{"id":30856,"date":"2026-01-15T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-01-15T04:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/?p=30856"},"modified":"2024-04-06T20:56:23","modified_gmt":"2024-04-07T00:56:23","slug":"world-war-hulk-5","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/2026\/01\/15\/world-war-hulk-5\/","title":{"rendered":"World War Hulk 5"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Big finish. I guess. And a month late. What could cause a comic by the mighty John Romita, Jr. to ship late? I am disinclined to think it was him, but things happen. Well, we\u2019re back in the arena, Hulk recapping at us. It\u2019s 2007 and this is issue 5 of a 5 issue book, if people don\u2019t know what\u2019s going on, it\u2019s their fault. Also there\u2019s a text page at the front that DOESN\u2019T recap anything, which is stupid. So Hulk spends 2 pages telling Reed why his \u201cobedience disk\u201d is about to make him kill Tony like we haven\u2019t been beaten over the head with this info for 4 issues. Then Reed takes the deathblow, but of course he doesn\u2019t kill Tony, because Hulk didn\u2019t want him to. It\u2019s all crap.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Sentry smashes Hulk out of the arena and through several other buildings in some truly impressive Romita, Jr. destruction. And we quickly learn the Sentry is crazy, consumed by some kind of bloodlust and eager to beat on the Hulk. Why? Who knows? The massive destruction continues for a few pages.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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So the Sentry is now at the heart of a gigantic tornado of fire, truly unleashing his \u201cpower of a million exploding suns\u201d for the first time, and everyone has realized they\u2019re in trouble. Good guys and bad guys join forces to protect people, Tony Stark is accessing a bunch of satellites for reasons I can\u2019t discern, and now it\u2019s up to Hulk to stop the Sentry.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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What are these sound effects? Jvmmm and spjzzz to you, too, I guess. Fight fight fight, Tony finally gets control of some satellites, I still don\u2019t really know why, then the Hulk\/Sentry fight explodes somehow, and as the smoke clears, everyone now sees Bruce Banner and Robert Reynolds fighting instead of Hulk and Sentry.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Hulk starts beating on Miek for pages, it seems like should have been a puddle by now, as Miek reveals\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Womp womp. Very cool color work on the flashbacks by Strain there, the little bursts of color.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Forever is a lot shorter than it used to be. Well, I guess the idea is Hulk is so mad he\u2019s like some kind of radiation bomb now, I dunno, and he says, \u201cDo it! Before I break the world!\u201d which is very silly, and then Tony\u2019s satellites fire various beams of red energy at Hulk. Whatever they are.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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No idea what just happened. What a terrible series. That\u2019s Hulk\u2019s son, Skaar, inexplicably rising from the surface of the planet we were told got blown up, an adult. How? I don\u2019t care. In the wake of this, I think Hulk was off the board for a while. The Incredible Hulk comic became The Incredible Herc, about Hercules. Really. Skaar got his own book immediately, and briefly, as I recall. And Jeph Loeb, the reigning champ of bad comics in this time, immediately introduced Red Hulk, a mysterious new Hulk who, yes, was red, and who was eventually revealed to be Thunderbolt Ross somehow. I don\u2019t know, I sure didn\u2019t read that nonsense. This series was more than enough to put me back off Hulk and his world until the late 2010s, when Al Ewing\u2019s Immortal Hulk became the best Hulk comic ever made. Also I don\u2019t know if Rick is dead here, but he\u2019s fine eventually, don\u2019t worry.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Well, that\u2019s that. Spider-Man\u2019s involvement really dropped off after the middle of this. Had I remembered how little he\u2019s in the back of this series, I woulda done a summary post instead of 5 of them. Spider-Man also appears, in his black costume, in all 3 issues of the awkwardly named World War Hulk: Aftersmash: Damage Control, Dwayne McDuffie\u2019s last turn with his creation. But, like almost all the superheroes in that series, he just stands in the background of various panels while people talk. It\u2019s pretty weird. The heroes all show up to help clean up after this series, and thus are sort of the audience right alongside the reader as the Damage Control team and others have their story. That series also introduced a new Goliath, Bill Foster\u2019s nephew Tom, who appeared in 3 panels of WWH 4. He had a role in a few of the tie-ins chronicling his journey to becoming Goliath, and he\u2019s still the big G today, although he\u2019s appeared in few comics since. But, with this, we\u2019re finally done with the absurd Back In Black. You can see why I broke it up like this. Imagine sitting through all these insane detours waiting to get to One More Day. What a stupid, stupid time. But we\u2019re past it now, so we can finally see the new status quo\u2026. Just kidding, it\u2019s way past time to check back in with USM.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Big finish. I guess. And a month late. What could cause a comic by the mighty John Romita, Jr. to ship late? I am disinclined to think it was him, but things…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":30866,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1864],"tags":[2159,2222,49,2368,59,64,118,435,2369,2370,247,2349,1959,2371,2367],"class_list":["post-30856","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-2000s","tag-black-bolt","tag-christina-strain","tag-doctor-strange","tag-greg-pak","tag-hulk","tag-iron-man","tag-john-romita-jr","tag-klaus-janson","tag-korg","tag-miek","tag-reed-richards","tag-rick-jones","tag-sentry","tag-skaar","tag-world-war-hulk"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30856","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30856"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30856\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":30899,"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30856\/revisions\/30899"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/30866"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30856"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30856"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30856"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}