InsaneJournal

Amadeus Cho, who, from his introduction through World War Hulk and the opening of this series was a rather obnoxious character, has taken his vengeance quest against The Man to its final phase: planning to use his laptop to completely topple SHIELD.  Herc tries to talk him out of it, and so tells a story:




Greg Pak's solo work on Incredible Hulk had a lot of these sorts of moments, where characters and the narrator philosophize about rage and how powerful it is and how bad and etc.; I generally found them dull.  This moment really works, perhaps because Herc's origins give him a lot more genuine mythic resonance to draw on.

This is also the arc that really sells Herc as a serious character (not that he's not funny here too, because he's frequently hilarious).  He mostly appears in either The Avengers or Thor, where he fills different roles, both inherently more comic; The Avengers is a team book, where characters don't have to be as three-dimensional as when they're leads (I know the guys over at "House to Astonish" think Captain America works best in this setting, where he can be a sort of one-dimensional model of Heroic Inspiration and play off other characters, rather than having to be really interesting on his own), and there Herc is usually the comic relief (the "roustabout", as Herc himself put it in Incredible Herc).  In Thor, he's Thor's goofier foyle, the champion who's in it for the liquor and babes.