Planet Hulk #5 Review

Written by: Sam Humphries

Art by:  Marc Laming & Jordan Boyd

Publisher: Marvel

Planet Hulk has always been a bad name choice in my mind, should it not be Country Hulk or something? I understand that it is to liken the series to the famous Planet Hulk story but unlike the Civil War tie in to Secret Wars, the Planet Hulk has nothing to do with its previous name bearer, it’s not even a full planet of Hulks. The series revolves around Steve Rogers being sent to quell an uprising in Greenland. This ,although having little to do with the original story, is an interesting enough premise and if it had been pulled off well enough then it could have been interesting. Unfortunately a lot of time is wasted focusing on Steve fighting animals that have been infected with Gamma (about two whole issues) and not spending nearly enough time showing how the hulks are living, why The Red King is rising up etc. This leads to the conclusion that we see in #5 carrying little to no weight and comes across as flaccid, to say the least. Steve fights the Red King and has a debate with him but we don’t care about any of it and it doesn’t seem climactic in any regard as the whole issue has almost been pushed to the side the entire run.

If I were to take a guess at Planet Hulk’s (SWA) creation process, in a nutshell, it would be a good premise was established and a start and an end was thought up but then bringing that to fit five issues brings out various problems and sacrifices have to be made. Finally the Planet Hulk name is slapped on to entice readers. This similar sort of trend is something that most, but not all, of the Secret Wars tie-ins seem to be showing and I’m getting a little bit tired of it myself, it having gone on for a good few months now, and can’t wait for the event to end so that writers have the room needed to flesh out their stories as they wanted.

We do see a revelation in who Doc Green was all this time and it is a pretty cool twist that could only happen in the setting of Battleworld but the book does nothing with it, it is revealed, everyone sort of shrugs and then the book ends. I feel like so much could have been done with that revelation and character, that Steve fighting the Red King should have been issue three so that four and five could have focused on the Doc Green situation. Even if the story made better hints at Doc Green’s identity or set up a more engaging dialogue throughout the series between Doc and Steve, as the two do have wildly varying viewpoints. Towards the end Doc Green makes the point to Rogers that Bucky’s inspiration to Steve shielded him from viewing reality as it was, this point would have been a much more apt or cohesive remark if this possibility had been set up throughout the storyline instead of just being outright said at the end.

In short, I have no idea what the focus or message for this series was supposed to be. There’s some good ideas that, had they been used differently, did have the potential for creating some memorable moments. Instead, we have a storyline that doesn’t really go anywhere or say anything worthwhile, which I will forget about in a month or so, and characters that don’t really feel like the ones they’re based off of. If you’re on the fence as to whether or not the SWA Planet Hulk series is for you, I’d recommend you probably sit it out, but if you’ve read to this point and you really want to see how it ends or just round off the series then go for it, it has a couple of good moments but the bad does outweigh the good.