The HULK! #23

I didn’t buy Crossed this week like I had planned because my LCS didn’t have back issues extending to #1. Being a completist, I would have been driven mad by half a set. HOWEVER, there was a copy of the infamous The HULK #23 in which Bruce Banner is almost shower-raped at a Y by two sour-faced gay guys. As noted in Mistakes of a Past History #2, writer Jim Shooter was apparently going for “verisimilitude” with this story, but the result is a menudo of melodrama, a veritable potpourri of painful plights so grotesquely portrayed that I can’t believe it got green lit in the first place. Of course, I was interested in buying the issue because of the gay angle (it being of personal interest), but trust me, gay people were not the only one’s maligned by Jim Shooter. Junkies in particular should be taking some umbrage with him, to say nothing of baby mommas. “Verisimilitude” to Jim Shooter apparently means, “everyone dies unmourned: the good, the bad, the innocent” or something equally as nihilistic… well, in a Sartre-for-Dummies-I-read-about-this-once-while-waiting-on-line-at-the-grocery-store kind of way. Shooter didn’t have the chops to write this effectively, and that’s the real crime.