An Autopsy of The Immortal Hulk

Jun 30, 2025

Amid the ruins of the post-apocalyptic wasteland that was the comic book industry in 2018—an industry long since wrecked by toxic identity politics, radioactive creators, and monstrously mediocre storytelling—there was a rumor going around.

Hushed whispers by downtrodden fanboys almost too afraid to believe what they were hearing. Word on those cracked and potholed streets said1 there was finally a new comic on the stands worth reading.

A comic that was actually good.

Not only good, but great! A must-read. A legendary run in the making.

In 2018?! Published by Marvel?

In 2018 I had all but given up on mainstream comics2 as a lost cause thanks to years of demoralizing slop by creators of various they/them gender identities whose disdain for the characters they were hired to work on was almost as deep as their disgust at the customers who paid for them. Creators whose sole purpose was seemingly to “own the incels” and kick those “misogynistic” nerds out of their “racist” little clubhouse. Years of rage bait gimmicks replacing fan-favorite characters with no-name newbies whose only qualification was that they checked all the right boxes on the identity politics score card.

(Normie fans of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, exasperated by girlboss cringe like Ironheart, She-Hulk, and The Marvels are currently going through the same “get woke, go broke” gauntlet comic shops endured a decade ago.)

Even so, I have no doubt that a lot of liberal leeway would still have been given if it weren’t for one fatal flaw that tied all those titles of the “All-New, All-Different Marvel” together.

The stories sucked.

So when I heard about this supposed oasis in the desert called The Immortal Hulk, needless to say my interested was piqued. Not enough to buy it or read it, especially not back then when my attention was far more focused on the incipient scene of crowdfunded comics (a story for a different time) but the thought of it always stayed somewhere in the back of my mind.

Now, years later, after the (albeit somewhat misplaced and overexaggerated) bitterness I felt at the sad state of an industry I’d loved has somewhat subsided and with the culture war—if not undergoing a ceasefire, then certainly on something of a stalemate—I decided now was a good time to go back and see what all the fuss was about.

Everyone knows The Hulk. Like so many of his Marvel compatriots—Spider-Man, Captain America, and even a former B-lister like Iron Man, whose popularity skyrocketed thanks to the movies—the 1960s creations of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby have long since escaped from the world of four color newsprint into mainstream public consciousness.

In other words, Hulk is a household name.

Even your aunt knows the story—sad scientist Bruce Banner (David, if you watched the Bill Bixby/Lou Ferrigno show from the 1970s) becomes mad monster The Incredible Hulk when he loses control, unleashed by the power of gamma radiation.

With that simple but effective premise as a base—Jekyll and Hyde for the atomic age—the Hulk’s story has been told and retold over the decades by various artists, writers, actors, and directors, each giving their own spin on that joyless green giant.

My personal favorite is the Planet Hulk storyline from 2006, in which the Avengers have finally had enough of the Hulk’s billion dollar temper tantrums and decide to toss him in a rocket and shoot him into space, where he crash lands on an alien planet and becomes a cosmic gladiator. (If you’ve seen Thor: Ragnarok, you’re familiar with the premise, though unfortunately I can’t say director Taika Waititi did the original comics by Greg Pak and Carlo Pagulayan the justice they deserved.)

You’d think that, with the steady spate of Hulk stories being churned out since the 1960s, they’d have run out of ideas for the Jade Giant. But what’s old is new again, and one of the fun and fascinating things about the weird relay race that is mainstream superhero stories is seeing how each new creative team tackles these iconic old characters.

Granted, most “runs” on a given character are mediocre and forgettable at best and abominably bad at worst, but every now and then the stars align and the right creative team combines with the right character and the right concept to make something special.

This was the case with The Immortal Hulk (2018-2021), penned by British writer Al Ewing, penciled by Brazilian artist Joe Bennett, and presented with pristine covers by industry legend Alex Ross3, in a run that many consider to be one of the best in the character’s entire sixty-plus year publishing history.

Taking place in the wake of the Civil War II crossover event (in which Bruce Banner is killed for shock value as per the usual M.O. of big event comics) the general arc of The Immortal Hulk is that Hulk, as the title implies, cannot die. As the mystery behind his new undead persona unfolds, we learn that the gamma radiation which triggered Banner’s initial transformation all those years ago is far more mysterious than the scientist suspected—gamma is given a decidedly supernatural spin centered around the otherworldly Green Door and its gnostic secrets.

The mission statement is clear: to bring the Hulk back down to his more horror-inspired roots after decades of action-oriented Avengers adventures and campy smash shenanigans.

As Ewing himself writes in one of the issues’ letter columns, opining about the original run of the character:

Those first six issues are the primal meat, a bubbling primordial soup of Stan Lee, Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko, all trying to work out exactly what kind of monster they’ve made. It was a horror book, to begin with—Bruce Banner, sitting and waiting for the night to come. Waiting to change into his terrifying opposite, the Jungian shadow-side—everything he hid from the world and tried to pretend wasn’t inside him. “How do I know I won’t keep changing,” he breathes, with a thousand-yard stare that’s a strange mix of fear and desire, “into that brutal, bestial mockery of a human—that creature which fears nothing—which despises reason and worships power!”
Who was this nighttime Lord of Misrule, this shambling monstrosity pretending to be the gentle giant from my TV cartoons? What had he done with the Hulk I knew?

Tracking the scent of that “primal meat” as his guide, Ewing goes all in on the Hulk’s horror bona fides, imbuing each plodding panel with a sense of impending doom, as Bennett draws the characters with bulging eyes and fleshy faces drenched in thick beads of sweat as they look with slack-jawed awe at this different kind of Hulk—a Hulk who bears a sinister sneer on his ugly mug—accentuated by Paul Mounts’ sodium-lit color scheme which gives the proceedings the quality of nightlife eeriness.

Even the classic “hulk-out” is made more horrific—instead of the usual “you wouldn’t like me when I’m angry” followed by Banner’s puny frame making rapid muscle gains to spark the envy of even the most steroid-infused of ripped gym bros, Hulk transformations here are painful and grotesque, almost like the Hulk is being ripped out of Banner’s body, violently vomiting him forth to smash everything in sight.

Indeed, in addition to the many psychological and supernatural horrors, the series is rife with that kind of unapologetic gross-out body horror—in issue #8, for example, Hulk is vivisected by the mad scientists of Shadow Base (led by General Fortean, a more cold blooded, ruthless replacement for the Hulk’s usual archnemesis, Thunderbolt Ross) with his still-conscious body parts placed inside formaldehyde jars as the quivering chunks of meat attempt to reattach to each other (in the next issue, Hulk goes full Mortal Kombat and uses a mutated supervillain’s skull and spinal cord as a ball-and-chain to beat down what’s left of his bifurcated body).

Being a Brit who cut his teeth on 2000 AD and Judge Dredd comics, Ewing’s writing feels like a nostalgic callback to the glory days of the 1980s British Invasion—a time in the comics industry when a murderers’ row of British talent were drafted to breathe new life into these old American characters, adding a level of mature literary sophistication and auteur gravitas to the otherwise silly world of spandex superheroes—to chart-topping success.4

In recent years those stories have been derided as cynical deconstructions that doomed erstwhile fun-loving characters into grim-and-gritty parodies of self-seriousness—and there’s certainly some merit in that criticism. But at their best, these were tales well told by “outsiders” who genuinely loved these weird American creations—tales that offered a fresh perspective and would pay dividends in the industry for years to come.

So who would’ve thought that, in 2018, an Alan Moore-protégé named Al Ewing would come along and recreate that limey magic—and with the Hulk of all characters?

As if to prove the point, Ewing begins each issue with heady epigraphs quoting everything from Sartre to Shakespeare to Scripture.

Issue #1 of the 50 issue series begins with a quote by Carl Jung:

Man is, on the whole, less good than he imagines himself or wants to be.

The nod to Jung is apt considering all the psychoanalysis of the Hulk/Banner dynamic that follows. But such a take is hardly unique to Ewing—in the 1980s, Peter David (who was, it should be noted, an American) had his own critically-acclaimed run on the Hulk, in which he sat Bruce Banner on the psychiatrist’s couch to diagnose his Hulk-outs as a symptom of dissociative identity disorder brought on by his abusive childhood at the hands of his psychopathic father.

In addition to the David callbacks, Ewing sprinkles in references to the character’s entire history whenever possible, while still maintaining the integrity of his run’s particular spooky vibe—an impressive juggling act that shows respect for what came before and no doubt made his editors happy that he was willing to play ball with the rest of the Marvel Universe.

One thing that I’m sure made The Immortal Hulk’s editors decidedly unhappy was a couple of controversies that arose late in the series’ run involving the artist, Joe Bennett.

The first incident occurred when Bennett was credibly accused of including subliminal antisemitic imagery in issue #43—Bennett eventually apologized for the “mistake,” a mistake that was edited out of future reprints. Plausible deniability is probably what kept Bennett from being fired then and there, but a more damning (in the eyes of editorial, at least) incident followed just a few months later, when an edgy political cartoon drawn by Bennett resurfaced, depicting a sword-wielding Jair Bolsonaro (basically Brazilian Trump) smiting his political enemies, who were depicted as scurrying rats. This was the final nail in the coffin of Bennett’s mainstream career, but by that point his work on The Immortal Hulk was already completed.

I only bring up these unfortunate events because they present an interesting meta-dynamic: like the split personalities of Bruce Banner and The Hulk, I can’t help but wonder how much the friction between the far-left writer Ewing and the far (?) right artist Bennett played into the je ne sais quoi of the series, like unstable ingredients mixed in a mad scientist’s laboratory resulting in a fuming chemical reaction that is more than the sum of its parts.

None of this would have been intentional, of course—Bennett presumably tried (and failed) to keep his rightwing politics close to the vest in the notoriously left-leaning comics industry, but Ewing, for his part, has never been shy about voicing his (albeit corporate-approved) opinions. Not to the obnoxious degree of many of his colleagues, to be fair, but Ewing’s radical left worldview nearly drips off the page of his otherwise well-written work on The Immortal Hulk.

The most infamous example of this—and one that lost the series a good deal of the goodwill it had earned early on—is a scene that occurs in Issue #11:

Jackie McGee is an investigative reporter following the Hulk’s glowing path of destruction while also seeking closure for a traumatic incident from her youth when the Hulk, during one of his rampages, destroyed her childhood home. During the scene in question, McGee interrogates a literally-emasculated Hulk (having lost his muscle mass due to his gamma powers being drained by a bad guy, leaving him a saggy green mess) about the pain he causes.

You smash towns. You […] ruin lives. You’ve killed people—not many, but you have. Six months later, you’re on The Avengers again, all is forgiven—
[…]
Your anger…it’s indulged. Even respected. Mine is dismissed—if I’m lucky.
We live in a world of—of men—white, college-educated men, men like Bruce Banner who just rant and scream and rage and—smash things—and the world bends over backward to understand that. To reward it.

This scene could be—and indeed was—dismissed with a roll of the eyes as “angry black woman lectures the Hulk about his white (green?) privilege,” and while it certainly is that, I’d argue that the context of the story Ewing is telling (and McGee’s character arc in particular) prevents it from being just another liberal self-own or unintentional parody.

The same could be said for a later arc in which Ewing really lets his leftist freak flag fly—the Hulk takes over Shadow Base and starts airing manifestos about destroying the human world for its capitalistic sins, inspiring mobs of green-clad protestors to shout “HULK SMASH!” as they spray graffiti and throw bricks at police cars in protest against the injustices of the evil Roxxon Corporation.

In the hands of a lesser writer, this ANTIFA-inspired subplot would be nothing more than a bad “Hulk smash capitalism!” joke, but again, the quality of the larger narrative of The Immortal Hulk story is just so good that I can’t help but give it a pass (without excusing its moral failings).

One of the common retorts to the oft-repeated complaint that “SJWs are ruining comics by making them political!” is that comics were always political.

And the thing is, that’s true. Stan Lee was a good enough business man to keep his Democrat sympathies subtle, but Alan Moore was a loud-and-proud anarcho-communist and Grant Morrison was a out-of-the-closet libertine occultist. Frank Miller used Batman to make fun of Ronald Reagan in the 1980s and Denny O’Neil had Green Lantern use his power ring to fight racism in the 1970s. Sure, the creators of 1990s were a bit more concerned with pouches than politics, but the general swing is undeniable.

The difference is that those comics, for all their liberal biases, were good.

The modern “woke” comic book is contemptible for its simplistic “Orange Man Bad!” leftism, to be sure, but even more so for its mediocre art and disrespect for the characters.

But despite so many shades of gray books that continue to be made by creators seemingly incapable of thinking in anything other than black and white, every once in a while we’re reminded that comics can still be great (Make Comics Great Again?5) no matter their politics.

Look no further than The Immortal Hulk, a highly recommended green pill for the red- and blue-pilled alike.

LAYMAN OF LETTERS

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