Today I’m putting on my journalism hat and heading out to the one, the only COMIC-CON! As you might have seen to the start of the week, there’s going to be a cavalcade of thrlls and surprise coming from the editors and writers themselves (including… a head shaving incident as Astonishing X-Men changes hands? Oh, that wacky Bullpen.).

But never fear! You can save some cash and traveling headache by picking up a copy of this week’s Iron Man #20 because believe me, it’s pretty surprising.

NOTE! Spoilers for Iron Man #20 within. Enter at your own risk.

In today’s Iron Man #20, we’re getting a soldier’s eye view of the Manhattan-based warzone.

-Quick side note: isn’t it weird to call this whole thing “World War Hulk”? I mean… really? Sure, the alien invasion potential is huge and the threat of world war is certainly there, but world war is a little more than the story has delivered so far. Well, we still have issues to go and you never know what could happen by #6, so maybe I’m jumping the gun. Maybe the internet will break in half, what can you say?

Anyhow, the Hulk’s just sort of smashing around, doing his thing and SHIELD is now under sub-director Dugan. Since the Hulk has a really clear objective here and (according to the Spirit of Vengeance) all the due cause, he jumps up to a hellicarrier (The Hellicarrier?) and confronts SHIELD directly. After all, Nick Fury is the one who tricked him into the crazy plan, right? Dugan explains the LMD situation and lo and behold, the Hulk has no issue with SHIELD and might even be rethinking his Smash Fury plan. Letting them go with a warning, the Hulk leaves the hellicarrier and continues the hunt.

Now, Dugan does the smart thing and takes two guys who’ve Hulkbusted before to pick their brain on what to do next. Sadly, he gets the lamest ideas of either ‘waiting this all out’ since the Hulk seems pretty focused on his revenge or attacking now with nothing they can say for certain is going to do the job. While waiting this out sounds good on paper, it doesn’t really stop the destruction going on (unless they just bundled up the Illuminati and handed them over…). And, as we all know, attacking the Hulk in a mindless rage is a dangerous business so just throwing themselves at him when he seems to have a determined plan is just futile. So their out of luck and that’s when Dugan gets a secret message from Tony. He’s using his Extremis powers while lying nigh-naked in the aliens’ makeshift Gitmo to tell Dugan of the plan he’s had in his back pocket for just such an occasion. Because if things continue to get worse (what with the rest of Illuminati not coming out to confront the Hulk on what the heck they did)l, Dugan is to OPEN UP THE NEGATIVE ZONE, combining the Negative Zone with the Positive Zone so to speak, thus BLOWING UP MANHATTAN. No margin for error here, he wants to destroy the Fantastic Four, himself, entire divisions of soldiers, heroes standing up for him, just to get at the Hulk and his alien brigade.

Yeah, HARDCORE.

On one hand, Tony’s got a big brass pair to pull something like this to cover his own mistakes. Not that we have any reason to believe that the Hulk would simply smash and go home once he’s taken care of his revenge, but… what have you got to lose? I mean, it not like we’re giving him some low level tech support office workers, these are some of the most important men on the planet as far as raw power and brain power. They should be able to put their heads together without blowing up a major city with innocent people around. On the other, something that large a scale may just stop the Hulk, but it will effectively stop SHIELD as well. If Speedball is a national enemy for being connected to the blast in Stamford, how could we possibly trust an organization that set off the equivalent of a nuke on our home soil? Greater good or not, however you look at it, there would be a level of fear when looking at the people who used to be friendly and neighborhood.

It’s Dugan’s call on when to use this Doomsday Device.

Interesting stuff.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 25th, 2007 at 1:00 pm and is filed under Marvel, News & Views, The Fifth Color, Version 1.0 Blog@. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.