Incredible Hulk: The End #1: Review

Aug 2002
Peter David, Dale Keown

Story Name:

The Last Titan

Review & Comments

Rating:
4 stars

Incredible Hulk: The End #1 Review by (February 15, 2010)
Based on a short story published by Peter David in an anthology entitled The Ultimate Hulk.




 

Synopsis / Summary / Plot

Incredible Hulk: The End #1 Synopsis by Peter Silvestro
Image from Incredible Hulk: The End #1
In the distant future only one person lives on the desolate Earth: the two-hundred-year-old Bruce Banner, accompanied only by a hovering vidbot recording humanity’s last days. He wants very much to die but the Hulk within, consumed by anger and hate, will not let him. So he travels the world, hoping in vain to meet another human being, kept alive by the power of the Hulk. The sole remaining lifeform is cockroaches, who have evolved the ability to fly in swarms, pursuing him for his meat. They attack Banner, who transforms into the Hulk, attempting to fight them off and failing, as the hideous swarm strips him of his flesh. Later Banner watches the replay on the vidbot, discovering that the Hulk regenerates to full health in eighteen minutes, unable to be killed by anything but Armageddon, rejoicing in the fact that he has outlived all his enemies.

Banner reviews the events of the world’s demise: as nuclear conflict erupted, Hulk crawled into his cave, uninterested in the outcome but made even stronger by the release of radiation. Later Banner was awoken by an alien recording robot, who informed Banner that he was the last of his race and assigning him a vidbot to record his fate. Banner tries to die by throwing himself from a high cliff, but the Hulk emerges to prevent a fatal landing. After a dream that he has met a beautiful woman and become a new Adam to her Eve, Banner suffers a seizure, and in that flash realizes the meaning of his life: as the titan Prometheus stole fire from the gods and was punished by being devoured by eagles and regenerating daily, so the Hulk is a modern Prometheus, the last titan, similarly punished for the sins of the atomic age. Banner, realizing he’s dying, pleads with the Hulk to let him die and be at peace with his loved ones. But the Hulk, taking over, just wants to be left alone…on the dead Earth…cold.

Preview Pages
Click sample interior pages to enlarge them:




Dale Keown
Joe Weems
Dan Kemp
Dale Keown (Cover Penciler)


Characters

Listed in Alphabetical Order.

Hulk
Hulk

(Bruce Banner)



> Incredible Hulk: The End: Book info and issue index

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