Last year, Marvel managed fairly respectable sales on Sam Kieth's Wolverine / Hulk miniseries.  Respectable by any standards, but particularly so considering that the book was a rather eccentric affair in which Wolverine and the Hulk inexplicably met in the middle of nowhere and helped a hallucinatory girl who kept disintegrating into a crayon scribble.

Not surprisingly, Marvel is returning to the theme, but this time the Hulk gets top billing in Hulk / Wolverine: 6 Hours.  Given the content, that's fair enough, since Wolverine spends most of this issue wandering around a forest listening to a radio in order to fulfil his contractual obligation to turn up, rather than playing any real part in the plot.  It's essentially a Hulk story, from that book's regular writer Bruce Jones.

Bruce Banner is still on the run from... well, whoever.  I'm not sure whether it's the normal authorities or the conspiracy from his own series, and it doesn't really matter.  Anyhow, he's fleeing north to Canada, and blags his way onto a private charter flight.  Thanks to the miracle of contrived plotting, also aboard the flight are two drug dealers on the run from the law, and a sulking teenage boy who's suffering from a fatal snake bite that will kill him in six hours, as a result of a terrible room-cleaning, glasses-missing, similar-looking-pet-snakes accident. 

This is a high concept miniseries.  The high concept is that the entire thing takes place in the course of six hours (hence the title).  Rather than keep telling us the time in captions, the story instead keeps working it into dialogue or background clocks, which is a nice touch.  If you're interested, this issue covers 11.59am to 2.45pm.

I vaguely recall seeing this series described as being in real time.  Of course, it's nothing of the sort, because it's appearing over the course of eleven weeks and the story takes six hours.  Presumably somebody has 24 in mind here, but the difference with 24 is that the individual episodes have a duration in time, and the episodes are in real time.  Comics can't be in real time because they have no passage of time, and I have my doubts that stories that attempt to mark time this strictly are going to work in serialised format.  It seems to me that it's a device that's only really effective in self-contained stories.

It's all very intricately constructed, and just about gets away with the coincidence involved in bringing all of these characters together - though it's a stretch.  As the aircraft is obviously just about to crash next to Wolverine's holiday home, I suspect the bounds of credibility are going to be snapped next issue.  There's only so far you can go with coincidence, especially if Wolverine has no real reason to be there.  Come to think of it, nor does the Hulk, really.

Bearing in mind that Wolverine and the Hulk are characters who don't meet up all that often and have very little shared history, there are two main reasons for getting them to co-headline the same story.  One is the historical accident that Wolverine happened to make his debut in an issue of Incredible Hulk back in 1974, but it's not that significant a story for either character.  The other is the shared theme of the characters being unable to control their anger, but that hasn't been all that prominent for Wolverine in quite a while now.  Moreover, it doesn't have all that much to do with the plot so far.  The result is that this looks suspiciously like Jones wanted to do a time-marking story and happens to have slotted Wolverine and Banner into the story in interchangeable roles.  Maybe the reason for their involvement will become more apparent in time, but at the moment they're being used in a rather generic role.

Scott Kolins' art does fairly well on the detailed settings and background details which are integral to the story.  I'm not quite so sure about his version of the Hulk, which seems a little awkward for my tastes.  Characters like the Hulk don't really fit into the style that Kolins has used here.  It's pretty good work on the whole, but it does feel like both the lead characters are going to present a bit of a challenge in terms of integrating them with the style of the artwork.

This isn't a bad issue, but it does feel like it's more interested in its gimmick than in the characters, particularly Logan.  Logan has an unfortunate track record of being used in guest appearances which serve no purpose other than to have him in the book.  It's something we've seen less of in the last couple of years, so hopefully future issues will make clear that this is not a relapse.

Rating: B-

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