snap judgments

Manager Hank and I got to explain what ‘jumping the shark’ was to a fellow employee. You see, as I at least told it, it comes from the idea that once something ‘jumps the shark’ (as Fonzie did on Happy Days), there really is nothing else. You can’t be challenged because what’s possibly going to seem more dangerous (or less ridiculous) than jumping over a shark on a pair of water skies? How can you go back to simple drama or more personal stories? You jumped a freakin’ shark! It’s pretty cool don’t get me wrong, but it’s like that Daffy Duck trick he’d do to end the vaudeville show cartoon where he drinks nitroglycerin and blows himself up. It’s a fantastic trick and brings down the house but he can only do it once.

And thus, World War Hulk. As of issue #4, I can pretty much guarantee that none of the results are going to matter to anyone bigger than the Hulk himself, and even he has to revert back down to a more popular culture standard by the summer. World War Hulk is a lot of sound and fury signifying nothing at all.

Why? Thanks for asking! You see, I’d been actually with World War Hulk (though shaky on a few points) up until this last issue. #1 came in to lay down the ground work to those who hadn’t been paying attention and to take out some major structures. This is to show that we’re playing for keeps, or so I think, showing Iron Man taken down with fighter jets and buildings smashed and Black Bolt held up helpless and defeated (which is another story in and of itself, just table that thought). All in all, something that really set the tone of this whole she-bang. This was going to be brutal, it was going to be righteous and Civil War was going to look like the McNeil-Lehrer Hour next to this real war of wars.

Second issue kept it up as far as throwing heroes at a man destined to win. I mean, they can’t defeat the guy on #2, right? The fights were fantastically illustrated, real meaty slugfests that went beyond showing you the face-offs that Civil War gave you and delivered the blow by blow of a super battle. It probably would have been better if oh, say… the rest of the Marvel Universe was affected by these battles the way that Civil War sent shockwaves through other books; Peter Parker unmaskes in Civil War #2 and Amazing Spider-Man follows suit, Sue Richards leaves her husband as of Civil War #4 and the Fantastic Four title shows you the aftermath (or an entirely different departure, but again, rant for another time). Here, many major heroes go toe to toe with the Hulk and lie in the street in bloody heaps and… the Fantastic Four are on another planet saving Sue. Or Ben and Johnny are stuck with the Zombie-verse. The Avengers (both sets) seem to be just fine in their own books, the Mighty still paused in the world’s slowest fight with Ultronette and New hanging about the Sanctum Sanctorum in a paranoid fit (again, more rants, another time… focus, Carla!). World War Hulk #2 could have been cooler if just a little more attention were paid to it.

#3 was it! #3 was the issue that had me in my seat, ready for something big in the Hulk-verse, so to speak. There is no situation that can’t be improved with an appearance by Thunderbolt Ross in my opinion and his explanation of why the Hulk doesn’t deserve the air God Fearing Red Blooded Americans breathe is everything I love about the character; his stick-to-itiveness, his firm belief in what he thinks is right to the exclusion of all else is what the anti-Hulk side needed. From his point of view, there’s a sense of danger and threat because really, how much can titans slug it out? We need some human contact, as flawed as it is, some history and Thunderbolt firing two pistols into the Hulk’s face as they plummet from a hellicopter is just genius. Of course, the act is futile in the face of the incredible Hulk and a couple more issues, but the sentiment is there and it put the book over for me. By the end of this issue, Doctor Strange is so desperate to stop the madness, he drinks the essence of the extra-dimensional demon powerhouse Zom, I guess thinking that if you can’t beat ‘em…

Okay, that’s pretty hardcore. A guy who’s been relatively hands-off in recent events is taking not only EXTREME action to try and find a resolution, but possibly unleashing forces he had no way of controlling that could easily make a bad situation worse. This isn’t just the act of a desperate man, this is the act of a stupid man and here is where my worry starts.

Issue #4 sets in on the big Demon-Fueled Strange and the Righteously-Indignant Hulk fight and despite the power level and the awesome factor, this is kind of a weak battle. In fact, even the Hulk seems a little tired of all this and doesn’t seem to have his heart in the battle, almost trying to talk Doctor Strange down from this incredibly risky and uncontrollable turn of events. After saving a bunch of people from Rampaging Strange’s destruction (yeah, figure that one out), the not-so-good Doctor is forced to join the rest in the new gladiatorial pit. Rick Jones, the shadow of this book (and sadly just as empty- yikes! another tangent!) shows up to give an ‘AH HA! You’re not REALLY a monster after all!’ moment that was better done in the last issue of the Incredible Hulk with a less interesting character. Hulk shrugs this off and sets about showing the Illuminati what he had to go through off-world while the rest of the heroes in the Marvel Universe just seem to… watch in super-handcuffs. What were once elegantly brutal fights are getting sloppy, where once we had some enthusiasm for seeing heroes fall we find redundancy, and the book has officially lost my attention. Justin time for the Sentry to get off the couch.

That’s right, OFF THE COUCH! Like Mighty Casey at Bat, the Golden Guardian of Neurosis has been sitting back on the couch watching this all go down with pleas from his friends and comrades to get up and do something, goddamnit! And finally, after remembering a conversation in which IRON MAN told him it was OKAY TO PLAY GOD, he leaves his house and is ready to end this travesty of justice.

Let’s face it folks: other books have moved on. As if realizing that the characters involved in World War Hulk weren’t going to make a difference, the tie-ins to World War Hulk have come and gone. Frontline is focusing more on the lives of the characters than revealing half of the secrets that it did for Civil War. Issue #4 was the issue I stopped reading this series and started flipping through it for salient points. While Civil War: Frontline added some dimention to the overall plot and painted both sides of the war with damning evidence (okay, the MySpace Rant wasn’t exactly ‘damning’, per se) and at least contented some questions I’d had. It wasn’t great (those historical comparisons in the back were really lousy), but the main story carried itself through. This, however, is starting to look more and more like a vanity project for Sally Floyd (the woman WHO LIVES BY HER OWN RULES!) that showcases scenes of war and disasters in a four-color smash-’em’-up event. I’m not saying that World War Hulk shouldn’t have major repercussions and that the innocent bystanders shouldn’t have a place in the story, I’m just saying you can’t pull on my heartstrings that some poor old woman lost her house while the Hulk was totally throwing that dude through a building. Don’t ruin the action with sentimentality, wait until the slugfest is over, then show us the misery; otherwise, both lose their impact. Then again, this may be just me.

The very moment I decided I was going to start flipping was at the end, when Ben Ulrich goes undercover to see the Hulk Gladiatorial Pit up close and personal. As he sits with people hungry for violence and spectacle, the opening act seems to be a demon shrike from the Team Aliens fighting a lion from the zoo that s obviously shown to have no survival instincts left in him. It’s a sad sad picture made worse by the audience reaction and their lust for the gore. Ulrich asks the guy next to him who was going on about how the lion was fried and split like a peach is the guy had any pets, to which he replied two dogs and seemed unfazed by the comparison. “We have met the enemy and it is us”, honestly, it’s no big revelation and showing that the conquered can be as ‘evil’ or brutal as the conquering is a common trope of war stories since long before Hulk showed up in a space ship. What bothers me so much about it is that this is the Marvel Universe where I could count on the common man to rise to the occasion. The first two Spider-Man movies endeared me to them by showing that when the chips are down, we rise up to aid the honorable and in need regardless of powers, Luke Cage’s neighborhood threw things at SHIELD agents trying to take their hero down, all of this showing some inherent good in humanity.

Civil War: Frontline gave you Sally Floyd and Ben Ulrich, the humanest of the human, as the conscience in some ways of our heroes at war. World War Hulk: Frontline seems to be showing us at issue #4 out of 6 that there is no way the hope for the future is going to rest with us, so thank god the Sentry got his butt off the couch.

Augh! I swore I wasn’t going to do that! So, sum up: World War Hulk is ending in an issue while the rest of the comics on the stands had it end months ago. With issue #5, we’ve been shown that one man is going to be more powerful than the rest of the heroes combined and settle things in 28 pages that the rest of the series entire couldn’t do. Daniel Way has blown up the Hulk without knowing that this trick? You can only do it once.