Broken Frontier

Hulk smash. Hercules labors. Together they like to fight. In a convoluted mess of mixed mythologies and contrived scenarios, Hercules and the Hulk meet, fight and then face a larger foe together.

This is an entertaining book. I would expect no less from Pak and Van Lente. There is a lot of fun to be had in these 64 pages, but there are some definite problems with logic. Varied mythologies are mixed together and spat back out in a mess of indistinguishable proportions. For someone who has not studied the various mythologies presented here, it would be fairly confusing. I have enough of a grasp of Greek mythology to know who is and isn’t from Edith Hamilton, but the Norse stuff is set up like it is of the same time line. Now if this were DC, it could be explained away as the first three worlds, and to an extent it is.

The framing sequence of Athena teaching an object lesson to Cho is solid. However, the characterization of Amadeus is starting to be a little weak. Here we have a kid that is one of the most intelligent people in the world, able to bring S.H.I.E.L.D. to its knees with a laptop. You would think that immediately following a heart breaking lesson from his big green idol, he would look upon Hercules with more jaded eyes, but somehow we are supposed to believe that his age leaves him vulnerable and needing of that hero worship.

The rest is good fun. It is a little choppy. To tell the truth, it seems to this writer that the varied vignettes are there to give the varied artists a purpose. I guess that is good enough reason to give us the Hercules wrestling scene that seems oddly out of place. The rest I get, but those two pages just seem like an excuse.

Overall the art is nice. Pham does the work readers have come to expect from him. Layton brings his experience to the page and Nguyen knocks it out of the park. However, Brown is a little uneven. He does fine with the fight scenes, but his stilted and static non action scenes mar the rest of an otherwise well drawn book.

Given a neat idea and an awesome reprint of a Stan Lee first meeting between the titular pair makes the price tag well worth the purchase. You get a lot of bang for your buck, but the problems with the book are fairly glaring and keep it from being the classic one might have hoped.