Broken Frontier

The ruthless and unforgiving Spikes have been cast against Hulk and the children of Sakar. Now is the time of the Worldbreaker.

Long ago the Spikes--sentient spores with the ability to infect anything organic, thereby turning it into a mindless killing machine--nearly wiped out all life on Sakar. In an attempt to destroy Hulk, the Red King re-introduced them to the planet. As with anything getting in his way, this only made Hulk more mad. It also ushered new alliances where there were once enemies.

Much has been made of decompressed storytelling in comics over the past five years or so. I’ve never really bought into it that much because sometimes details and intensity, while equally important pieces of storytelling, rarely carry a similar pace. Of course, these things aren’t always necessary to the story and filling space for the sake of reaching twenty-two pages doesn’t exactly ingratiate readers. Unfortunately, that is how the previous two or three issues of Hulk have felt.

Greg Pak is basically being asked to write a year’s worth of story (that’s about 260 pages) for Hulk so that the Green Goliath doesn’t interfere with Civil War. He started out gangbusters, but the quality of the work has slowly been sliding…up to this issue. Finally, Pak has reached a point in the story where plotlines are able to merge and the story moves forward at a nice clip. He even gives us a nice cliffhanger to draw us back for the final confrontation that will determine the fate of Sakar.

Even Aaron Lopresti’s art looks more like his typical style here, which is a very good thing. The issue is about eighty percent action, and barely a page goes by that Hulk isn’t jumping into the middle of a fracas. I wish I’d seen this kind of treatment from him (or perhaps it was the inks or colors before—I can’t put my finger on it) in the previous three issues, but better late than never I always say.

After a fun and quickly paced sub-arc that opened the twelve issue Planet Hulk epic, these middle chapters have been rather slow and dull by comparison. However, this finale to the four-part Anarchy feels more like the book did when Pak and company got on board to begin with. The writing seems a bit more inspired, the art seems a bit more clear and the Hulk seems like he’s about to fulfill the prophecy of the Worldbreaker. It’s going to be fun to watch the Red King get his comeuppance.