In the crumbling desert city of Dystopia, a group of insurgents led by Janis hurries through the crowded marketplace to reach the building where their mysterious hope is hiding. The group is attacked by the Gravity Police who order them to surrender in the name of the Maestro. They flee and the Police pursue, only to be halted by a crumbling building…from which rises the Professor Hulk
The Professor takes them on, destroying their hovercraft and a giant mechanical Dog o’ War, leaving them to tell the Maestro that the Incredible Hulk is coming. The Maestro’s Minister hurriedly conveys the message to his master, revealed as a gray-bearded green-skinned (and oddly familiar) giant.
Hulk links up with Janis who escorts him past the traps that guard the insurgents’ underground hideout. Hulk, brought through time and losing his patience, demands an explanation; Janis brings him to a makeshift museum commemorating Earth’s fallen heroes (including the ashes of many heroes, among them Betty Banner’s) and a meeting with its curator: the elderly Rick Jones, who is Janis’ great-grandfather.
Meanwhile, Pizfiz, a captured insurgent, is being interrogated by the Maestro’s torturers, where his mind is probed and he reveals how a team of rebels discovered Dr. Doom’s time machine and went back to the 1990s to contact Rick Jones; the probing causes his mind to fail so the enraged Maestro decapitates him with a single blow.
Elsewhere, the aged Rick fills Hulk in on the rest of the story: after nuclear warfare decimated the Earth ninety years earlier and wiped out all heroes, the Maestro, strengthened by radiation, took power in the desolate city and ruled as a brutal despot; now Hulk has been recruited through time to help end his savage reign. Above ground the Maestro leads a team of soldiers into the insurgents’ lair, where the hapless fighting men are wiped out by booby-traps. The Maestro goes on alone, impervious to laser-fire and acid, and comes face-to-face with the Hulk. They greet each other with “Doctor Banner, I presume?”