It was greatly disappointing after the build up from Future Imperfect and Last Avengers Story.

What I’ve always found interesting is that I’ve most enjoyed PAD’s work when he’s paired with a good artist. I have no idea how to interpret this, exactly. I tend to think of him as a fine, fine writer, but I’ve been bored with his work when the artist isn’t working out. I don’t know if this means that 1) a lousy artist doesn’t know how to convey what PAD wants, so the story suffers; or worse, 2) I’m biased, and PAD is only an OK writer who appears to be good when the art is good. My personal opinion tends towards 1. However, I will note that during or not long after this same time period, PAD was also writing Spider-Man 2099 (which I liked when Rick Leonardi was on it, and hated when he left), Supergirl (loved it with Gary Frank, hated it with whoever replaced him), and Young Justice (loved Todd Nauck, who I believe did the bulk of the series).

I still tend towards theory #1, because it occurs to me that I still tend to like PAD comics when a story I’m enjoying continues to be enjoyable during a weak fill-in artist. I started to really enjoy PAD’s Hulk after Deodato and later Kubert came on. The new “gravage” Hulk and the general story direction became more enjoyable. However, both Deodato and Kubert frequently required replacement artists, but my enjoyment of the story didn’t suffer.

So I’d skip #427 through #445 and go right to post-Onslaught (which unfortunately kicks off with a very poorly-drawn Angel Medina story, but it’s necessary for the setup). Ironically, I think PAD was on the verge of quitting Hulk at that point due to someone’s idea of sending the character to the Heroes Reborn universe. The compromise of splitting Hulk from Banner gave us the “Gravage” Hulk worked in our favor, since it really let him refurbish the character all over again. #446 to 467, plus the “The End” story as a nice epilogue, would really wrap up this series wonderfully and not end it on the downer of “it all went downhill from there.”

I asked Peter David about the Wild Man at a convention. If memory serves, he intended the character to be useful to the rest of the Marvel Universe. He could take away the power of a super-human, at least temporarily, and give writers a reason to have characters become depowered in their stories. Again, this is going from memory, so I may be off.

Gary Frank & Cam Smith drew some great-looking comics. My only problem was that their Hulk face was too human. He only looked like a monster occasionally. That may have been intentional, but I would have liked to see more panels like the “Smash them all!” panel shown here. Still, I enjoyed their artwork a great deal. The bachelor party & wedding issues were especially good.

I was going to say ‘probably no’ to the question of the rest of the run, but refreshing my memory with comics.org reminds me that among the crossover messes and aimlessness were quite a few damn fine stories Ghost of the Future, the Nick Fury funeral, -1, and the last issue, at the very least, are comics people should own. But the story David meant to write but wasn’t allowed to are comics people should have been able to own.

(Still a bit miffed that we never found out why the Wild Man was so important…)

Not enough can be said about how good, how funny, and how touching the Bachelor Party and Wedding issues are, as they encapsulate alot of what was so great about David’s Hulk writing tenure.

On a slight down note, it’s sad to me how much the book fell off after Gary Frank left the book. Liam Sharpe never seemed a good fit, and a bevvy of underwhelming artists followed him. The real killer was when several of David’s long building sub-plots were interrupted and cut short by various Marvel crossovers, all of which were awful.