CREDIT: Marvel Comics
Rating: 4.5/5 – A Great Update for Marvel’s Resident Greek Demi-God
by ComicSpectrum EiC Bob Bretall
Hercules has a long history at Marvel, beginning in 1985 in in his most recent ‘starring role’ taking over the numbering from the Incredible Hulk and doing a 29 issue run as The Incredible Hercules from 2008-2010 with Amadeus Cho as his sidekick and then continuing for another 11 issues in the self-titled ‘Herc’. Amadeus Cho is now doing a stint as Marvel’s newest Hulk and Dan Abnett and Luke Ross do a wonderful job updating Herc for the current day and giving the series a really nice hook. Hercules has set up shop and has a simple mission statement: Labors Undertaken.
Abnett adds quite a few really nice elements to the story. Hercules works for valuable items, well, items valuable to the people hiring him. I’ll leave this up to you to discover how this works, but I was delighted by it. Hercules has embraced modern weaponry, which only makes sense, he’ll use whatever is going to get the job done best. Gilgamesh is Herc’s freeloading guest and I look forward to seeing him get off the couch at Herc’s pad and get mixed up in the action. I’m sure we’ll see that in upcoming issues. It was the little flourishes like this that sold me on this series, quite beautifully illustrated by Luke Ross, including a lot of background detail that fleshed out Herc’s living spaces and added a lot of character to this take on my favorite Greek Demi-God.
Old things are waking and they’re not exactly interested in peaceful coexistence with humankind. Hercules is going to be squarely at the intersection between these “old things” and the human world in this series and if this debut issue is any indication, I’m going to love seeing Abnett and Ross tell the tale. This series jumped straight onto my pull list and is one of my favorite books in the new wave of Marvel titles so far. I look forward to more.
Reviewed by: Bob Bretall
(bob@comicspectrum.com)
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