X-Men: First Class has generally been reliable for good old-school superhero stories.  But last issue was a little shapeless, and this month's story is perhaps the weakest so far.

"Smash" guest stars the Hulk.  And that's basically the plot.  It guest stars the Hulk, and the X-Men fight him for most of the issue.

Okay, there's a little more than that.  The X-Men are helping the US Army to look for the Hulk.  So they hunt for him, and they find him, and they fight him.  But then Rick Jones shows up to explain who the Hulk is, and Professor X learns (completely out of the blue, so that the story can end) that the military want the Hulk as a weapon.  So the X-Men go home.  And that's the plot.

This is decidedly underwhelming.  I was going to say that the Silver Age Hulk isn't a very interesting character, but actually, that's going too far.  The problem, more accurately, is that he's only an interesting character when the story is about him or Banner.  In a story like this, he's just a big lug who yells a lot, which isn't particularly enthralling.

More to the point, the story turns on the X-Men learning things about the Hulk which are very familiar indeed.  This is, of course, an all-ages book, and I suppose that to a very young reader who's unfamiliar with the Hulk, this might seem fresh.  But even for that audience, there are better ways to introduce the Hulk than to write a story where he fights the X-Men for almost a whole issue, while his back story is squeezed into a one-panel flashback.

The fight scene itself is reasonably well done, and there's a good art sequence with the Hulk slowly figuring out that Marvel Girl is lifting him off the ground.  But mostly, this is a disappointingly routine effort.

Writer Jeff Parker can do much better than this - as he proves in a two-page back-up strip with art by the returning Colleen Coover.  These light comedy pieces have incredible charm and life, and I'd love to see them expanded to get more space in the book.

Rating: C+

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