Brandon Borzelli's Geek Goggle Reviews

Hulk vs. Hercules: When Titans Collide
Marvel Comics
Pak, Van Lente, Pham, Nguyen, Layton & Brown

Hercules against the Hulk could be a fun, little, out of continuity story. Unfortunately for this one it starts off on a couple of bad feet. It’s a fairly tame story that illustrates more about how everyone screws over the Hulk and shows how the Herc-ster isn’t really a pure good guy. I’m not sure we learned anything new about either character in this story. Perhaps the hope is if someone is reading one title and not the other they might get some cross pollination. As you can I’m struggle with why this exists.

Let’s begin with the cover. “64 pgs!” It states. Even if you count the ads this thing isn’t 64 pages. The Hulk versus Hercules story is 31 pages and the re-print of the Tales to Astonish from 1979 is 10 pages. I have no idea where 64 pages comes from. Maybe my copy is missing 20 some pages.

The re-print is actually pretty cool because it includes the letters page and wouldn’t you know it, but people back in 1979 were complaining about the direction of their comics. I guess as long as visual story telling existed people were griping about what the creators were doing. Now back to my evil review of the issue.

The setup is interesting. Cho and Athena are talking about Hercules. Athena tries to tell Cho a cautionary tale of trusting her brother, Hercules. There is another interesting thread here that is not really explored, which is, how does Cho dismiss his mistakes of backing the Hulk for so long?

Athena’s story takes place some undetermined time ago. Hulk is hanging out on Mt Olympus when he meets up with some banished monsters. Eventually Hulk confronts the Gods and they call in Hercules. The battle is a good one. Later Hulk and Herc make nice and they team up to kill some goons. Herc, turns on Hulk’s monster friends, thinking they were goons too. Hulk is beside himself and flees to be alone.

It’s an okay story. It’s not the greatest Hulk story in the world, but it is a good Hercules story. The dialogue Hercules says is laugh out loud funny. The scenes were he is wrestling is hysterical. This part of the comic is great.

Where things are more murky is the part the Hulk plays. He’s a prop. He’s barely a part of this story. Why not just have Wolverine or Spider-Man or Dr Strange in there too? The Hulk doesn’t even speak in the entire issue! This was a major letdown and brought this story down a notch.

There are a ton of artists for this issue and to be honest, I kind of expected it to be all over the place just from the cover credits so I was okay with this. I realize most people would like some consistency with their art, but it really didn’t matter to me for this particular issue.

So I guess you could say if you are buying this for the Hulk then you can pass on it. If you love Hercules then you might like this story. If you need consistent art then forget this issue. If you love UCWF wrestling then this issue is all you. Luckily, I found a little something to smile about in this thing.

3 out of 5 geek goggles.


Hulk vs. Hercules When Titans Clash