Comics I Bought This Week: May 14, 2009

I'm back from the comic shop this week and I got four new comics plus a hard cover collection:

Echo - 12

Savage Dragon - 148

The Walking Dead - 61

Jack Staff - 20

Invincible Ultimate Collection Volume 4

And now for a review of something I've read recently.

"Red Hulk" Volume -1 by Jeph Loeb and Ed McGuinness

A brief snapshot of my recent Hulk reading. "Planet Hulk" I liked because it was fun but it wasn't great and "World War Hulk" I didn't like and found it no fun. Then I was waiting for Marvel to relaunch Hulk in a new book because Hercules had taken over Hulk's old book. But they never did. The did start a "Red Hulk" series though. Turns out that is the new Hulk series. Weird.

Anyway "Red Hulk" is pretty short on plot and long on fight scenes. The basic plot is this: A Hulk that is colored red shows up. No one knows who he is but he kills the Abomination and then gets into fights with a lot of the big guns in the Marvel Universe and beats them up. It's up to the good old Green Hulk to stop him.

There is a mystery going on about who the Red Hulk might be but it's barely touched on. The plot is paper thin and just there to string together fight scenes. Almost all of the "plot twists" are just someone new showing up to fight the Red Hulk. But I do give it points for the fight scenes being fun.

Unfortunately they could have been more fun. Ed McGuiness's art let me down a bit in the storytelling department. He can draw well enough and illustration-wise it was fine but he made it hard to follow things at times. The fights didn't always have the impact they could have had because sometimes I was confused at what was going on. I've seen worse storytelling but I've also seen better.

All in all it was a solid Hulk comic. Not great by any stretch of the imagination but it was fun. Besides "World War Hulk" I've been enjoying some Hulk collections, both new and old, lately and this one fits right in with them. So if you're in the mood for cover to cover Hulk fights check this one out.