Hulk: World War Hulk II (2018)

Another Amadeus Cho/Totally Awesome Hulk story released under the more general Hulk title. A lot of what goes on here follows from the events of the last two volumes, so there will be some spoilers from My Best Friends are Monsters and Return to Planet Hulk.

Amadeus has always maintained that he exercises complete control over his Hulk, but that’s a lot less true than he’s been willing to admit, and over the last few volumes, that control has been weakening further. When he returns to Earth after his time in Sakaar, Amadeus isn’t the one in the driver’s seat. His sister Maddy and his hero friends are faced with the sobering – not to mention massively difficult task – of going up against the Hulk.

There’s a lot of neat stuff going on here. I really like the form that Amadeus’s Hulk takes, both how he operates when he’s in control of their body (very different from Bruce Banner and his Hulk) and how he interacts with Amadeus in their subconscious. I also like Amadeus’s attempts to reassert control and protect Maddy and his friends from the Hulk.

Speaking of which, let’s look at the rest of our cast of characters. It’s a good volume for Maddy, who demonstrates once again that, even if she doesn’t quite have Amadeus’s impressive world-intelligence ranking, she’s never one to be counted out. She’s very on the ball here and is basically working full-out to try and solve the problem at hand without hurting Amadeus.

The rest of the volume is filled with quite the cache of heroes. We get appearances from the majority of major characters who’ve shown up in previous volumes, from heroes who clashed with Amadeus in Civil War II (like Captain Marvel and Black Panther,) friends he worked with in Big Apple Showdown (like Silk, Ms. Marvel, and Jimmy Woo,) and Thor, who showed up last volume in Sakaar. We also get Miles Morales’s Spider-Man (that’s right, two spider-people in a single arc in a Hulk story – it’s a beautiful world.) Yeah, and a bonus inclusion of the first issue of the original World War Hulk – with Banner’s Hulk – features Iron Man, Doctor Strange, She-Hulk, Mr. Fantastic (my brain is too MCU-oriented, as I always forget that the Fantastic Four and the X-Men can hang out with these characters too,) and more. Phew!

So, the way I understand it, these last two volumes have transitioned Amadeus out of The Totally Awesome Hulk (which I think is no more?), but he’s being folded into a new title based on the pan-Asian/Asian-American superhero team-up we got in Big Apple Showdown. Written by Greg Pak, who penned The Totally Awesome Hulk, a new series (limited series? not sure) featuring an even bigger team-up is underway: The New Agents of Atlas. Since I loved Big Apple Showdown, I’m always down for more Kamala Khan, and I’m interested to see where Amadeus goes from here, I’m sure that’ll be worth a read.