All is Calm, All is Hulk in King in Black: Immortal Hulk #1!

The Hulk finds the true meaning of Christmas- Goop! It’s a quieter tale written by Al Ewing, art by Aaron Kuder, colors by Frank Martin & Erick Arciniega, and letters by Cory Petit!

Robert Secundus: Have a hellish, grotesque Hulkmas/ it’s a sad time of the year/ We all cry/ when we see Hulk’s eyes/ flash back with fear// Have a hellish, grotesque Hulkmas/ and remember you’re made of meat/ that will decay/ and fade away/ like so much chaff and wheat.// Oh, ho,

Zoe Tunnell: Wait, was I supposed to have a song prepared? Oh god. Well, call me Scrooge because I sure as hell ain’t Caroling.

RS: Where’s your Hulkmas spirit, Zoe? Don’t you want to break down in tears as you contemplate the horrors of childhood and the brokenness of all things in this superhero comic about a guy who turns green and gets so strong he can do big punches? Tis the season!

ZT: Rob, bud, I don’t need Hulkmas to have introspective horrors re: childhood, I’m trans! But I WILL weep big fat tears looking Hulk’s big dumb adorable face in this issue because I already have several times and, undoubtedly, will again.

“If these shadows remain unaltered by the future, the child will die.” —A Christmas Carol

RS: I think we’ve really lost something in our modern, commercialized, pop culture Christmas, and no, I’m not talking about Jesus. I’m talking about the “scary ghost stories and tales of the glories of Christmasses long long ago,” the sense that Christmas, and December generally, was a haunted time, a scary time; when Charles Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol (and his other lesser known Christmas ghost stories), it wasn’t shocking for ghosts to star in a Christmas tale. In other times, Christmas was the time of werewolves, of devils and darkness. I’m glad Immortal Hulk is keeping ghosts in Christmas.

ZT: Nowadays you’ll get an occasional Krampus or the like and while they ARE delightful, you’re right! Christmas ain’t creepy anymore, it’s all Coca-Cola Polar Bears and Grant Morrison/Dan Mora comic books. KiB: IH being an unsettling spook fest isn’t really a surprise given, y’know, everything about the series, but the specific flavor of chills here caught me by surprise. The usual body horror takes a back seat to emotional pain, overwhelming dread and the greatest fear of all: being alone for the Holidays.

RS: The emotions right from the start are so powerful; that feeling of isolation walking down the street; that glimpse of joy at the sight of a present; and then that different kind of fear of not being alone on the holidays, fear of the time that’s supposed to be happy and joyful, that the world insists is happy and joyful, being invaded by pain, trauma. And then the need to be alone after that, the safety and comfort that comes sometimes from getting away from everyone and everything and just being alone with yourself for a while (though, in this case, “getting away from everyone” involves murdering the forces of an invading alien army by exploiting symbiotic weaknesses to sonics and fire).

ZT: After decades of hearing “Hulk only wants to be alone”, this is maybe the most effective showcase of everything being alone means. Even within Immortal Hulk, the Hulk System had developed to a point where none of them were ever truly alone. Now it’s down to just The Big Guy and Joe Fix-It, and neither one knows what to do. As someone who regularly oscillates between craving human connection more than anything else in the world and wanting to go live in a hut in the woods, the way Hulk finally got his wish and now realizes just what that means really stuck with me. As did the way The Big Guy just…wanders the streets, lost, really stuck with me. He’s a little kid, lost in the middle of New York City in the middle of a Christmas blizzard.

…wait is this just Home Alone 2?

RS: He sets boobytraps! With fire! Significant scenes take place in toy shops! OhmygodImmortalHulkKinginBlackisJoeFixitdoesaHomeAlone2.

ZT: WE’RE ONTO YOU, EWING!!!

A Picturesque Christmas

ZT: Now that we’ve gotten the bottom of Al Ewing’s cinematic parallels (don’t think I missed the Die Hard nod with Joe cutting his feet on the glass either), I feel like we should really shine a spotlight on the art team. To be honest, I’ve found silent issues very hit or miss in the past. If the art team isn’t on the absolute top of their game, it can make the whole undertaking feel muddled and slight. Thankfully, Aaron Kuder, Frank Martin, and Erick Arciniega blow beyond any expectations I had and more than carry their share of the story. Kuder, in particular, proves he is unquestionably one of the most skilled artists in the game right now.

RS: So many of these panels I just want to fall into (or jerk away in disgust). I think my favorite sequence is when Hulk first happens on the toy store– in four pages the art moves from cool beauty and childlike wonder to intensely sharp pain, furious anger, and then one of the most disgusting transformations we’ve seen in this series, which is saying a lot.

ZT: It was harrowing, but it didn’t hit me nearly as hard as the lone panel of Hulk just…hurt. Kuder’s moments of child-like glee are so overwhelmingly resonant and powerful that seeing The Big Guy with weariness and sorrow beyond his years was just a knife through my heart. I’ve written entire essays over how much I have identified with Hulk’s pain through this series and I am genuinely not sure anything has made me want to give him a hug and tell him it’s going to be okay more than that one panel.

RS: The other thing that’s really neat to me about the art are the layouts. I’ve been thinking more and more about poetry as a useful figurative lens for talking about comics, particularly comics that adopt a formal grid. Both are mediums that work by putting a kind of rhythmic pattern down across a page. And here we have a comic that opens with a line of poetry, “Twas the night before Christmas,” a line, specifically, of anapestic meter, that breaks beats down into sets of threes. In the layouts we have a three panel grid structure. I doubt the synchronicity of 3s was intentional, but it’s neat. What’s really important about the grid to me here is it gives the comic a steady rhythm. It’s easy to blow through silent issues, but one of the reasons why I think I read this at about the same pace as an ordinary (talkie?) issue (beyond the really engrossing art itself) is that the layout sets the pace. It tells you how to proceed across each page; when things are speeding up, when things are slowing down. Of course, all layouts do this, but I think there’s a real care and attention here to that pacing beyond the ordinary.

ZT: I am gonna level with you here, poetry has never been my strong suit. And, congrats, because you have successfully taught me and engaged me more about poetry than literally any teacher I’ve ever had. I absolutely agree the layouts lent the issue more structure than a lot of silent issues, it made me want to take my time and appreciate every moment and panel in a way they rarely do. ‘Nuff Said month can come back now, but everyone needs to play by these rules, because it is wildly effective.

King in Black

RS: One thing we’ve only really alluded to thus far is that this is a tie-in to King in Black, an event I am so far enjoying, and I never would have expected to be paired with this series. This issue feels a lot to me like some of my favorite classic event tie-ins; you know, like when Daredevil fights a vacuum cleaner in Inferno? It’s not central, it’s not adding much of anything to the main plot of the story– it’s just taking advantage of the shared universe, and telling a nice little ancillary tale that might not have been told otherwise. It shows the ramifications, the results of the event at a different scale than you get in the main series.

ZT: It has been wild reading King in Black tie-ins so far, honestly. They’ve ranged from clever uses of the event set-up to just…not acknowledging the Goop Invasion at all and Hulk walks the line between the two, I feel. The only tie-in takes the form of one of Knull’s beasts serving as the threat of the story. Credit where it is due, the thing was absolutely terrifying. Far more than any symbiote has been, as far as I’m concerned. It felt like a full circle moment for the clear influence HR Giger’s xenomorphs had on symbiote, casting one of them as a similar singularly terrifying threat.

RS: I really, really appreciated that threat. This is the Hulk— and a couple of random Goop Troops from the invaders felt like they might kill him. When I go back to the main series next, and scale up from just a beast to an army, I’ll be able to better appreciate the threat as a whole now, I think. Knull ripping apart the Sentry was one thing– a soldier almost taking the Hulk is quite another.

ZT: As someone who did not enjoy King in Black #1 very much, it had almost the opposite effect on my end! I found the power levels and overwhelming threat in KiB just utterly dull and more escalation for the sake of escalation. Here, the lone symbiote soldier is given such presence and dread that it works and makes them horrifying in a way Knull and other Big Strong Super Monsters very rarely are.

RS: King in Black certainly is…well, a lot. One of the things that I’m looking forward to in the rest of the series is, well, I don’t think it can escalate further, right? Since it escalated so sharply with that first issue? Maybe the rest of the story will be more interesting as a result? Anyway, even if the rest of the event is a dud, I’m really, really happy it gave us this issue. This is, I think, going to be an all time classic Hulk issue, and an all time classic Christmas issue of comics. It’s beautiful, and horrifying, and sad, and painful, and all the things that Christmas is, and can be, and is not allowed to be depicted as being.

ZT: It is easily one of the best Christmas comics I’ve ever read, and something I will probably throw into my annual Christmas traditions. It is just hauntingly beautiful and hits me in the heart like a damn sledgehammer. Immortal Hulk will likely be studied and remembered for years and I truly hope this special doesn’t get lost in praise for the main series. King in Black: Immortal Hulk deserves to be held up right alongside it.

Marvelous Musings

Mekanix. What a weird callback.
I deeply respect Joe’s ability to zero in on tropical shirts no matter where he is, and am very jealous. Yes, Ho Ho Ho is tropical now, shut up.
Hulk cutest there is? -Editor Chris