The final issue of the Warbound arc takes place before, during, and slightly after the events of World War Hulk #5. There’s a small amount of danger in this, because going into it, we can already feel like it was largely irrelevant in the main story, but fair enough – this arc has always been the “Behind the Scenes” part of WWH.

The bulk of the issue features Cho, Wong and the Hulk-supporting renegades tracking down the demon Zom, who after being expunged from Strange after his defeat, has transferred his essence to Iron Man’s discarded Hulkbuster armour. Er, okay, sounds a bit strange, but I can deal with it. After clearing that mess up, they arrive just in time for the climax of WWH which honestly isn’t improved much by being shown from a different angle.

The high point of this issue certainly isn’t the plot, which is fairly generic background-filler for WWH, skirting around the main story but not actually interacting with it. Instead, the best stuff is the character interaction. A heavy focus obviously goes on Hercules and Cho, but Angel and Namora also get plenty of good material. In fact it’s quite damning to the X-Books that my favourite appearances for Angel – in this arc, and the time his guest-starred in Thunderbolts – didn’t even come out of the X-Office.

Ultimately, the Warbound arc is a fun one with great writing and art (Kirk’s pencils remind me of Mark Bagley, circa Thunderbolts, which is a good thing.) even if the sense of irrelevance permeates it all. Cho has been an interesting character to me since his introduction in Amazing Fantasy #15 (er, not that one) so it’s nice to see Pak making use of him. However, it’s not entirely nice to see how he’s going to in the future…

When I started this blog, I promised it would be about the comics, not about industry drama and celebrity. I got about 350 words into the entry for this issue before I realised I’d barely talked about the actual story at all, so I decided to be fair to the comic and to the creators, and I wrote the above review. If you’re actually interested in seeing what I have to say about comics marketing and politics, concerning the re-titling and re-casting of this series, click more to read it.

(continue reading…)