HULK VS. IRON MAN!

(as seen in the pages of Advanced Iron #64)

HULK #283-284

"Follow the Leader!" - May & June 1983

Writer : Bill Mantlo

Artists : Sal Buscema & Joe Sinnott

The Hulk and the Avengers have teamed-up to locate the nefarious Leader.

This is not the stupid savage Hulk by the way, it is rather Banner's intellect and personality in complete control of the Hulk's strength. So forget the whole «Hulk smash!» routine because there's none of that here.

Aboard an Avengers quinjet, the heroes locate the Leader's base orbiting the Earth: an enormous ship that was hidden to the world by the Leader's advanced technology. The Avengers proceed to board the ship only to discover that the Leader is nowhere to be found, but the heroes are greeted by the ship's computer: Omnivac. The artificial intelligence being begins to explain that the Leader has gone back in time to irradiate a young prehistoric humanity with gamma rays in order to create a world of slaves. The Avengers are then dispatched through time themselves.

But as they are sent through time, all memory of their true identity is erased. Iron Man finds himself at the head of an army of medieval knights in XIIth century England. The Hulk and the She-Hulk, unaffected by the Leader's trap, must travel through time to retrieve their comrades and stop the Leader before it's too late.

If your brain has an OFF switch, you'll have fun reading this story. It's generally entertaining in a silly corny 80s kinda way.

It's cool to see the Hulk reunited with the team he helped to found, even if it's just for a brief mission. The art is all right, typical of what early 80s Marvel comics generally looked like.

If your brain doesn't have the aforementioned OFF switch, you're not gonna like this one.

If you actually try to make sense of the story, you will soon come to the conclusion that there is not much sense to be made of it. The Avengers have forgotten who they are but a couple of punches miraculously bring their memory back? Hawkeye thinks he's Robin Hood and all his followers buy it, even though he looks and sounds nothing at all like the real deal? Why does the Leader need to irradiate prehistoric humans with gamma rays in order to control them? No gamma-irradiated being in existence has shown greater obedience because of it, whether it be the Abomination, Doc Samson, Jennifer Walters or the Hulk himself! Silly. Not only is it a bunch of nonsense, the dialogues are also incredibly corny.

Omnivac explains: "And so the Leader departed; back through the ages to an era when a just-born Earth lays cradled in the cosmos. There, he intends to filter out all extraterrestrial sources of radiation EXCEPT gamma rays… and thus spawn a new breed of mankind over which his awesome intellect will reign supreme!" (Thank Heavens they stopped making those insipid time-travel stories a long time ago - yes, I'm trying to forget IM #59 by Grell, please don't remind me.)

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