“Hulked Out.” Or, “Hulk Duly Smashed.”

I like to think that I am a man who can concentrate sufficiently to understand basic texts and even to a degree complex ones. Post-war philosophy has long been my achilles heel but I believe I can cope with this shortcoming manfully. I have managed to cover it up magnificently in my day-to-day dealings with other people. 

Is it that contemporary “continental” philosophy is especially complex, or is it that it is routinely boring, poorly written and willfully introverted? I further wonder aloud, Is it a coincidence that the foremost readers and espousers of theory at university were also proud members of the juggling society?

I used to sit in the postgraduate methodology seminars, batting my bottom lip absently, listening to –– no, listening around –– the voice of Richard Robinson as he spoke of Deleuze and Guattari and their eccentric but nevertheless thrilling “rhizomes,” and I used to think, “In less than an hour I can be drinking hard cider and shooting pool and we can forget this flimsy pretense for being here.”

Given my proven excellences as a reader, however, I have nevertheless come to doubt my certified “powers” as I attempt to make sense of the recent Hulk storyline.

A MacArthur “genius award” to the first person who can explain the thing to me.     

It’s hard to work out any of what’s going on in the Marvel Universe right now. The Hulk comics are especially mind-bending, and not in a particularly good way. I don’t know who’s where when and I definitely do not know why.    

“Riddle me this, me Trinity scholar”:    

The Red Hulk was a double-agent shuttled between MODOK’s grisly crowd of misfits and maniacs on one side and Bruce Banner on the other. Fine. Hulk’s son “Skaar”, meanwhile, wants to kill Bruce Banner but only once he turns into the Hulk – which Dr. Banner shan’t do. He simply refuses to comply. His resolve is marvelous to behold.

Skaar and Dr. Banner are also popping up and cross-overing in the Wolverine titles at the moment with Skaar double-crossing Wolverine with Wolverine’s grandfather Romulus. Are you following this rubbish?     

Doctor Doom was kidnapped and knocked “the fuck” out with what amounted to a “stupid bomb” (their words) so that he couldn't think straight. I know the feeling. The eminent Herr fon Doom is, in his turn, appearing “simultaneously” in titles across the board with a marked knack to be in a dozen places at once almost equal to Deadpool’s. 

Then, in the Hulk titles, every major superhero gets turned into a “Hulked-out” version of themselves. They really are called the “Hulked-Out Heroes.” I think that “Hulked-Out” should enter the common parlance, because it describes my condition quite remarkably. I am wholly hulked-out.

Regardless of me and my refined sensibilities, Deadpool-as-Hulk (yklept “Hulkpool”) disappeared into the time-space continuum, there for to kill Deadpool. That is, to go back in time and kill himself before he became “hulked-out.” 

Why any person would suddenly conceive of this powerful drive is not explained by the excellent craftsmen at MARVEL COMICS; but we keep on buying right along. It is a time paradox: accept it and stare out of the window, as if you are in the postgraduate seminar again and letting the venerable Richard Robinson’s paper pass over your head like gamma rays on a balmy afternoon.

Hulkpool Adrift Thru Time was actually a good story but what it added to the larger narrative escapes me. What it did for the furtherance of human civilization eludes me. More Deadpool money for the Marvel coffers.    

Deadpool is in twenty titles any given month – even Marvel is making embarrassed jokes about this, even as they scoop up my money into their bulging pockets using a large trowel.

At this moment in my life I don’t know if the denouement of the Hulk arc has even happened or not. Has that story finished? Nobody seems quite sure.     

Now you're up-to-date and will have a witty thing to say if you ever have the excellent fortune to be in a drawing room with those interesting personages Tinsley Mortimer or Paul Johnson Calderon.

“Cockled Headers: Secret Origins.”

     Corin Depper is here. With his patented passive-aggressiveness.
    Never comes out and has a row - but he foments trouble everywhere he goes, as if by magic.
    I said to him, "You ever said 'Boo' to a goose, Corin?"
    He goes: "Boo." 

*****************************************************

     I was walking down through Union Square West heading north, thinking, “Apropos of boring comics, all stories involving the Shi’Ar and the Imperial Guard are boring. Also any stories containing or involving Alpha Flight. Likewise anything set in the Savage Land.”

*****************************************************

     The scene: The Time Machine
     The time: What is time, after all, in a time machine?
     The circumstances: I was trading my Deadpools for numbers of Cable and (pre-Max, MU) Punisher War Journal. Slipped in a Silver Age Doctor Doom special “under the rose.” Roger was generous & okayed the trade.

     Sifting through some Spider-Man copies and frowning, I coughed and straightened my tie and went to Roger, “May I approach the bar and ask a question?”
     Like a slip of a lad hesitantly asking one of his parents where exactly babies come from — — and why.      Roger assenting in his nebulous way, I approached the “bar” bearing a copy of an early-Nineties Peter Parker, the Spectacular Spider-Man which was warped and rippled in bumps along the tops and bottoms of the pages. (I found out later from Harry Metcalf that the correct term for this is "cockling".)  

     Nigh every copy I have seen of this title, at least those issues numbering between #159 and #188, is so corrugated. Also issues of GI Joe and Quasar and Iron Man and Web of Spider-Man from the same benighted period. I believe depredated conditions such as these contribute to what historians refer to as a “Dark Age”.
     I went to the bar, and showed them to Roger. “Do you mark these bumps [–cockles–] along the header?” I asked.
     Roger squinted a spell, and looked perplexed. Finally he deduced that I was not complaining about the art. (Far from it – Sal Buscema was drawing this title for a long and excellent run at the time.)
     When he had ascertained the source of my complaint, he nodded to himself and remarked, “You need to see a psychiatrist.”

     It’s going badly with you when your comics guy is remarking that you are in need of therapy. That said, Roger’s proffered solution did not satisfy me. He reckoned that the comics were warped and crinkled by sitting in damp. He goes, sheepishly, “Did you get your wrinkled comics from us? Cause we used to keep our longboxes in a damp basement...”
     Nice to know that my esteemed comics guy keeps his valuable back stock in a balmy subterranean mangrove swamp – a real winning recommendation there, Rodge. It isn’t that though. I think it is a problem with Marvel Comics across the board (or at least certain titles) from that period, irrespective of where they come from. They aren’t all from Roger's soggy basement. I just got some numbers of Punisher from Lone Star Comics in Texas and they have the same “crinkly header” problem.
     Roger said, “There would have been some comment on this phenomenon among the comics community in the last thirty years. I don't think you have just discovered something that has eluded the greatest minds of the comic-collecting community. The comics collecting fraternity is traditionally, shall we say, vigilant, ah, exacting indeed, on such minutiae concerning, ah, condition.”
     I bridled at this, “slightually.” As if I wasn’t able to out-think the paltry comics buff community with my excellent eye for detail? Like I, with my larger knowledge of the universe, couldn’t see beyond the petty purview of the fanboy?
     “Or perhaps it’s just that I’m a pioneer, and you dull workaday men gathered this day in this room have not the ‘eyes to see’” I yelped faintly, to dull chuckling from the room.
     The fact remains that I keep finding crinkled comics from that period in select Marvel titles from a variety of sources. Should “they” ever come to notice this phenomenon, say in the pages of Overstreet or even Wizard, I hope that some honest soul will rightly attribute its original recognition to me. 

      Dum vivimus vivamus!