Marvel 1999 Week--Hulk #3!

I was dreamin' when I wrote this
Forgive me if it goes astray

But when I woke up this mornin'
Coulda sworn it was judgment day

'Cuz they say two thousand zero zero party over
Oops out of time
So tonight I'm gonna party like it's Marvel 1999


That's right, folks, it's time for another theme week around here...and, as my main man Prince tells us, we're going to spend the week wallowing in Marvel 1999.

(editor's note--that lyric..."two thousand zero zero..." doesn't that mean 2000-00, or the year 20,000? What up with that, Prince?)

1999 is going to be an interesting year for me to look at, because I was out of comics at the time. Financial reversals left me broker than the Joker, so I dropped comics cold turkey for 3+ years starting in early 1997. I left when the Heroes were still Reborn, and before they had Returned. Long story short--I hadn't read most of the books we're covering this week until now. So it will be a learning experience for me, and hopefully at least vaguely interesting for you.

Let's start with a couple of early observations:

**We'll be seeing an awful lot of low issue numbers this week, as Marvel hopped full-scale on the "#1 issues are great" bandwagon. After the Heroes Returned, Marvel re-started all the effected mags with yet another #1. Even 2 prominent titles that weren't rebooted by the Image outsourcing--Hulk and Spider-Man--had "soft" re-launches which started in new #1's....a decision Marvel has obviously come to regret, given the almost random declarations that all of these magazines are about to magically hit #600 at almost the same time..

**That being said, it's also clear that by 1999, Marvel was past "the Nineties." Having been burned by the loss of so much popular talent to Image, Marvel spent a good part of the next decade seemingly hiring passerby from the street who could "draw" like Lifeld or Lee or McFarlane, and going so ridiculously overboard in trying to ape the Image style that even the Fantastic Four were given lots and lots of pouches.

But by June 1999, not so much. It's as if the insanity of Heroes Reborn maneuver somehow burned out the last vestiges of Image envy, and Marvel could just get back to telling comic book stories. The creators we'll see this week--Waid, Byrne, Busiek, Perez, Claremont, Stern, Ordway...while not always successful, are generally pretty good story-tellers, understood the English language and anatomy, and could turn in work on time.

So let's see...I never start off with The Hulk...so here we go:

Hmmm, maybe I spoke too soon, because that is one crappy cover. The coloring and super-imposed imagery make it difficult to tell exactly what we're supposed to be seeing, and what we do see is "blechhh." Ron Garney will acquit himself better on the insides.

We're starting in the middle of an arc here, as the Hulk has been going out of control (more than usual), without Banner knowing about it at the time. We're going to blow the suspense on page one, two and three, though, as it's immediately clear that a shadowy madman is the one who has been making the Hulk go berserk.


And our creators:

I know John Byrne doesn't have the cachet these days that he used to in comics circles. But in 1999, he still mattered. Consider this: Both Spider-Man were having re-launches, and Marvel decided that they wanted Byrne on board for both of them. That's showing some confidence in the guy (or, at least in the power of his name on the cover to move copies).

And yet his influence was clearly on the wane. Within a year, he'd be relegated to writing and drawing "flashback books" set in the distant past (i.e. X-Men: The Hidden Years, Spider-Man: Chapter One, and Marvel: The Lost Generation). And then he was gone from Marvel for good (so far).

Byrne's first run on the Hulk in 1985 lasted all of six issues, and this time he wasn't around much longer--just 7 issues and an annual. One would have hoped to have the author of a big re-launch have more of an impact, both in time and content. But unlike the Amazing Spider-Man re-launch (about which we'll have more later this week), creatively there was no reason here for a new #1.

Part of the problem this time around was a bit of an experiment in storytelling Byrne seemed to be conducting. The first 5 issues of the run dealt with the Hulk's destruction of the town of Faulkner. But Byrne kept retelling that same story from different viewpoints--an interesting idea, but this was no Rashomon. The problem here is that the Hulk wasn't actually fighting anyone. He was just rampaging through a small town, throwing trucks and blowing up barns. Even seeing those events through the townspeople's eyes, Banner's, and the mystery mastermind, it's just not that interesting of a story to justify such repetition. And those only so many times you can see the same events replayed before the yawns set in.

Further hurting things was the deliberate decompression Byrne was going for. Check out this sequence, where our villain takes a whole page just to have Hulk pick something up.

Trust me, this goes on for pages. What makes it worse is that it's all "action" we've already seen in the past months, just retold with different captions. Check out this sequence:




And compare it to the same events portrayed just a month prior, in Hulk #2:



All well done enough, but really--there's not enough new ideas, or new perspective here to justify such extensive repetition, is there? It's potentially a fascinating approach--but I think the events Byrne chose to give us multiple viewpoints of aren't that interesting to begin with, and the new viewpoints don't really add up to much.

I'll save you further decompression, as we get pages and pages of conversations, which aren't bad...but since they're mostly from people we'll never see again, ultimately pointless. We do get a couple of noteworthy bon mots:


And we get Tony Stark laying the groundwork for future dickweedery:


And after all of that yakking, it's time for the big reveal:

Ooh, ooh, I just KNOW it's gonna be someone cool!!!

D'oh!! Oh, poor John Byrne, don't you know--Tyrannus is never any good as a villain. All this build-up, for him? Sigh...

SPOILER ALERT: Banner turns back to the Hulk next issue, and takes Tyrannus out with one punch. The end.

So, that's Hulk 1999--an experiment in storytelling, that comes across as a failure. I sort of understand what he was trying to do--turn the Hulk into a force of nature, show how he's perceived by different people--but none of it really works. And it moves like molasses. I like Byrne's work a lot, but I don't think this is one of his better efforts. But Byrne left so early (for whatever reason) that we might not know what his full intentions were. We'll talk more about Byrne later this week. But at least Cable's not in it.

But let me leave you with this: I like Ron Garney's Hulk:

What do you think, Prince?

Perfect!!

ELSEWHERE IN THE MARVEL UNIVERSE:

Speaking of issues focusing on point-of-views:

The Inhumans #8, by Paul Jenkins and Jae Lee, in which we get a new view on several ongoing subplots, because the story is told from Lockjaw's point of view, as he teleports around looking for someone to play with. WOOF!!