Marvel’s Avengers: Hulk #1 review: A minor wrinkle is finally added

Marvel’s Avengers: Hulk #1 provides no real new insight or twists to Bruce Banner or his green rage machine alter ego, but does finally provide what may be a foreshadow to what causes the cataclysmic event in the game.

The video game Marvel’s Avengers may have been delayed until September of this year, but the comics based on the game are going to just keep rolling out, apparently. The latest focuses on everyone’s favorite unstoppable green rage machine, The Hulk!

Much like previous issues featuring Iron Man and Thor, Marvel’s Avengers: Hulk #1 covers all-too-familiar-territory. Even if someone has never seen a Marvel movie or picked up a comic book, The Hulk is such a pop culture bedrock that everyone knows what his deal is. He’s a guy who turns into an unstoppable rage monster that while he usually does good by stopping a bad guy, often causes a lot of collateral damage in the process.

In that way, nothing new is explored here in Marvel’s Avengers: Hulk #1. We get Bruce Banner hemming and hawing about his inner monster and the guilt he feels over not being able to control it. He wants to be rid of it. Been there, done that.

This feels pretty much like deja vu because we just had an uncontrollable Hulk rampage in Marvel’s Avengers: Thor #1 which just came out last month, so this really feels like far too well-mined territory. We get it, Hulk is a rage monster, and he might do more bad than good, yadda, yadda, yadda.

The one element of this comic that is actually interesting, and might be a bit of foreshadowing to the actual game, is the introduction of Bruce’s scientific colleague, Doctor George Tarleton. Tarleton’s intentions are good; he knows the Earth on the verge of a serious energy crisis and thinks an immediate solution is needed. More importantly, this is something Tarleton considers a far more immediate and bigger issue than Banner getting rid of The Hulk (and on a global scale, he’s probably right).

Tarleton has a solution but besides being distracted by dealing with The Hulk first and foremost, Banner thinks Tarleton’s solution is unsafe and shouldn’t be rushed into. Tarleton thinks it should be implemented immediately and takes steps to do so, creating a monster in the process that only a certain green gamma rage monster can stop.

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What happens from this and the aftermath finally possibly hints at what exactly might have caused the disastrous event in the upcoming Marvel’s Avengers video game, but it’s such a small nugget of foreshadowing in a series of comics that have just repeated beats that have been done so many times.

Literally the newest trailer for Marvel’s Avengers provides more insight in 60 seconds then three comics have because it indicates what the Avengers did and what the result of it was. Why can’t this be what they are exploring in the comics rather than just rehashing familiar takes on these extremely well-known superheroes?

I doubt this will change much in the next issue, which focuses on Captain America. What are the odds the issue will focus on how Steve Rogers is a man out of time or something and probably clashes with Tony Stark on how to handle things?

Once again I am confused as to how these comics would get anybody excited about the game. And now that it’s been delayed to well after these comics are all out? They’ll just be a weird forgotten footnote honestly.

Marvel’s Avengers: Hulk #1 is available now.  Square Enix’s Marvel’s Avengers the video game will be available for PC, Xbox, PS4 and Stadia September 4th.

A copy of Marvel’s Avengers: Hulk #1 was provided to App Trigger for the purpose of this article.