Hulk #39 – Review

By: Jeff Parker (writer), Gabriel Hardman (artist), Bettie Breitweiser (colorist), Ed Dukeshire (letters), Jake Thomas (assistant editor) & Mark Paniccia (editor)

The Story: Red Hulk visits the old family farm and Omegex finally strikes.

What’s Good: While this issue isn’t perfect, it has a lot of goodies.  For one thing, it features the top-shelf art team of Gabriel Hardman & Bettie Breitweiser.  Everything about Hardman’s artwork is impressive.  His characters are strong and vital presences on the page and he puts a lot of effort into the barns, trucks, airplanes, etc.  It’s really something to behold, but one other thing to praise about Hardman is page layouts.  If you’ve ever gotten bored by a comic that featured almost nothing but pages full of 4-5 full-width rectangular panels, you will appreciate this.  Every page is laid out a little differently and Hardman uses the full page of layout elements to keep it fresh for us.

Bettie Breitweiser is simply my favorite Marvel colorist right now.  The pages just look stunning and while I (honestly) lack the vocabulary to do her work justice, her work has really inspired me to learn more about color theory.  So there’s that.  In the past, I had called her colors more muted, but I think the big-boy word for that is that he colors are less “saturated”.  She also has a very strong sense of shading and her colors are never at odds with Hardman’s inking (Hardman has a wonderful sense of shading too).  These two are a great team-up.

As for the story, well, it has some good stuff too.  I love the fact that Rulk’s best friend is a life-model decoy named Anne.  In a way it seems weird that this gruff man (whether he is Rulk or General Thunderbolt Ross) would be buddies with a 20-something woman, but she probably reminds him of his daughter.  Over the last ~15 issues, Parker has turned Anne into a character who we care about without resorting to any annoying tricks like a special issue devoted to Anne; he’s done it all within the context of his story.