What’s up everyone! Welcome to Beyond The Panel. Coming at you today with talk about Immortal Hulk #42! After a strange encounter between Hulk, Joe, and The Thing, now we move back into the state of things which everyone else got themselves into after getting pulled into the Hulk’s orbit.

Now I was surprised by the change of direction which Jackie McGee’s story took. Unlike everyone else, there was literally some major costs to be counted when it came to her job with the paper. Jackie and her people wanted all the dirt they could on this story, and somehow this constantly brought them into the middle of all this madness, for better or for worse. Though in this case, we were seeing the response to everything which did go wrong through their pursuit of the Hulk news. So with that said, the direction her story took was shocking because of the changes you didn’t think the news company would have to make just to make-up for the losses. I mean to an extent you get what was transpiring, yet at the same time it was heartbreaking to see that in the end? There wasn’t nearly enough appreciation for the work which McGee brought to the table.

Though with that said, nothing could have prepared you for where they were ultimately going with this by the end of the issue. That really shook her story up for the better. Surely enough you would want to see more from McGee, and the only way would have been to make her more integral outside of just reporting news.

This time around things did get pretty interesting on the Gamma Flight side of things. I will admit that sometimes we could go a whole issue without them and miss nothing, but you do understand the role a team like them have to play in a story like this. So it made sense that after the escape they just failed to stop, that there would be some new tensions to jump into. Especially when it comes to one guy apparently needing to make a statement that he was the guy in charge. And that he clearly was not satisfied with all the failures they have suffered up to this point. So in the end, they did get to the point where Eugene Judd and company were able to ‘count their costs’. Though again, aside from this? You still probably aren’t going to feel like you were missing much from this part of the story compared to everything else ongoing.

For this issue of Immortal Hulk, it definitely took a second to realize that this was a different art team handling the interiors, and I enjoyed how much I didn’t mind it this time around. As I have said before, changes in art team should only matter if you can see a significant difference in the artwork which takes you out of the story. Fortunately for this issue of Immortal Hulk, it was more on the grounded and engaging side of things. So it wasn’t problematic that the art style would change to fit that. I for one liked the pencil work from each of these three different artists who came in with detail and distinction to what they drew, and a great sense of clarity to it too. What actually caught me off guard was the use of a grainy overlay for one story, but somehow it worked too.It probably helped that there was a colorist who at the very least was able to maintain a certain level of energy to the story through the use of solid colors. Even in the end, I liked that couple of pages from the original art team because it was a proper set-up into what comes next.

By the end of Immortal Hulk #42, there’s some big changes to prepare for in the new year. Just when you think you have seen everything, still this creative team tells you you haven’t seen everything yet.