World War Hulk: Warbound

Collects World War Hulk: Warbound #1-5 written by Greg Pak with art by Lenoard Kirk and Rafa Sandoval.

This book is actually an Aftersmash title, and takes place right after the Aftersmash oneshot that is included in WWH: Damage Control. After Hulk has been subdued, the Warbound, the Hulk's merry band of alien sword fellows, escapes capture but then find themselves facing the Leader, who has created a giant radiactive dome, Gammaworld, where he keeps a lot of people captured and transforms them into monsters by using gamma rays. The US Army also shows up and endless fighting ensues. In fact, as the book ends the fighting is still not finished, and I'm not sure what that means for the Warbound. The high point of the book is where it's revealed that Korg, the rock man, is actually gay.

I have to admit that from the moment they were formed in Planet Hulk, I didn't like the Warbound. They just don't appeal to me. I don't find any of them interesting in any way, and, even though they were prisoners together, I find it unlikely that creatures with such different backgrounds would form such a strong bond as seems to be the case with these, uhm... fellows. Actually I still don't understand how they communicate, but that might have been explained at some point. There's a lot of science fiction in super hero literature, but this is more like science fiction with a bit of super heroics and it just doesn't work very well.

The story is standard super hero fare of the dime-a-dozen kind, the focus is on the Warbound, and this is the main weakness of the book. Each chapter is accompanied by a shorter story about one of the Warbound. Although these are generally of a higher quality than the main story, it is not enough to save the book, and knowing more about the individual characters does not improve the credibility of the group.

The art of the main story, drawn by Kirk, is boring and void of any kind of atmosphere. The coloring does not help on this, in fact, the coloring is very bad. The art of the shorter stories, by Sandoval, is actually pretty good, and it's just about the only nice thing I have to say about this book.

I would argue that this book was doomed to failure from the beginning. The idea of the book is obviously to tell a story about the Warbound, but they're just not interesting enough to build a story on, and coming up with such a bland plot to tell this story does not help either. If you've read Planet Hulk and/or WWH and thought that the Warbound were pretty cool, you might find this semi-interesting. Otherwise, I would stay way clear of it.

2/10