Hunger by Joshua Hale Fialkov and Leonard Kirk Review

See the Galactus cover? See the title? Think it’s about Galactus and his hunger? Wrong! It’s about Rick Jones! Who? Ultimate Captain Marvel. Yeah, me neither. 

So the end of Age of Ultron saw time and space tear apart and somehow, for some reason, Marvel 616 Galactus made it over into the Ultimates Universe where he bonded with Ultimate Gah-Lak-Tus – a swarm of planet-devouring bots – to become some ultra-powerful Galactus hybrid. All to the good – except it disappointingly becomes your standard Galactus story thereafter. Galactus threatens a planet, cosmic heroes – in this case, Captain Marvel, Silver Surfer, Ro-Nan, and Mahr-Vehl – team-up to stop him. Guess how it ends? Yup! 

I was hoping this book would focus more on Galactus and give us a new spin on the character, or look into another aspect of the character – something, anything about Galactus, a character who rarely gets more than a cameo these days. But nope, not even in a mini-series marketed to be about him does he get more than a background b-plot role. Instead we’ve got Rick Jones, a whiny teenager who didn’t ask to be Captain Marvel but is and won’t stop complaining about it. 

Hunger sees Rick rise up and become the hero he’s destined to be - it’s that cheesy. A hero falls, a hero rises, blah blah blah, the end. This is why I don’t read Marvel’s Ultimate Comics line – they suck! Fialkov isn’t talented enough to write an interesting Ultimate Galactus book like Warren Ellis did a few years ago and churns out predictable scenes in a paper-thin plot with flat, irritating dialogue for the increasingly annoying Rick Jones to spout. Leonard Kirk’s artwork is pretty good – his cosmic space battles were very eye-catching, imaginative and colourful, but it’s not enough to save this one. 

The kicker is that this isn’t even the full story – you’ve got to read Cataclysm to find out what happens next. That is if you care, which, if you’re anything like me after reading this trash, you definitely won’t. That “to be continued in Cataclysm” tag at the end is such cynical storytelling. You think you’re getting a full story in this mini-series but it’s more of an extended prologue – and one helluva boring, predictable, bog-standard one at that. 

Up yours, Marvel!