Ground Zero

Peter David, Todd McFarlane, Erik Larsen & others Ground Zero (1988)
I never really felt one way or the other about the Hulk, but picked this up because it includes issue 340, an X-Men crossover which otherwise costs several hundred dollars these days. Before we proceed any further, here's what someone called Aurora thought of it on Goodreads:

I haven't read much Hulk, and this is pretty much why. The basic metaphor of Hulk and Bruce Banner is only so interesting, and there just isn't much else here. Also! The art is sooo bad. Everyone has mullets! The X-Men show up and Wolverine and Rogue have mullets!

Yeah, I sort of enjoyed it but I can't really disagree with that. Ground Zero wasn't quite pow! the comic book growing up, but its voice had broken, it couldn't talk to girls, and it was still playing with action figures while dreading any of its pals finding out. It's written by Peter David whom I recall as being not without certain qualities, although for some reason his only regular title which I can recall off the top of my head was when he turned X-Factor into a vehicle by which to bag sales for all those other mutants usually seem hanging around in the background of better stories. David kept these seven collected issues reasonably interesting in terms of doing weird things with the characters, which probably wasn't easy given that the villain combines a porno-moustache with a giant throbbing brain and is seemingly aware of being a villain. At one stage he transforms a couple of the Hulk's enemies into monsters named the Rock and the Redeemer, then later finds it advantageous to betray the pair, and so we see a memo added to the to do list on his fancy computer screen in futuristic Asimov font so as to ensure that he doesn't somehow forget to stitch them up like kippers:

LIE TO ROCK AND REDEEMER.

What a wrong 'un, he is!

Unfortunately though, the art isn't great and the best I've ever been able to say about Todd McFarlane's work is that he's consistent. He's not the worst, and true enough some of those Spider-Man covers had something, but his figures are clunky, resembling Stretch Armstrong dolls pulled into uncomfortable taffy shapes which no amount of crosshatching can conceal; and there's not much variation from his three basic expressions - surprise, anger and glee on faces with otherwise more than a touch of Archie about them and which don't really gel with the mood of the book. He draws a decent grey Hulk but has difficulty with anything that's supposed to look like a person. Bruce Banner here resembles the Archie version of Harry Potter, for example.

That said, Ground Zero is good enough to leave me wishing it had been better, which is, I suppose, a recommendation.

The Multiversity

Grant Morrison etc. The Multiversity (2015)
I know I said I was getting a bit tired of self-aware comic books pretending that a drawing of a man in a cape is just a different level of reality because of something a theoretical physicist said whilst off his tits on special brew, but sod it - Grant Morrison, for all his faults is occasionally great, and Captain Carrot was on the cover of the first issue. It seemed worth a punt.

I never read Crisis on Infinite Earths so most stuff about the layered realities of the DC universe has been lost upon me, and Final Crisis was incomprehensible. I'm not really sure what this one is supposed to do either, but on the assumption that Crisis happened so as to keep us from having to read about Krypto the Superdog, then Multiversity seems to reverse that particular act of po-faced revisionism and is therefore a good thing. Roughly speaking it seems to be a mash up of Morrison's Zenith and Alan Moore's 1963, or at least has elements inevitably in common with both. We have a load of alternate realities, some of them fairly absurd, under attack by something vaguely Lovecraftian from outside; in addition to which it's all massively self-referential with characters attempting to work out what's going on by reading earlier or later issues of the comic in which they appear. It's not actually big or significantly clever, but even this is acknowledged in online potshots which become caught up in the narrative.

Yet another comic-about-comics treatise retreading the same tired themes.

Ordinarily I'd agree, but what's different this time is that it just about has a story - albeit one in which individual chapters could probably be read in any order - and that it's a hell of a lot of fun.

Multiversity first appeared as a series of loosely related issues of comic books set in different parts of its reality, allowing for a great deal of horseplay. My favourite iteration is probably The Just, set on a world in which Superman's robot legion has rendered caped crime fighters redundant, leaving their offspring to lives of super-powered boredom and killing time; but equally enjoyable is the obligatory trawl through the history of superhero comics rendered in stylistic tribute to Siegel, Shuster, Kane, Kirby and all of the usual suspects. Morrison's Alan Moore fixation is expressed as an issue focused on the Charlton comics characters which inspired Watchmen, and which is clearly a comment on Watchmen, although I have no idea what it's actually saying. We also get Marvel's Avengers with the plates switched and a thinly disguised version of Erik Larsen's Savage Dragon, which is amusing if you like that sort of thing, and happily I do in this instance; and whilst I'm over-thinking such things, I'm sure I recall the evil one-eyed egg with bat wings as one of Dorothy's imaginary enemies from Morrison's version of Doom Patrol.

Multiversity is probably deep, meaningful, and stuffed to the gills with references I didn't get, but it doesn't actually have much in the way of story if you look closely; which isn't a problem because Grant Morrison seems to be at his best when he's all surface and can keep himself from mentioning Aleister bloody Crowley every two pages. I'm not sure this is all surface, but that was how it read to me and I therefore invoke the same difference clause; and yet it is of sufficient complexity as to yield unexpected rewards upon second and third readings. This might be one of the best things he's written in a while.