Review – The Immortal Hulk #25 (Marvel Comics)

Posted on March 24, 2020 in Marvel Reviews

Publisher: Marvel Comics
Writer: Al Ewing
Artwork: German Garcia, Joe Bennett
Colors: Chris O’Halloran, Paul Mounts
Release Date: 23rd October 2020

Set “billions of years in the future, in a completely different space and time”, it was perhaps somewhat easy for this comic’s 87,519 readers to see just why Marvel Worldwide called the forty-page periodical “ground-breaking” in solicits. But whilst this milestone publication’s narrative certainly delivers on Al Ewing’s desire to pen a story which is still “horrific on various levels”, and yet “filled with a kind of ethereal alien sadness”, many within its audience were also probably elated that the plot was confined to a relatively tight single book, rather than the British writer’s original idea that he spend five issues in the Ninth Cosmos…

For starters, “Breaker Of Worlds” is initially an incredibly slow-tempo tale, which diligently dwells upon the desolation of space surrounding the alien entity Par%l, since the Hulk brutally murdered the Sentience of the Universe and subsequently started destroying all life in creation. Admittedly, this perhaps understandably depressive listlessness concerning so forsaken an environment is momentarily brought to life when the extra-terrestrial encounters his former lover, Farys, on board the Observer’s Berth. However, such a claustrophobic atmosphere of cheerlessness soon returns as the couple’s strained relationship quickly sours even further, following the “skilled breeder of Tiding-flies” creating something her former partner vehemently opposes; “The egg feels grotesque. Heavy with corruption, Obscene in power… You… You have made an abomination.”

Disconcertingly, not even the much-anticipated arrival of the “Breaker-Apart” at O%los injects much more pace into the proceedings, even though the galaxy-sized green giant’s presence disagreeably results in the death of nine billion souls. The Eisner Award-nominated writer seems to spend an absolute eternity clarifying that this particular incarnation of the Hulk intends to destroy everything everywhere, when the colossal creature’s destructive path was pretty much well established right at this comic’s start.

Adding to this book’s sedentary story-telling and palpable sense of lethargy are German Garcia’s debatably lack-lustre layouts. Whether you agree or not with Ewing that the freelancer’s “work is absolutely gorgeous” and produces an “intensely, magnetically beautiful” look to this comic which makes Par%l’s world “really feel alien”, the Spanish artist’s significantly padded-out, double splash-page illustrations predominantly seem to have been pencilled just to help fill out this gargantuan doubled-sized issue, rather than simply help illustrate “a comic the likes of which has never been read before.”

[PREVIEW ARTWORK – CLICK TO ENLARGE]