The Immortal Hulk begins it’s final journey below, after a tussle with the Avengers in Immortal Hulk #49 written by Al Ewing, pencilled by Joe Bennett, inked by Ruy José and Belardino Brabo, with colors by Paul Mounts, and letters by Cory Petit
Zach Rabiroff: As Ewing’s Hulk drew toward its journey’s end /
We found ourselves amid a scene of strife /
Welcome to Times Immortal, blessed friend
Robert Secundus: I’ve come to the point of my life/ where i’ve discovered that terza rima/ is fucking hard, something something -ife.
I Canto Quit You
Zach: There is a cosmic injustice to the fact that last issue was my off-month on this Times Immortal beat. That issue opened with a quote from Franz Kafka, noted literary Jewish procrastinator and explorer of the satirically unsettling. I have, let me tell you, no shortage of things to say about Franz Kafka. Every day of my life, I heroically resist saying things about Franz Kafka even without prompting (as, indeed, I am doing right at this moment).
This issue, however, we get Dante Alighieri. Specifically, we get this passage from the first lines of Canto III of Inferno (a.k.a. the only Dante poem that anyone will ever be seen quoting):
It will horrify you to hear this, Rob, but I simply cannot tell a lie, at least not in print: I am not, and have never been, a Dante guy. I find him a pale shadow of his Roman inspirations; a pallid, pious, yet bitterly egotistical attempt to capture some of the epic scope of his model and guide Vergil. So despite my long familiarity with his tripartite poem, I must confess that I have never, even once, managed to enjoy it.
You, however, are the resident Dante expert here at ComicsXF, which makes this precisely the right quote for you to be grappling with to open our issue. So by all means, please lead us off: what does this epigram mean to you, to Hulk, and to river Acheron over which we pass?
Rob: I’m going to put aside my shock, horror, and, if I’m being quite honest, sense of betrayal for now, and focus on that text.
So, there are three things I want to establish for our readers: this quotation’s place in the poem, the relevance of the text to the story, and the relevance of what is elided from this quotation to this story.
Dante’s journey does not begin in Hell. It begins in a dark wood he wanders, lost, in the middle of his life. There he encounters three strange beasts that threaten to kill him, before he encounters the shade of Virgil, the object of, let’s say Dante’s great fandom, who tells Dante that the only way forward is to find a path through the tortures of Hell, the purifications of Purgatory, and joys of Heaven. Dante falters, knowing that he is just an ordinary man, not a great saint or mystic worthy or capable of such a journey, but Virgil reassures him that three great women of heaven— the Virgin Mary, mother of Christ, St. Lucy, who was killed by her pagan husband, and Beatrice, a girl who Dante had loved, who had died very young.
Dante is reassured, but then he confronts this great gate, with this inscription, and his journey begins properly. He passes through and enters Hell. I was surprised by this choice of epigraph because, well, we’re so near the end of our journey. This is something encountered by Dante while he’s still lost, while he still needs great reassurance, while he’s still ignorant of so many wonders. Our protagonist has been through everything, and is stepping through his own hellgate to tortures he knows intimately. He’s going back to Hell.
Ok. Part 2: the text. This condenses the aim of the Inferno into one sentence. The poem will interrogate the doctrine of Hell as a thing made for justice, by power, wisdom, and love. It will routinely place before the reader stories that will lead them to challenge, affirm, or both at once their understanding of things such as sin and punishment. In a blunter way, these are the same preoccupations of the comic. The Hulk has played the Satan of Job rather than the Satan of Dante, but the comic has asked what is justice, what is power, what is wisdom, and what is love (and here I am begging Chris to refrain from an editor’s note) while using superheroes and supervillains to show us various modern sins. The One Below All, Brian Banner, Xemnu, Dario Agger, The Leader, Peter Gyrich, and the Avengers themselves are all different kinds of sinners leading their own damned lives. There’s a theological tradition (I think more popular among the Orthodox churches, but I don’t understand them much at all, so I beg forgiveness if I’m off here) that Hell and Heaven aren’t places so much as states of being with respect to God’s grace. Those who turn towards it are in Heaven, and those who turn away are in Hell. You can have, then, an Inferno that tours our world, that catalogues the sins and punishments of the Hell that is our own modern society.
Part 3: the elision. As is often the case in Immortal Hulk, it’s only with the title page, itself on the final page, that we see entirely what the issue is up to. Here it is: “Ye Who Enter Here.” The epigraph was odd in that it stopped right before the most famous line that Dante ever wrote. But notice— something is still missing.
Before me things create were none, save things
Eternal, and eternal I endure.
[…] ye who enter here.
The comic skips “Abandon all hope.” And that might just be because part of Ewing’s title drop schtick is often to cut down the given line to the bone, to something extremely short and direct, letting the reader fill in the rest. But I think this particular elision is important. This comic could easily be described as 50 issues of Hulk mashed up with Dante, but we can see it’s very much not that. The gate is at the end rather than the beginning of the journey. The poem confronts us with hopelessness. The comic refuses to doso. Why? What does that mean? What are we to think of this Hell, this damnation? I do not know. I think we’re going to need to wait until the final issue to know for sure.
Formal Deviations
Zach: For all its narrative pyrotechnics, Immortal Hulk has rarely been a comic that experiments with form. We saw it happen in issue #25, the midpoint of the series, where the Hulk’s journey through the Ninth Cosmos was conveyed through a series of otherworldly narrative captions that echoed the awesome, quasi-Biblical imagery of the art and story. That rarity of deviation from standard comic book layouts makes it all the more striking and full of portent when a break does happen – as it does this issue.
Here, in the absence of a panel grid or traditional dialogue, the story is told in prose text layed out in black borders along the sides of full-page images. These are the words of Jackie McGee’s newspaper articles, which we’ve seen her researching since her introduction in this series. It’s a fascinating choice, for the second issue in a row now, to center the narrative perspective on a character other than the Hulk: last time, it was Jen Walters relating her conflicted history with her cousin Bruce. Here, it’s Jackie providing a human perspective on an action sequence that would (if told in a more usual style) feel perhaps overfamiliar and repetitive – after all, Jackie herself writes that “maybe every fight the Hulk has is the same fight.”
So from a storytelling perspective, Ewing’s choice makes the ordinary seem strange and unusual, and at the same time builds tension at a key point in the drama: just as the story reaches its climax, we find ourselves kept out of reach of Bruce Banner’s thoughts and plans. If this is a horror book, then the greatest horror is the unknown, and at this moment – as we venture into the lowest depths of Hell, just as we ascended to Heaven midway through this series, the unknown is all that stands before us.
So I’m curious to get your thoughts on this, Rob. What did you think of Ewing’s choice here, both on the level of form and content?
Rob: It reminded me above all else of another character-defining run’s format-breaking climax, Walt Simonson’s Thor #380, in which Thor’s battle with the world-serpent occurs entirely in splash pages. It’s interesting to me that two such similar choices could result in such different effects; Thor #380 draws you into the battle, lets you feel every moment, every blow, as if you were standing beside Jormungandr and could hear the moment Thor shatters every bone in his body. But the narrative boxes here, as you note, put us at a distance. Instead of immersion, the choices lead to a kind of abstraction. We’re viewing it all apart from the Hulk, but also in a sense apart from Jackie, from everyone. These are excerpts of prose from a newspaper article written after the fact, and an article that is written to be driven by reflection, not narrative. It’s a very odd choice for a climax. Instead of urging the reader to get swept up by the action, it leads the reader to take a step back and think carefully about not just this moment but about the story thus far. I think you’re right that there’s tension building here, but for me there’s also a kind of serenity.
Zach: There certainly is, and I think I have an idea as to why. To explain it, allow me to argue with myself for a moment here. I said that this narrative choice alienates us, as readers, from the Hulk. But maybe that’s not quite true.
Beginning in 2013, Al Ewing wrote a run of Mighty Avengers comics that were among his first sustained stories in the Marvel Universe. That series opened with a kind of mission statement, in which an elderly woman hurled a brick at an eldritch monster in Times Square, encouraging a crowd of committed spectators to declare solidarity with the street-level Avengers heroes. And what started in that moment reached a logical climax in the run’s now-famous final sequence. There, in the flickering moments before the extinction of the multiverse, an ER doctor breaks the fourth wall to address us, his patients, directly. “We were Avengers, you and I,” he tells us. “The mightiest of Avengers. At the end of the world it all meant something. We all counted.”
The overarching theme of Immortal Hulk is a system: the Hulk, we were told early on, is not one personality, or even a set of dueling ones, but an ever-expanding collection of voices, which, at their best, exist to raise up and give strength to the others in their times of need. Why, then, should we have assumed that the system stopped within Bruce Banner’s brain? Why would it not extend ever-outward, to include Doc Samson, and Rick Jones, and Dr. McGowan, and Betty Ross last issue, and Jackie McGee in this one?
And if it does, then there’s nothing alienating about this narration at all: what we are reading here is the voice of the Hulk, because Jackie, in casting her lot with her friend and choosing to make his risk and sacrifice her own, has become a part of that infinite system. As, by reading this series and identifying with its heroes, have we.
The Hulk is immortal, because there is always a Hulk, because the Hulk is every one of us who makes the choice to be. And so, paradoxically, even as our heroes descend into the infernal deep, there is a sense of strength and possibility greater than ever existed at the start of this series. The Hulk, all of us Hulks, are joining together at last.
Not So Below
Zach: I mentioned earlier that Jackie’s narration has the effect of making the familiar seem powerfully new, and that’s especially true when it comes to the actual plot of this issue. The center of the story is really just another brawl between the Hulk and the Avengers, but an outsider’s eyes give these characters a kind of majesty that we rarely see in Marvel heroes, with their human foibles and feet of clay. (DC heroes, historically treated as more abstract and godlike, are another matter, as writers from Alan Moore to Grant Morrison have made careers demonstrating.) Take the stunning, unforgettable description of the Fantastic Four’s appearance in this issue:
“Reed Richards’ body made little alien sounds as he stretched into the room. Johnny Storm’s face was hidden in flame. He couldn’t seem to turn it down or off. And Sue Richards stared at and through everything, seeing shapes in the air nobody else could guess at… It was Ben Grimm – the Thing – who looked the most human. ‘What’s the matter with ya all?’ he said, genuinely aggrieved. ‘Did they hurt ya, pal?’ The Hulk looked almost sad when he said that. But he didn’t take Ben’s hand.”
I’m reminded of what might be the best part of Frank Miller and David Mazzuchelli’s “Born Again” story in Daredevil: the arrival, also told from the perspective of a newspaperman, Ben Urich, of the Avengers onto the scene of an inferno: “A soldier with a voice that could command a god – and does. And suddenly it’s raining so hard it hurts. Everybody who can falls silent.”
But the two cases are different, I think, in one key respect: where Miller used the technique to distance the audience from the pantheon of heroes, Ewing, paradoxically, employs it to bring us deeper into their emotional realities. It would scarcely have been possible to make us focus on the human connection between Ben Grimm and Bruce Banner if this were a more traditional comic: we’ve seen it too many times, in too many issues, to take the moment with the solemnity it deserves. But here, with our eyes drawn to white blocks of text next to enormous tableau’s, we have no choice but to treat it like a scene from a neoclassical painting. This is a moment that means something, to them and to us. Did it mean something to you, Rob?
Rob: I think so. You know, every time we sit down to write this column, and we start writing a few thousand words on Dante, Damnation, Kafka, alienation, capitalism, SOCIETY, etc etc, it’s hard not to feel extremely silly; we’re writing about the Hulk, a character owned by the Disney Corporation, created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby in 1962 to sell magazines to children. Where is the line between Serious Critic and Disney Adult Desperately Trying To Convince Themselves That It’s Cool And Fine To Obsess Over Art Made For Children?
I don’t know where the line is, but I know that (to some degree, even if we’ve gone past it) these comics are worth some level of appreciation, and not because of the epigraphs. You can slap some William James quotes and a nine panel grid on anything to make it seem Grown Up and Smart or whatever. I think it’s because of moments like that human connection— two men who seem monsters, walking together, one trying to offer a bit of human compassion, the other unsure of how to accept it— that we can take these seriously. I think the thing baked into this shared comic universe, regardless of who owns it, regardless of what lunchboxes and funkopops and multi-billion dollar franchises it’s used to sell, is just a bit more humanity than you’d find in a lot of escapist pop culture. I think, more so than the psychedelic imagery, or the growing nostalgia industry, that this is what led these comics to find a wider and older audience in the 70s and 80s. Stan and Jack wanted to sell magazines, but they sold them by making sure that the core was always something deeply, simply human. I think it’s important that the most significant, the best Marvel comic of the modern era took a moment at its climax to peel away all the spectacle, all the superheroics, all the allusions and Big Ideas, to remember that.
Zach: I think what makes Ewing a uniquely effective writer is that he consistently lands at the center point of both Lee and Kirby: the former with his chummy, relatable characters with feet of clay; the latter with his grand, cosmic, awesome and terrifying ideas. You’re absolutely right that the human connection between the Hulk and the Thing is what makes this issue – and all of their interaction in this series – work in a way that transcends the typical comic book punch theatre. But it also allows us an emotional inroad to the religio-sci-fi concept underlying this issue’s plot.
The Hulk refuses to take Ben’s hand, not out of animosity, but out of fear and shame: he has seen in himself, more clearly than ever, a warped reflection of Ben Grimm, all goodness turned to an evil and corruption that cannot help but infect those around him (or so he believes). I am fascinated by this issue’s vision of the extended Banner-Ross clan (Rick Jones standing in for hotheaded Johnny Storm) as an alternate, twisted “Below” to the Fantastic Four’s “Above”.
It’s a concept so obvious, so clearly right and rooted in these characters’ histories together, that it seems impossible no one had ever stated it before. But it’s new here, and it reflects Ewing’s seemingly infinite capacity to turn the cumbersome continuity of Marvel Comics to his advantage: he plays his footnotes like a symphony, arranging the notes so that they flow harmoniously toward one inescapable crescendo: the Hulk must return to the Hell whence his cosmic power came. Just as Ben Grimm once ascended to the highest heaven to stand face to face with his creator (an issue specifically mentioned by Ewing when Ben and Joe Fixit sat down for a Coney Island hot dog several months back), the Hulk must go to what lies below to confront the source of his creation. Whether he survives, and in what form, is the unholy mystery still to be revealed.
Final Thoughts
- [Ed. Note: What is love? Baby don’t hurt me, don’t hurt me, no more.]
- The second to last issue. Once more into the breach.
Zach Rabiroff edits articles at Comicsxf.com.
Robert Secundus is an amateur-angelologist-for-hire.
