What’s up everyone! Welcome to Beyond The Panel. Coming at you today with talk about Maestro #1! I’ll admit, as a reader familiar with who the Maestro is? I never quite understood the hype behind a character who only exists in the future. Maybe it was because we never knew the origin of the Maestro. I mean, what in the world happens to create a future where you’re dealing with a version of the Hulk like this? This sort of thing matters.

I for one definitely had my reservations too, because in most cases it doesn’t take long to explore the origins of a character. Though with the Maestro here, they have given him a book where it will take five issues to tell this story. That made you question just how they were going to approach this. Especially when you want to do enough in the first issue to keep us coming back for more. The last thing you would want to do is get through the first issue and decide that you’ve seen enough.

From the start of this issue, they threw us right into the origin story for Maestro. It definitely took some adjusting too, because I’m pretty sure most of us would have assumed that this was going to be a straightforward story told. I know I did. It never seemed like it would be that complicated of a tale to create a new kind of Hulk. Though here we were taken through quite a lot of obstacles to begin getting to the truth. This was also an adventure this took us through mentally because for as confused as you could have been, and for how many questions you had about what was unfolding too, we were all in the same boat with Banner. It’s not like I could have a problem with this either since as I said, this is a unique story that is spanning five issues instead of just one. With that said, it didn’t take terribly long to break free from the mental hoops to get through to what we were seeing that was real about the future this Hulk belongs to.

It was only after the right interaction with the right character where the pieces began to fall into place. This took till the last stretch of the first issue, but still it was worth the wait to understand how the world fell. Some things about this discovery made sense, other things came as a surprise for the kind of involvement it took to make a bad situation worse for this world. Though at the end of the day, clarity began to develop from an understanding of this world, and where a Hulk who thinks fits into it.

This brings us to the interior work from the art team. German Peralta was an excellent choice as artist for this book. This isn’t the first book I’ve read where he has been penciler, and I was always impressed with the work from this guy. Very detailed, and does some of his best work when working on whole distinct worlds, such as this barren future. How he drew the Maestro specifically stood out to me, because you could see just from appearance that he was different from most other Hulk personalities. He had the size and stature, but at the same time you could see the intelligence in how he carried himself. Though also a stare which captured a lot of frustration at the world around himself, you know, instead of rage. And when you have a penciler with such attention to details, it helps to have a colorist onboard who can match that with colors which breathe life into that image. Jesus Aburtov has an excellent range to his pallete, and the depth to his colors. His best definitely came from his use of textures, highlights, shadows, and even glows which made the art pop.

In the end, Maestro #1 served as a solid start for his origin story. We know that this is supposed to answer how the world fell and the Maestro rose, though for this first issue the effort was placed primarily on the world which came before what most fans know.