Review: Herc #1

Written by Greg Pak and Fred Van Lente
Illustrated by Neil Edwards

A BOLD NEW ERA FOR THE LION OF OLYMPUS! The Chaos War left 
Hercules without powers — and without a sidekick. But when mythic evil stalks the streets, and a latter day band of Hercules-worshippers cries out for their savior, what is the son of Zeus to do? He takes his three thousand years of combat experience, raids the armory of Ares for the most fearsome weapons of legend, descends from heaven and gets medieval on their asses. Return to Olympus with Hercules’ “Dream Team” of writers Greg Pak & Fred Van Lente and artist George Jeanty for an all-new, all-dark on-going saga here!

Hercules returns in his brand new ongoing, shortening his name to just four letters and losing his best friend. Now that Chaos War is over, it looks like Pak and Van Lente have been given a temporary stay of execution in writing the fan-favorite character, despite previous reports that everything was over as Chaos War concluded.

So with our story focusing on an entirely mortal Hercules dealing with the fallout he created by recreating the world, how does our first issue read?

Click behind the cut for some thoughts on the issue.

To say that the Incredible Hercules was a fan favorite title is admittedly to put it a tad lightly. While Hercules has certainly been a part of the Marvel Universe for some time, he was never more popular than when getting his own title spinning out of World War Hulks (at least, not to recent memory). Teaming up with Amadeus Cho, the two led the book in a mythological buddy-cop story, kicking various amounts of ass and on occasion taking some names. There was love, there was beer, there were amazing sound effects, and there were various quotables left and right.

This is rather definitively not that same series.

To their admittance, the Incredible Hercules – since it began – was a several act story that eventually came to it’s conclusion in Chaos War. What we have now is seemingly uncharted territory, unplanned for but not unwanted. However, with the massive changes the character went through in between when his series started in ’07 and now it only stands to reason that we’ll be getting a somewhat different book with said character. So the “bwa ha ha” is scaled back and the title is immediately grounded, opening with Herc riding the subway and dispatching a local gang in an empty train car. Right from the bat the book has a much different feel to it than the Incredible Hercules, and that’s not neccesarily a bad thing.

However, the question then becomes a rather tricky one, and that is “what did we come to this book for?” It’s an admittedly difficult question to attempt to answer as it’s a very personal one, but let’s do our best to look at it as objectively as we can. The Incredible Hercules was ostensibly two thing: a comedy, and a mythological adventure. While you come for the genre and stay the well written characters and plot, those are the two major selling points that are highly praised by fans. Incredible Hercules was always fairly laugh out loud funny which is what most people talked about with the title, but it also rather heavily mixed Greek mythology back into the Marvel Universe. There are always mentions of the Greek heroes in Marvel, but they’re rather outshined by the heavier presence of the Norse Mythology characters, to the extent that Marvel’s big blockbuster event is completely engulfed in Asgardians. To be fair, the Greek pantheon had been destroyed – but then again, so had the Asgardians during Avengers Disassembled, and they still came back, right?

So if we’re looking at Herc as the continuation of the Incredible Hercules, Prince of Power, and Chaos War, it’s important to note what elements of the story carry over. We’ve already confirmed that this is no longer a buddy comedy filled with the “bwa ha ha” of old. Amadeus Cho is off doing his own thing, and Herc is avoiding Olympus and all that it has to offer, focusing on his heroism. It’s very quickly established that this story will focus on the mythology aspect more, as we’re given brief side notes abouts various influential Greek stories which Herc’s new arsenal is based around (which is a long way of saying that if Greek mythology is your bag, you’ll feel rather at home).

Of course, with the aspect of Greek mythology taking the forefront, so does the adventure story. This is a very action oriented issue, with a train fight sequence leading into a street fight sequence which eventually leads to Herc’s battle with Hobgoblin. There is some slight humor in there, but the Herc of this story is a much more humble hero. He still likes beer, but this is the first time he has really accepted his God-like nature, responding to the prayers of his believers and genereally just trying to be less decadent. It’s a very logical transition to make as the hero was essentially forced to grow up after the events of Assault on New Olympus and his entrapment in Continuum. Of course, wether the lack of jokes and snappy dialogue is a deal breaker is up to you and you alone as a reader, but there’s at least enough good story to warrant the new series.

The title reads essentially as a new book. This is very much an “Incredible Hercules is dead; long live Herc” issue for the series, as Pak and Van Lente write essentially a new style of adventure. On the one hand, I can’t help but miss the more humorous stylings of past adventures, even in the case of some of the books that Van Lente wrote on his own with the Taskmaster mini. In all honesty, the overt lack of humor in the title is the only real polarizing aspect. The title feels like a brand new book, as if there had never been a previous Herc ongoing before, and that element allows a lot of the shifts in storytelling to feel more natural. It is, after all, rather unfair to hold creators to specific ideals, because if they only ever wrote one type of story forever it’d eventually get dull and repetitive. So we’ve moved away from the sillier and more outrageous comic and are now focusing on more of a gritty street level title. While the first issue definitely has that vibe (with Herc pulling out a bullet, for example), it’s generally too early to get a very firm grasp on the title’s over all goals with it’s new direction (aside from just telling good Herc-centric stories, of course).

Neil Edwards as an artist also helps to set the new change of pace. The book always had a lightly-cartoonish look to it before, but this issue spend it’s time artistically in the dark and gloomy rain of Brooklyn as Edwards focuses on making this book feel as street-level as possible. Edwards still manages to make Herc the hulking hunk of man that he is, and the sleek yet heavy inks by Scott Hanna really helps to bring the book’s shadows into definition. Edwards gives all the characters a very realistic look, and this only becomes an oddpoint when Hobgoblin rears his head. The new Hobgoblin previously appeared in Spider-Man under the pen of Humberto Ramos with an obviously more jagged and cartoonish style, but Edwards’ hyper-realistic reformatting makes Hobgoblin into quite a frightening looking character. He ends up looking like a Doctor Who villain, but in that positive way that make Doctor Who villains so entertaining.

The only real negative here is probably due to an element of confusion on my part. A month or so ago, we chatted with Fred Van Lente about his upcoming work on Herc and Alpha Flight, and Van Lente mentioned that the title’s initial focus would be immediate fallout from Chaos War. Since Hercules resurrected the world in his image (with decidedly less beer than you’d expect), he had accidentally brought back Alpha Flight from the great beyond as well as one other unmentioned character. As it was explained to us/me, the Herc title would feature Herc attempting to find this character, as it was not someone Herc wanted to bring back. This is something that the issue doesn’t address at all, however. Herc’s mission is rather different, focusing here on just re-establishing Herc as a man of the people. There is a brief mention of Ares as well as a tease that I can only assume is a Fear Itself nod (since Herc will indeed tie-in to the event), but the aforementioned concept does not appear in the pages of the book at all. Granted, this is one of those “I could just be flat out wrong” moments of reading, but I couldn’t help but look out for a familiar character throughout my reads of the issue.

It’s also somewhat notable that the story – quite possibly accidentally – hits a lot of the same notes that Mike Oeming’s God Complex did, which also featured a Greek hero who had turned to the life of a mortal to work in a restaurant – but I would guess that that’s entirely accidental. A God living as a man isn’t exactly a new concept, especially for a character like Herc who has been down amongst the humans for quite some time now. It was definitely something I noticed while going through the issue on my first time around, though.

So Hercules returns and all is essentially right in the world. I miss the page-by-page laughs, but I still enjoy what we’re given for our first outing. The issue is not the bombastic return to form that one might expect for a new volume for the character, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a good one still. If anything, the issue if highly accessible for new fans, as there is really very little knowledge required before the issue begins to truly get into the storyline. All things considered, this is just the beginning of a new street level hero book that happens to come from the Greek pantheon. It’s a good action title at the moment, but I’m crossing fingers that as the story goes on it gets a tad more involved in similar style to what came before. After all, it was the tremendous over-arcing story that made Incredible Hercules such an enjoyable endeavor in the end. It’d be a same to drop the book down to paint-by-numbers arc by arc storytelling, especially with a character that has developed such a vast following to the defining run by the creators. I don’t suppose it’s too much to ask for as good of a long-form story in the end, is it?

Final Verdict: 8.2 – Buy