Incredible Hercules #116

Okay, I give up – Incredible Hercules is now the best book Marvel publishes. Why argue with the strongest man in history? When writers Greg Pak and Fred Van Lente continued the “World War Hulk” storyline with two of its supporting characters as the Incredible Hulk headliner deserted his own book, they extended a frontline franchise that had become an overnight oddity; with uncommon wit and literally classic chops they’ve just as quickly made a defiantly marginal concept a mainstream must-read.

The book tracks the uncertain odyssey of strongman Hercules and supergenius Amadeus Cho, a heart & head match that’s a major key to the folkloric smarts and storytelling savvy of this book. The pair first came together when the somewhat uncomplicated demigod’s sense of right and wrong was offended by the hounding of the Hulk, and the unsurprisingly skeptical youth’s sense of paranoia and infallibility was applied to computer-hacking the Hulk’s government tormentors out of business. Now the impulsive champion and the too-calculating cyberterrorist are on a dysfunctional road trip to avoid the authorities and perhaps stumble into genuine heroism.

In the series’ second-arc opener Herc’s sister Athena is enlisting the Doric Duo to weather a coming celestial war in which the Eternals, science-created analogues of the Olympian gods, will also figure. A font of wise if cranky counsel and a pillar of fair play, Athena holds forth on the folly of new-agey humans worshipping the Eternals’ own outer-space deity figures and reminisces about unjust interventions by her other brother Ares, God of War; Nietzsche said a god ceases to exist when he stops being worshipped, but in the resilient character of Athena Pak & Van Lente seem to be suggesting that an idea – like adherence to stubborn facts and honorable conflict – can survive no matter how much self-deluding people and tyrannical nations turn away from it. (This is one of the Marvel books that shed light on current issues in a much deeper and more entertaining way than certain pseudo-events that mostly shine a spotlight on their overworked metaphors.)

There’s an amusing skirmish between the Greek gods and their Eternal counterparts, cleverly aligning the two camps as stand-ins for the science/religion debate in a way that explains the Eternals’ narrative reason for being in a universe with well-established “real” gods at a level of texture that even Neil Gaiman didn’t quite deal with in his brilliant recent miniseries. The dueling pantheons also gave me the feeling I was seeing a more purposeful and archetypally pure take on a JLA/JSA struggle than I might ever see in those actual groups’ comics.

At one point Herc laments his problematic parentage by the philandering Zeus to the constitutionally pissed-off Amadeus, who replies, “Welcome to the human race” – just one of many perfect-pitched punchlines in this book’s divine comedy. I’ve just spoiled that one, but Pak & Van Lente – with suitably grand yet mischievous art from first Khoi Pham and now Rafa Sandoval – have a canon more where that came from.