Legends Reunited: A Review of The Incredible Hulk: The Last Call

written by Peter David
penciled by Dale Keown
inked by Mark Farmer, Marc Deering, Walden Wong and Scott Hanna
colored by Peter Stiegerwald and John Starr

Of all the creators that have worked on the character of the Incredible Hulk since the character's creation over fifty years ago, apart from Stan Lee and Jack Kirby there are two arguably two names that stand out more than others, and that's Peter David and Dale Keown, who are to the Hulk what Chris Claremont and John Byrne are to the X-Men, what Frank Miller was to Daredevil, and what Byrne was to the Fantastic Four. What all of these creators have in common is that following Lee and Kirby (and Bill Everett, in the case of Daredevil) it was their work that really helped define these characters. It really is a pleasure to see David and Keown working on a Hulk book again after all these years.

Rather than have these legendary creators catch up with Bruce Banner and his giant green alter ego in his current status quo, David and Keown go with the "untold story" route, revisiting a time in the character's life when Betty Ross Banner, his wife, had just died (she got better eventually) and he was yet again suicidal. He calls a suicide hotline (hence the title) and shares a bit of his history with the counselor Veronica, but even as we get a bit of retrospective about his history with Betty, a new threat is just around the corner.

What defined Peter David's run, which spanned over a decade and involved collaboration with at least five different artists, was how he plumbed the depths of Banner's and Hulk's shared mind, and this came to a head with his run with Keown, which saw the birth of the "Professor Hulk" persona, which was basically Banner's and Hulk's ids merged into one. It's fitting, then, that instead of going for a particularly bombastic story to mark this nostalgic one-shot, they go for a more subdued approach. David's gift for dialogue isn't quite as evident here as it is in his stronger work, especially since he sets the story at a time when Hulk was less articulate, and as a result, Hulk gets a lot less exposure than I would have preferred, which means that Keown doesn't quite get to shine as much as he could. Still, it's a reasonably satisfying, if kind of forgettable self-contained story. No status-quo shattering going on here, and for those of us who just stopped by to reminisce (like me) that's just fine.

I kind of wonder at the choice of villain in this particular story, but I do recall the one time that David wrote this character, Keown wasn't drawing him, so perhaps this informed the choice. I don't know. I also found the cameo of a certain fourth-wall breaking box-office superstar a tad gratuitous, but I won't begrudge the creators their fun.

7.5/10