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.
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.