Heaven knows, I give Bendis a lot of grief around here (deservedly so, but...). Yet I'm man enough to admit when he's right about something.
That something? The insane idea that Greg Pak has been putting forward that no one has ever died in one of the Hulk's many rampages.
It all started when Amadeus Cho, also known as *ahem* Mastermind Excello, came on board. And to convince Hercules and his little band of heroes that they should help Bruce Banner crush the Illuminati, Cho came up with the little chestnut that no one had ever died because of the Hulk. Not a single person. Here, check out this from Incredible Hulk #110 (2007):
And from
#111:
And he's even gone so far as to have someone else state that there's never been a
single casualty from the Hulk (sorry, I couldn't find it...).
Now, you can give Bruce Banner all the
props you want to, but some things are way beyond
instantaneous mathematical calculation in the heat of battle, no matter what Cho might say. If you've seen the results of enough military helicopter crashes, it strains credibility to believe that knocking them out of the sky could
never result in a casualty, no matter how careful you did it. If you saw the results of the evacuation of
New Orleans, it's
not conceivable that you could evacuate a panicked city
10 times that size, and then fight 10 or 12 monstrous battles there, and not have a single person inadvertently die.
Sure, Pak adds enough
caveats to try and cover his ass, like "
never killed an innocent," or "self
-defense," or "
that was a war" or "
as long as your brain hasn't been tampered with." So any exception you can find, Pak can argue it somehow doesn't count.
And that bugs the
frak outta me, for some reason. Probably because it's yet another attempt by comic writers to
have their cake and eat it too: they want to write a book about a destructive monster, but somehow have him
still be a hero. Look, Hulk can destroy the biggest city on Earth, yet
magically no one ever dies!! See, he is a good guy!! We want him savage, but still basically a nice guy. Next:
Galactus can eat a planet, but
miraculously, his brilliant mind ensure that there are no casualties. It's
cheap, lazy writing, not to mention morally questionable: let's have all violence and zero consequences!
But Bendis didn't get that memo. Look at
New Avengers: Illuminati #1 (2006)...not the mini-series, but the one-shot that served as a prelude to the
Civil War.
Commander Hill is lecturing
Tony Stark about the Hulk's
Las Vegas rampage, which happened in
Fantastic Four #533:
So, despite Cho's having "
studied every recording and report of every fight" the Hulk "
has ever been in," I guess he missed that one, eh? Except Stark says "How many this time?" That certainly implies deaths other times, right?
Then later, when proposing
exiling Banner to the Illuminati:
So, according to Bendis, innocents
have died in Hulk rampages (
and a dog!!). And it's not the first time. And more people will die.
And if you think about it, isn't that the
only thing that makes sense? If no one had ever been injured in a Hulk rampage, why would
Tony &
Reed et al have bothered to blast Hulk off
Earth? If he was
no threat to human life, why would the military have wasted a
kajillion dollars worth of equipment trying to destroy him?
So Pak's idea doesn't even make sense
in terms of his own story. If no one ever, ever died because of the Hulk, there was
no reason for Planet Hulk, no reason for World War Hulk. And no reason to lock up Bruce Banner afterwards, either.
I know
Marvel writers don't bother to read each others' work, and doesn't have editors who actually coordinate things, so this all really could be a case of "didn't get the memo." But looked at as two writers arguing about the implications of a character's actions, Bendis clearly wins this one.
So see? I'm not
irredeemably anti-Bendis...until the next issues of
Avengers and
Skrullapalooza, at least...