The time was ripe for betting on green

Maestro: War & Pax Nos. 1-5
Marvel Comics
Creators: Peter David, Javier Pina and Jesus Aburtov
Release date: January-May 2021

This series was timed just right to grab my attention.

I’ve long been a fan of the Hulk. I like most of the more “monstrous” Marvel characters like Hulk, Thing, Beast after Hank McCoy sprouted his blue fur, and Nightcrawler. They appeal to me visually, I guess, but I’ve also liked the characterizations of Hulk and Thing a great deal.

When I was a kid, my family watched the Bill Bixby/Lou Ferrigno “Incredible Hulk” television program every week. I also read and very much enjoyed a nice run of Incredible Hulk beginning with issue No. 212 while visiting a friend around that same time in the late 1970s. I’d read some other issues of the character from time to time, but never on any consistent basis.

I also enjoy the writing of Peter David, be it in the form of Star Trek and other prose novels or in comics. I like how he makes his stories character-driven and always includes touches of humor. Some of my favorites among David’s comics writing include Young Justice, Fallen Angel and Supergirl. I’ve long been curious about David’s lengthy run on Incredible Hulk. He lasts a good long time on the title, and it’s a character I like, but I’d always been unsure where to start reading.

I decided to do something about that curiosity several years ago by picking up the first couple Hulk Visionaries: Peter David trades, but then they got dropped on my to-be-read-sometime pile. Last year, I decided it was time to finally satisfy that curiosity and make sure I did the big Hulk read-through by tracking down the rest of the Visionaries series of trades and the Marvel Epic trades that picked up Peter David’s run on the title.

I also picked up a number of back issues from before Peter David’s run and settled in for a lengthy but enjoyable reading project that stretched from Incredible Hulk No. 195 through No. 448. There were some gaps, especially early on, but I revisited that run from my youth and read a number of later issues I truly enjoyed for the first time. And Peter David’s run was mostly complete, including every issue from No. 331 through 448. I was not disappointed. In fact, I enjoyed reading these Hulk adventures so much, I began following the new Immortal Hulk title in trade form as well, and I’m also enjoying Al Ewing’s take on Hulk.

Included in those Incredible Hulk Epic Collection trades of Peter David’s run was the two-part Future Imperfect story arc. This prestige format limited series by Peter David and George Perez was originally released in 1992. I bought and read these issues when they were released and enjoyed the tale of the modern-day Hulk being transported to a dystopian future where he has to fight a twisted version of himself named the Maestro.

Re-reading this series as part of David’s collected Hulk run, I was better able to appreciate the context around which Future Imperfect was written. I got to not only read Future Imperfect again for the first time in a long time, but I was able to see the beginnings of the story slowly develop in the regular monthly title and then explore the repercussions of the limited series on the characters going forward in future issues. Then shortly after I finished reading those collected Hulk editions, it was announced that Peter David was going to return to the concept of the Maestro for more tales nearly 20 years after the original story was printed. Now that’s serendipitous timing.

These new series would focus on how the Maestro came to be, and I was excited to try them. The first of the announced trilogy of miniseries was simply titled Maestro and explained how Hulk came to be alive in this future war-torn time. It also showed how he encountered another familiar face, who was then using the title of the Maestro.

This second series, War & Pax, picks up the story after Hulk has assumed the mantle of the Maestro and shows him coming into opposition with Dr. Doom and the members of the Pantheon, Hulk’s former teammates. I’m sure this was a welcome callback for any fans who first read about the Pantheon 20 years ago, but it was also a nice callback for me, who had just discovered the Pantheon members about 20 months ago, give or take a few weeks.

Both of these first two Maestro series were fun codas to Peter David’s earlier run writing Incredible Hulk. I’m looking forward to the third installment to begin in a few months. And I expect it to be just as much fun.