Hulk, Volume 2: Hulk Planet Review (Donny Cates, Ryan Ottley)

The Starship Hulk lands on a planet with a thriving Hulk society, created accidentally from an incident earlier in the series. But Titan lurks within Hulk’s decaying brain - and is about to emerge…

Hulk, Volume 2: Hulk Planet is the final book in Donny Cates and Ryan Ottley’s brilliant, if short-lived, series and it’s unfortunately a damp squib to bow out on.

Part of that is possibly because Cates only wrote two of the six issues collected here (Ottley wrote the others, in addition to drawing them) but I wonder if the book would’ve been any better if he had written all of them because the story is no great shakes. The Hulk society is kinda blah and Hulk doesn’t do much with them besides play their sport Godball before Titan emerges for a generic smackdown.

Perhaps Cates would’ve written Titan better than Ottley because I feel like the character has the potential to be compelling and Ottley’s treatment of it is muddled - I’m still not sure what Titan is meant to be or why - and devolves into your typical big bad that Hulk gotta punch until the pages run out.

So why did Cates only write two issues if he’s meant to be writing all of them? He relapsed into using drugs again and got divorced, so I think he ended up missing deadlines as a result and Ottley was forced to pick up the slack. Cates also went through a near-fatal car accident in 2023 that gave him short-term amnesia, but the issues Ottley wrote all came out in early 2023 so I think the car accident followed these and so the reason Cates missed these issues is drugs/divorce-related. But the long-term reason for why this Hulk series ended so abruptly and why there haven’t been any new Cates/Marvel comics for over a year now is due to the car accident (I should mention though that I’m just speculating about the timeline so I might be wrong about it).

The Doc Samson scenes early on were some decent character-building stuff and Ottley’s art has been consistently high quality throughout this series. But the fresh, intense comics that made up the first couple books in this run (confusingly, Hulk Vs Thor: Banner of War isn’t counted as “Vol 2” even though it’s the book sandwiched between Smashtronaut! and Hulk Planet) is absent from this weak, forgettable final volume. I still recommend this Hulk series if only for the first two books, but don’t expect the same high quality from previous books. And here’s wishing Donny Cates a full recovery and return to comics in the near future.