The Incredible Hulk: Future Imperfect by Peter DavidMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
In a future dystopia, The Maestro reigns supreme! The small resistance recruits the one foe capable of beating the Gamma-powered tyrant: himself! Can the Hulk defeat an older, more brutal version of himself?
The recent Immortal Hulk excepted, The Hulk has never been one of my favorite characters. Some of my earliest nightmares featured the Lou Ferrigno version. I've got maybe ten issues scattered among my thousands of comics. On the heels of reading Back Issue #111, specifically the interview with Peter David and George Perez, I had to read this.
The book stars in the Maestro's time. I don't know if events in the regular Hulk series led to this or I'm just supposed to connect the dots. Anyway, people use Doctor Doom's time platform to bring the Hulk to the future so he can fight himself. The best slugfest since Superman vs. Muhammad Ali eventually ensues.
The story is pretty good for the early '90s, a couple slugfests wrapped in a timey-wimey tale about the Hulk confronting what he could become. The art, however, is fantastic. The devil is in the details and George Perez invokes the horned one in every panel. Page after page is crammed with detail, from the two page crowd shot near the beginning, complete with hidden Waldo, to the Maestro's trophy room. I had way too much fun spotting the artifacts of dead heroes.
My edition contains a second story, The Last Titan. Peter David serves up a yarn of Bruce Banner wandering the earth a couple centuries in the future, the last human alive, a human haunted by The Hulk! Dale Keown served up on the art on that one, an introspective tale about the Hulk's last days. It was surprisingly good.
As far as products of 1990s go, The Incredible Hulk: Future Imperfect was pretty damn good time travel slugfest. 3.5 out of 5 stars.
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