Spider-Man/Hulk: Fire & Brimstone #1 Review
Debut issues of a comic series can be tricky to manage, as they require a perfect balance. You need to capture new readers with a strong hook and retain fans of whatever character you’re working on if it’s in the Big 2. Spider-Man/Hulk: Fire & Brimstone has the potential to be a very interesting exploration of how Bruce Banner controls the Hulk. Instead, every page of the first issue has panels jammed with pun after pun after quip after pun. I love humor, and even more specifically I love Kevin Smith’s humor. But along with co-writer Andrew McElfresh, they bury all of the interesting portions under a pile of jokes.
In Spider-Man/Hulk: Fire & Brimstone, we find Spider-Man and Hulk somewhere quite different than our normal locales. They are both in the crowd at a large religious gathering. This isn’t a setting I was expecting, so my expectations were set high from the jump. The issue unravels as a group of villains calling themselves “The Manosphere” attack the large gathering. After a big, bombastic battle with Hulk and Spider-Man, we learn that Hulk was there because he has been using religion to keep his “demon” under control.
The reason I brought up the perils of first issues is that there is a lot of good stuff in this issue, but it’s so poorly balanced that it’s not memorable rather than a flash in the pan. R.B. Silva and Federico Blee on the art of the book knock it out of the park. The way they draw everyone in the issue is fantastic. Their art on visual gags also makes the jokes land super well. But aside from the art, the book is a mess.
Humor, as with all things, can be overdone. Smith and McElfresh make a lot of great jokes and puns in this book, but that’s the biggest problem: there are a lot of them. There is no room to breathe without the next joke being jammed in your face. It’s too heavy-handed in its execution. It’s as if every joke that was pitched or felt situational made it to the book. Some of the jokes could have been cut in favor of material with greater weight and closer attention to the book’s themes.
But it’s also the first issue, which means they have to hook their readers. I expect the people coming to the comic for Smith will want this whole-kitchen-sink approach to jokes. The humor could start to slow down as they find their audience, at which point they can dig into the bigger themes this book has buried under humor. But as a critic, I want to see this team explore what makes the book so interesting. Hulk finding god is fascinating!
I have spent the last few months reading a lot of Hulk comics, and so many of them approach the Hulk problem from different angles. But as soon as the shoe dropped about Bruce finding God, I was more interested in that thread than anything else. Religion is an interesting story element, especially when controlling something that could be considered a sickness inside you. It felt like an allusion to programs like Alcoholics Anonymous that use religion to help people fight the sickness of addiction. Seeing Hulk through this lens is a really hearty theme that I want to see more nuanced depth from the writers moving forward.
If the team pulled back on the overuse of jokes and puns to let the Hulk’s religious angle take center stage, I think this could be a great series. Issue 1 is mostly carried by the perfect art and the hope that the elements that make this special are what the series digs further into rather than burying under puns. This isn’t a Pun-isher book.
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