Hulk: Grand Design (The Marvel Collectors)

Product Information

Tegan O'Neil | March 2, 2023 Uncaptioned images in this article are from Hulk: Grand Design, all writing and art by Jim Rugg. Happy Ending Override: Immortal Hulk ended with a semblance of peace amongst Banner and the Hulks. Come this series, he is rather hostile toward any of them, and the story mostly disregards the strides made toward peace (barring some minor rewrites to account for it).

The idea of Marvel's Grand Design books is rather brilliant. You take about 50 years of comic book history and you formulate it into a cohesive biography of some of your favorite Marvel heroes. This time around it's the big, bad Incredible Hulk and it's rather appreciated by me that he was given the Grand Design treatment. An Arm and a Leg: When Tony traps Hulk's arm in a cage of adamantium, Hulk easily rips his arm off from the elbow. There just aren’t a lot of big-tent family-friendly properties out there built around the cumulative consequences of multiple generations of mental illness and abuse. And yet that’s what the Hulk has been about, explicitly and in-text, since Bill Mantlo’s run in the '80s (although the idea was generated by Barry Windsor-Smith, that’s a long story better discussed elsewhere). Suffice to say, the development turned out to be extraordinarily generative for the franchise. Peter David spent over a decade exploring the consequences of Mantlo’s revelations, and almost every writer since has maintained and further developed the idea that the Hulk—Bruce Banner—suffers from serious mental illness. Dale Keown pencils a later rendition of Banner's childhood abuse. From The Incredible Hulk #377 (Jan. 1991); inked by Bob McLeod, colored by Glynis Oliver, lettered by Joe Rosen, written by Peter David. The (umpteenth) detente Banner had achieved with his alter ego's personality by the end of Immortal Hulk has been destroyed by an unknown force manipulating them. It's worth noting that Hulk is actually still willing to make amends. Banner is the one unwilling to make peace, afraid of his own destructive potential.

Marvel Preview: X Deaths of Wolverine #2

Well, you know - Spider-Man was never my guy, as I say. I liked Spider-Man’s world and supporting characters a lot more than I ever felt connected to the guy himself.

Following the events of Immortal Hulk, it seemed that Bruce Banner and the Hulk had developed a peace of mind with their condition and lives. However, something terrible has happened that has shattered the two badly, thus Banner is doing something he hasn't tried before: turning the Hulk into a "Smashtronaut". What has happened to the two to push Banner into doing such a thing? Writer/artist Jim Rugg concludes his creative reimagining of the entire history of THE INCREDIBLE HULK in this can't-miss oversized issue. You'll never look at Bruce Banner the same way again! Self-Imposed Exile: After El Paso is leveled by Titan and Banner realizes that only the Hulk is truly immortal, Banner chooses to throw himself into interdimensional space, hoping to protect everyone he knows from the worst yet to come. After Byrne's return did a belly flop they course-corrected with Paul Jenkins. (I'll always associate Jenkins with his underrated run on Hellblazer; he had the not-inconsiderable misfortune of following Garth Ennis on that title, but I think Jenkins' run is the dark horse candidate for my favorite Hellblazer - the Ann Nocenti rebuttal to Ennis' Frank Miller.) By then the EiC seat was about to turn over from Bob Harras to Joe Quesada. Marvel didn't seem to have any problems with making writer-driven comics in the year 2000, which is what desperation can do to a body. (The company didn't seem to have any problems antagonizing Peter David in the new millennium either). It was accepted... or perhaps better to say, acquiesced after that point that the Hulk was going to be a book that lived or died on the strength of its writer. Ambient threat from The Incredible Hulk #41 (Aug 2002), penciled by Lee Weeks, inked by Tom Palmer, colored by Studio F, lettered by Richard Starkings & Wes Abbot, written by Bruce Jones.Nonetheless, I don’t really know what to do with Rugg’s Hulk: Grand Design. As I believe I belabored a few paragraphs ago, I’m a person not without significant opinions on the question of the Incredible Hulk. I wanted to know what Rugg’s hook was. How was he going to find his way in?

If you were in or around comics in 2004 and are still in the business, in any capacity, well. Chances are very good you had to work for it. You had to really want it. Because at that time it was getting so much easier to do anything but. And the price of admission was never not eating a lot of shit. Then Bill Mantlo came along and wrote the Hulk like an actual story with a real central character, who developed and even changed as a result of learning new things about himself. Marvel didn’t really want that. To prove just how much they didn’t want that, after Mantlo left they put John Byrne on the title for a brief, aborted run in the middle of the 1980s. And I don’t want to dog that run, it was actually pretty interesting - Byrne moved as far from Mantlo as he could go, consciously doing a “widescreen” all-action book a decade and a half before The Authority. He didn’t even make it a full year before leaving for DC and Superman, however. So the name creator left the book and Marvel once again immediately stopped caring about the Hulk. Jarella, princess of a sub-atomic world and one of the Hulk's key romantic interests, is mentioned by Rugg a few times, very briefly. Now, for her outsize significance to the character, she wasn’t in very many comics - but she was significant to the Hulk in the same way Gwen Stacy was for Peter Parker. Her brief return during the Chaos War crossover was my favorite Hulk moment of the new century - even above anything in Immortal. Rugg mentions her the one time and moves past - Hulk’s true love swept aside in the course of events. A steady drumbeat of insular history unmoored from context, an odd effect native to this Grand Design. Hell - and this is a serious suggestion, since you do seem to have an affinity for the guy: write a couple Hulk comics for some other hotshot to draw. Might be fun.

Limit Break: When Bruce and Hulk refuse to fight in issue 12, Titan goes "screw it" and snaps the Engine Room lever past its limit. Cover image for 75960609966500141 HULK: GRAND DESIGN – MONSTER 1 MARTIN VARIANT, by Jim Rugg, in stores Wednesday, March 30, 2022 from marvel Powers as Programs: When the Hulk unleashes a blast equivalent to 3000 Gamma Bombs, Thor is caught in the epicentre and turned into a Gamma Mutate similar to the Hulk. The Hulk then takes up Mjolnir, giving him Thor's powers and cladding him in Asgardian armor.