ever since. But it might be that very struggle that gives him such a disarming certainty in his own correctness all the time. Samson is a guy who doesn’t like to be told he’s wrong, and doesn’t like to believe it even when the evidence is right in front of him. And I think we’ve seen in this series that this sometimes results in his dismissing the experiences of viewpoints of those around him, with often destructive results. And that’s true even when his intentions are benevolent.
No, I’m Pretty Sure It’s Called the Mandala Effect
ZR: We see here that Xemnu’s broader plan, as implied last issue, involves the rewriting of all of Marvel history with himself at the center: assembling the Avengers, praising the “good boys and girls” of the X-Men, and embiggening like Kamala Khan [Ed. Note: What a thieving jerk]. What makes his plan especially chilling, and particularly insidious, is the perceptably right-wing political tilt these new memories take on. We see Xemnu fans around the country talk about personal responsibility, and fret about whether environmental alarmists are making us move too fast. It’s all in the service of the Roxxon corporation, whose drive for control pulls the public away from an uncertain future and into the comforting certainty of the conservative past — a past which, as we’re reminded here, never really existed to begin with.
The effect is conveyed wonderfully by our two artists on this issue. Javier Rodríguez once again supplies flashback scenes, this time on video monitors showing perfectly-drawn pastiches of Silver Age Marvel. Joe Bennett’s modern scenes, meanwhile, are all about a creeping sense of dread curdling into abject horror, as we watch those same monitors crack, bleed, and succumb to a Watchmen-esque tentacle monster under Xemnu’s influence. The past may seem comforting, but that comfort might be hiding something cancerous underneath.
RS: This is existential and psychological, but also cosmic and eldritch horror; something from a dead planet came to our Earth, wrapped its tentacles around our memories, and changed our values. Or, it’s easy for us to frame it in those terms, when we’re looking at Bennett’s tentacles. You know, over the past four years, a lot of liberal and centrist commentators have looked at the rise of MAGA culture and the alt-right in similar terms. How many times have you seen the president framed as an outsider, someone who came into our politics and corrupted it, made it meaner, more hateful? At the height of impeachment proceedings especially, how many times did you see people act as though excising this one outsider would save us? That if we toss him out, things would Return To Normal? Hell, right now, politicians are campaigning on a Return to Decency. But these are comforting lies. In this comic, the thing ultimately responsible for destroying us isn’t the monstrosity made of fur and gears that fell from the stars. It’s an oil executive. A billionaire willing to sacrifice everyone, even those most loyal to him, to ensure that he remains in power. He’s not from somewhere else; he’s the Minotaur. And rather than slay him, we send our own to the slaughter in his labyrinth. At the end of this arc, if Xemnu is defeated, the CEO will remain. One will uncoil from our screens; the other will fill them up again with ads.
ZR: I think that’s exactly right: Dario Agger is a threatening villain precisely because he’s hiding in plain sight. Doc Samson compares Xemnu’s influence to the Mandela Effect, a term for a collective false memory held by a substantial segment of society (in recent years, it’s been most famous for convincing people of the existence of The Berenstein Bears and a movie called Shazaam starring Sinbad, because, heaven help us, Rob, but I’m a Millennial and sometimes there is just no saving Millennials from themselves).
And the striking thing about the Mandela Effect is how appallingly easy it is to achieve. The condition itself is named after a common belief that Nelson Mandela had died in prison decades before his actual death. Yet even a cursory glance at a news story or photograph would have informed people that this belief was wrong. They didn’t see it, because they didn’t want to or didn’t bother. So Xemnu doesn’t even need to have mind control to exert his influence on the world. He just needs to appeal to people’s ingrained prejudices, presumptions, and unwillingness to argue with those around them. He appeals, in other words, to the placid desire for conformity in each of us — just like a TV star would, naturally.
RS: And that’s why the Mandela Effect is so useful a thematic tool for this arc, which is so concerned with the Golden Age fallacy. We know that people suffered horribly in the 1950s and 1960s. We also know that racism existed before 2016. It takes such a small effort to confirm these obvious realities, and far, far too many people will not take that effort.
ZR: Late in the issue, Doc Samson comments on the way that rewriting the way we see the past can change our entire sense of self. “What are we,” he asks, “if not collections of memories?” I have to admit that the little X-Men light living in my head went off at the sight of this line. Since this past summer, Jonathan Hickman has been busy spinning a story around exactly this idea that mutant (or human) souls are coterminous with the sum of their memories and experiences. And while this could very easily be a total coincidence from two sympatico writers, my galaxy brain can’t help but wonder if this is some kind of Unified Marvel Theory of the Soul. Do The Five make mutants immortal in the same manner as the Hulk? Could Xemnu exert his influence over Cerebro. Is Krakoa the Magic Planet??? [Ed. Note: Maybe, no, and what?] O, for an Immortal X crossover series while I live to see it.
RS: But it’s important that Samson is framed as wrong in that conversation. Charlene sees herself as something more than memory. I also very much want to see a crossover with Krakoa, because Immortal Hulk is exploring so much similar ground; we’ve talked about how the Devil Hulk attempting to use the military to achieve his goals of breaking the human world may lead to his own ruin, and I think Xavier is treading on similarly thin ice with his use of capitalism. On the other hand, every other appearance of the Immortal Hulk outside of this title (the Great Responsibility one shot, the crossover with Fantastic Four, the truly bizarre story in Marvel Voices) has been underwhelming [Ed. Note: We at Marvel Files do NOT like Immortal Hulk as a “brand”].
Worldbreaker Break Mirror
ZR: Xemnu’s plan, however, is worse than a generalized attack on the world’s memories. His target is the Hulk himself: as we theorized last issue, his and Roxxon’s goal is to assume for Xemnu the legacy and reputation of the heroic Hulk by separating him from the public recollection of puny human Robert (don’t call him Bruce!) Banner. But as we see throughout this issue, the impact on Banner himself is devastating, the smashed mirror standing in symbolically for the broken connection between his personalities. Hulk, as we know, is a system: a multiplicity of personalities working either in tandem or at odds with one another. And while this might seem like an illness on its face, it’s really a way for Banner to effectively manage his lifelong dissociative identities — his own method of transforming repressed pain into heroism. By taking that away, Roxxon is, in effect, negating Banner’s hard-won sense of selfhood, reverting him to the repressed, hurt outcast with unresolved trauma and a bitterness against the world.
This isn’t the first time, of course, that we’ve seen Hulk and Banner broken into separate entities. It happened during John Byrne’s run in the 1980’s, producing a fairly benign Banner and a savage Hulk, and again during Jason Aaron’s brief tenure with the opposite effect. It’s that latter take that seems to inform what Al Ewing is doing here, as we see a cold, calculating, extremely defensive Banner asserting his mental prerogative. And that might be just as dangerous as any Hulk could be.
RS: In both his facial expressions and his voice, he reminds me of what we’ve seen of a different Banner in this series– Brian– and a different Satan than the Jobian Devil Hulk– the One Below All, who doesn’t just want to break the human world, to justly destroy all its injustice, but who wants to break everything, who is the absence of all things. We’ve seen one possible future in which the One Below All takes over the Hulk; if Xemnu is not turned aside, is this how that occurs? I’m also curious as to what this shift means thematically; is the series trying to say something about what happens when capitalism uses the media to warp activism? Is this about the downfall of revolutionary figures as they become warped by the very institutions they hoped to bring down? We began to talk about that a bit in the last couple issues, but there’s not enough of Banner on the page here, I think, for us to really build much more of a reading beyond what we’ve already said. We do get one new extremely interesting change, but I think, for now, that complicates rather than clarifies the issue.
ZR: Salvation may or may not be coming in the form of a Hulk personality who makes his first appearance in the shock ending of this issue: the Green Scar, the World Breaker, the gladiator-king of Planet Hulk fame. The key fact about this aspect of the Hulk, I think, is that he’s a dual-sided creature. A liberator and freedom fighter on one hand, but a cursed creature of violent devastation on the other. He is both the creator and the destroyer; a force of nature even by the standards of the various Hulks. So while he might be exactly what it takes to break the hold of Xemnu’s mental slavery, he may also be a case of the cure being far worse than the disease.
ZR: To my surprise, given the generally slow and horrific tone of this entire arc, I found this to be the most moving issue of Immortal Hulk so far. It’s not the high-concept religious-philosophical jamboree of earlier issues, but it is, in its own way, more human and profound. By focusing its idea of liberation in the personal story of Charlene, Ewing seems to suggest that heroism can be as simple a thing as learning to tell your own story. So to return to that Thomas Wyatt quote at the beginning of the issue, maybe there really is something immutable in us when all is said and done. Corporations, and governments, and yetis from space may try to tell you your place in the world. They may write a narrative, and sell it to you, and ask you to repeat it. But they cannot force you to believe that it’s true. Your narrative is your own, and that’s what makes you free.
RS: I don’t think I can add to that. That’s beautifully put.
Marvelous Musings
- For the story of Doc Samson’s defense of a killer on death row, check out Incredible Hulk #380. For his attempts to tell the story of Hanukkah to a rebellious yeshiva classroom, please refer to Marvel Holiday Special 1993.
- Xemnu calls televisions screens a “culture.” But does he mean a type of artistic medium…or a cluster of bacterial cells [Ed. Note: As a biologist, I don’t think television screens make for good media]?
- Essay prompt: Thomas More began as a progressive humanist, but responded to the growing extremism in the English Reformation by himself embracing fundamentalism and intolerance. Discuss.
- Essay prompt: But at the very end, he was killed by one of the great villains of history for his privately held beliefs and became a symbol of resistance to tyranny. Discuss.
- Short Answer: Which of the above prompts was written by Zach and which by Rob?
- Essay prompt: Of these two nerds, which one is the nerdiest? [Ed. Note: Guess who wrote this prompt?]
Zach Rabiroff works daily at a charity, and is also a freelance writer and editor. He reads a lot of comics.
Robert Secundus is an amateur-angelologist-for-hire.
Robert Secundus is an amateur-angelologist-for-hire.
