Red Hulk 3

I know squat about Rick Jones. It makes it kind of hard, initially, to get into this book, then. However, Jeff Parker does enough to fill you in on the history of Marvel's greatest-support-character-other-than-Jarvis. My only thoughts on this book, as a whole, is wondering where it is going. Issues 1 and 2 did a good enough job filling in some gaps in stories from the Hulk book and how Red Hulk and Banner get together to attempt to take down the Intelligencia. This story really doesn't do much other than fill in the origin of A-Bomb and extrapolate 22 pages of story from it as A-Bomb was created to be a manchurian candidate by the Intelligencia against Bruce Banner.

The book is mostly characterization of Rick Jones as A-Bomb, which is sad since the title of the comic is "Red Hulk". Yet, Parker's analysis of Jones' psychology is pretty nifty. The big question about how Rick should actually be feeling about being a Hulk-thing, and why he should feel that way was a nice bit of drama injected into Rick's character. Sadly, I liked Rick as the guy that was enjoying being a Hulk-thing more than most people. I suppose it is because I felt more like Rick was a representative of the readers. I don't think i'm going on a limb to say the readers would think it was pretty awesome to be a Hulk-thing. Rick has his A-Bomb form. He can change back into Rick. H eis still kind of the same guy in either form. Now, because of Parker's characterization of Rick, that analogue is gone, but it doesn't make Rick a worse character for it.