Ground Zero

Peter David, Todd McFarlane, Erik Larsen & others Ground Zero (1988)
I never really felt one way or the other about the Hulk, but picked this up because it includes issue 340, an X-Men crossover which otherwise costs several hundred dollars these days. Before we proceed any further, here's what someone called Aurora thought of it on Goodreads:

I haven't read much Hulk, and this is pretty much why. The basic metaphor of Hulk and Bruce Banner is only so interesting, and there just isn't much else here. Also! The art is sooo bad. Everyone has mullets! The X-Men show up and Wolverine and Rogue have mullets!

Yeah, I sort of enjoyed it but I can't really disagree with that. Ground Zero wasn't quite pow! the comic book growing up, but its voice had broken, it couldn't talk to girls, and it was still playing with action figures while dreading any of its pals finding out. It's written by Peter David whom I recall as being not without certain qualities, although for some reason his only regular title which I can recall off the top of my head was when he turned X-Factor into a vehicle by which to bag sales for all those other mutants usually seem hanging around in the background of better stories. David kept these seven collected issues reasonably interesting in terms of doing weird things with the characters, which probably wasn't easy given that the villain combines a porno-moustache with a giant throbbing brain and is seemingly aware of being a villain. At one stage he transforms a couple of the Hulk's enemies into monsters named the Rock and the Redeemer, then later finds it advantageous to betray the pair, and so we see a memo added to the to do list on his fancy computer screen in futuristic Asimov font so as to ensure that he doesn't somehow forget to stitch them up like kippers:

LIE TO ROCK AND REDEEMER.

What a wrong 'un, he is!

Unfortunately though, the art isn't great and the best I've ever been able to say about Todd McFarlane's work is that he's consistent. He's not the worst, and true enough some of those Spider-Man covers had something, but his figures are clunky, resembling Stretch Armstrong dolls pulled into uncomfortable taffy shapes which no amount of crosshatching can conceal; and there's not much variation from his three basic expressions - surprise, anger and glee on faces with otherwise more than a touch of Archie about them and which don't really gel with the mood of the book. He draws a decent grey Hulk but has difficulty with anything that's supposed to look like a person. Bruce Banner here resembles the Archie version of Harry Potter, for example.

That said, Ground Zero is good enough to leave me wishing it had been better, which is, I suppose, a recommendation.