Editor's Note: Fall of the Hulks: Alpha arrives in stores Thursday, December 3.

Plot: Narrated by longtime Hulk/Banner foe The Leader, this opening of the next big Hulk event establishes some of the seeds of threats that will bedevil the many Hulks running around the Marvel U.

Comments: I've tried my best to avoid piling onto the Jeph Loeb hate wagon, but unfortunately I find myself critiquing a work directly resulting from the much-maligned writer's inconsistent and often downright poor plotting. Jeff Parker has written a fairly good book with Fall of the Hulks: Alpha and it's unfortunate that nearly two years of Jeph Loeb-penned Hulk stories have neatly damaged the book's readability.

Billing itself as the introduction to the next big Hulk event coming from Loeb's ongoing, it follows The Leader over the years as he and a group of Marvel villainy's big brains (literally in his case) plunder the world's scientific and esoteric knowledge when the good guys aren't paying attention. Calling themselves the Intelligencia, the group toils for years – in between fights with their respective nemeses – to reconstruct the Library of Alexandria.

Actually, it's a really sound story about the Leader with a cute premise about how the smartest of Marvel's villains are beholden to petty emotions and infighting which inevitably bring them down. The problem is that the last few pages have a bit where it tacks on some prologue to the big "Fall of the Hulks" event and attempts to drop hints about the origins of the Red Hulk.

Let's be clear: after nearly 20 issues without providing any real clues about his identity, the Red Hulk has become the least interesting mystery since the introduction of Romulus (also conceived by Loeb, it is perhaps the nadir of Wolverine-related conspiracy stories). Worse, by retconning The Leader into the story so late into the game, someone along the lines seems to have forgotten that the most effective mysteries are the ones that tend to avoid throwing characters in near the end to explain away chunks of the plot. Sadly, this is exactly what the book does, telling us that the Leader has been part of some conspiracy seeking to do… something… to the Hulk (presumably both of them since it's the fall of plural Hulks).

Again, the core of the book – the ways in which smart villains sabotage themselves – is actually a pretty neat story in and of itself but it's got a bloody gross albatross of Loeb's atrocious plotting hanging around its neck, dragging it into a morass of plot holes and poor planning.

Final Word: Can a decent book be harmed by many bad ones preceding it? Apparently so.

If you liked this review, be sure to check out more of the author’s work at Monster In Your Veins

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