Fridge / Immortal Hulk

Fridge Brilliance

• This arc may be a way to explain the less scientific aspects of Hulk's nature, like his ability to see astral forms and ghosts. In Incredible Hulk #453 an alternate future Hulk said as much, pointing out he'd always had a slight air of the mystic around him, with the potential to go further.
  • It also explains how in Greg Pak's run the Hulk family have a preternatural awareness of each other's presence in moments of import, knowing a family member is coming or where to find them.
• Why is the Devil Hulk so protective of the Savage Hulk? Because Savage Hulk is the manifestation of the broken and scared child that Bruce was, who only wanting friends and people to love him. Savage Hulk is Banner as a wounded child. And as the Devil Hulk was created from Bruce's desire for a loving father figure to watch over and protect him, it makes perfect sense that Devil Hulk is protective of Savage Hulk too.
• When Dr. Frye killed Banner and then the Devil Hulk suddenly emerged, Dr. Frye, in terror, called him Dr. Banner. Devil Hulk angrily stated, "Are you trying to piss me off?". At first, before how much Devil Hulk cares about Bruce is revealed, the reader might interoperate this as the standard Hulk sentiment of hating puny Banner. After we realize that Devil Hulk loves Bruce like a father and is always trying to protect him, the intent changes from being angry that he was called Banner to being angry because Dr. Frye just reminded Devil Hulk that he just killed Banner. And hurting Banner is something Devil Hulk take personal.
• Extremis being used as part of Doc Green's cure as stated by Ross in Immortal Hulk #21 explains the cause of Rick Jones's enhanced learning after being cured, Extremis might also be the extra coding in the cure's nanobots that Dr Leucenstern mentioned in Hulk (2014) #8.
• The supernatural commonality between Sasquatch and the Hulk probably gives more meaning to the fact that Hulk's mindless body was summoned by a spell to give Walter a new body than it just happening to fit the criteria; because if you're searching literally everywhere, what are the chances you come across a Hulk before someone comatose?
• Speaking of Sasquatch, the comic points out that we haven’t seen Walter’s human form in a LONG time. It turns that little fact most people would ignore into an actual plot point, connecting Sasquatch to the One Below All’s machinations.
• The One Below All's plan is to make creation devoid of life and leave him alone. He is also using the Hulk body as a vessel. In other words, Hulk is finally alone.
• The implied conflict between Devil Hulk and the Green Scar makes more sense thematically when you see the various Hulks embodying Bruce during various stages of his life and what they mean:
  • Immortal/Devil Hulk we discover embodies Bruce's desire for a strong protective parential figure; the stern but caring and reliable father figure he did not have, but wishes he did. It's why he's quite different from the other Hulks in mannerisms and function.
  • Savage Hulk is Bruce's inner child in his situation, angry and lashing out, but caring and compassionate. No longer an infant or toddler, he has his own desires and lashes out, but genuinely means well and just trying to be understood. It's why Devil Hulk also looks out for him like Bruce. And ultimately, he is why he still wants his father to care bout him and that leads to the downfall of Immortal Hulk.
  • Grey Hulk/Joe Fixit, while based on a child Bruce's ideals of a real man according to his session with Doc Samson, he embodies Bruce's adolescent rebellion. He has more defined speech and desires than the Savage Hulk. He has many of the simple desires one would expect a teenage male to have such as his hedonism and desire for women and money. He is unafraid to break the rules hence why he became a mobster enforcer yet still operating under some form of code. Heck, his empathy and sympathy to the trans community out of a shared understanding of wanting to be one's self is a reflection of the adolescent struggle of self-discovery. As one critic put it, "Joe Fixit is the moody teenager Bruce was never allowed to be." While not as strong as some of the other Hulks nor possessing Bruce's smarts, he is still an apt problem solver, showing how adolescents are underestimated and looked down upon by adults. Him even taking the name of Joe Fixit from a sort of outside father figure represents the search for their own identity and looking for the father figure Bruce did not have and moving on from with Brian. This also explains why he stands out from the rest of the Hulks.
  • The Green Scar Hulk is aptly named because he is basically the jaded and emotionally scarred adult that Bruce would become and based on the natural progression of Savage and Grey Hulk. Solemn and serious, he maintains a sort of grudge toward the world that hurt him yet was able to move on somewhat to become a father of his own (though how well that went is... mixed to say the least.)
    • The enmity the Green Scar feels toward Devil Hulk then embodies the lingering anger regarding father figures as well as deciding what sort of man Bruce will be.
    • However, this is changed with the revelation that this Green Scar is actually Samuel Sterns wearing its appearance. However, this may serve to highlight some things. Samuel Sterns serves as a form of Shadow Archetype to Banner, being a manifestation of that darkness sans the muscle and taking the appearance of Green Scar beyond him being the strongest could reinforce this with the above.
  • A third note and that may become related later is the Merged Hulk or the Professor. Possibly resembling either Bruce as the optimistic young adult before the bomb or his ideal self (or perhaps shades of both), his absence may be indictive of the tone of the series.
• The revelations of the One Below All and how the reason Gamma energy can do scientifically impossible things being due to it's third form that is neither a wave or particle really being energy given off by the One Below All justifies why Gamma energy can never be used for anything good or positive. Even when Gamma mutates are heroic, the energy eventually ends up corrupting them if not into something evil then at least twisted and dark. It's also why Gamma research never yields anything that can benefit mankind and always ends up creating more horrors like monstrous animals and plant abominations. The One Below All is The Anti-God and hates everything, wants to destroy everything. There is no way power drawn from the antithesis of creation and life will make anything good.
  • It also explains why the Doc Green personality went Knight Templar and began destroying all gamma-based technology and curing gamma mutates with his enhanced intelligence. Like Jennifer Walters aka She-Hulk, he must have subconsciously realized Gamma's evil origins and wanted to stop it.
• This also explains both how the Maestro was revived after Heroes Reborn and why it took so long.
  • The Maestro, being from another universe, cannot access the Green Door back to the 616 universe.
  • During the Onslaught event, the Hulk, telepathically split from Banner and was physically split as well due to the myriad of energies unleashed by Onslaught's final form. Banner would commit a Heroic Sacrifice, resulting in Hulk becoming the lynchpin between the 616 and Heroes Reborn universes. When the two universes merged using his body as a medium, it severely messed up his physiology, leading to him eventually dying and the Maestro hinting their immortality to Banner. So when Hulk came back to life, Maestro must have used the extra energies to pull himself into 616 via the same Green Door.
  • Immortal Hulk also explains how Hulk was back to full strength after being revived. Its the nature of his powers to hit a Reset Button on his body's condition after every death.
• The classic Hulk characters Guardian, Glow and Goblin appear on the cover of issue #39, connecting not only to past Hulk stories exploring Bruce's fractured psyche but also demonstrating their connection to the Devil Hulk in his form in Bruce's mindscape:
  • The orange-skinned, valiant Guardian that is sworn to protect Bruce's inner child;
  • The seering red Glow in his eyes, indicating the frightening powers of calculation and reasoning in Bruce'd mind;
  • The monstrous Goblin-like form of Bruce's years of repressed rage.
• Devil's appearance in Bruce's mindscape seems not unlike that he took when he first appeared to Bruce during his childhood, only more Hulk-like; yet in his first comics appearance, in the Paul Jenkins run, he looks markedly different. This can be explained when you realize that Bruce only recently accepted this aspect of himself; in the Jenkins run, Devil appears to be more of a monster because of the years he's spent repressed and ignored.
• The One Below All has stated that, "The mystery frightens and disgusts me!" as basically the reason it wants to kill everything and destroy all light leaving the multiverse dead and hollow for all time. The mystery refers to the story and how everything unfolds as the One Above All has stated that, "The mystery intrigues me" when he was talking about the destinies of all sentient creature to the Fantastic Four. Why would The One Below All be disgusted and frightened by the "mystery"? The One Below all is basically an Almighty Idiot without a true mind. It has malevolent and dark impulses and omniscience but cannot fathom or comprehend anything without a host to inhabit and provide it with a mind and will that can direct it. It's fundamental nature is also evil, destructive, and hateful. Not only would its essential nature make it despise everything by default but it can't even fathom or understand creation, existence, and the many complexities thereof. It's like a child without the ability to understand the loud, strange, every changing cacophony of images and input that it is constantly subjected to due to its transcendental nature and has no way of turning it off or getting away from it. It's basically a mean infant that can't stand what it's seeing and wants to smash it so that it can have some peace.
• If you think of Marvel's The One-Above-All and DC's The Presence as one and the same, and by extension The One-Below-All and The Darkness. Below being Above's Hulk explains the inconsistency of The Darkness being a Generic Doomsday Villain in Dark Crisis. They clearly have a similar dynamic to Bruce and his various Hulk personas, sometimes they can work together, sometimes they can't.
• With the knowledge that the destructive power of gamma radiation is a manifestation of The One Below All's sheer hatred at all that exists, the reveal that Nick Fury has been killing living planets and demons with gamma-irradiated bullets in Original Sin makes slightly more sense.

Fridge Horror

• Bruce and the Hulk are not the One Below All's only serious attempt at destroying existence. How many times has the Marvel universe or even multiverse faced complete destruction? There are cosmic entities everywhere that are a natural part of existence and try to keep an orderly cosmos. A few of them have been personifications of evil/destructive forces that have not only tried to destroy the world but the entire universe as well. The Chaos King, Abraxis, Thanos, the Beyonders and Null. Now remember the line from the One Below All's trademark speech? "I have all of the power you give me and my weapon is hate". While the One Below All is implied to be incapable of creating things, he can alter them and has absolute control over the evil and darkness in living beings. Particularly those that are basically Made of Evil. In those instances, the One Below All probably barely has to try to manipulate the likes of Mephisto or Annihilus. Whether he uses them often or only once in awhile, the One Below All has his hands on every bad guy in existence. How often have the bad guys followed a plan they thought was their own but were maneuvered just so to further the One Below All's goal of multiversal extinction? The good guys have only ever been facing the pawn and never the Big Bad while the One Below All has eternity to finish its aims and can never really be defeated. All the times the Heroes defeated these uber powered cosmic threats all the while not even realizing that they were never winning. That there is a dark force controlling, to an extent, all of the bad guys everywhere. That the universe is perpetually under siege by the ultimate Omnicidal Maniac.
• In Immortal Hulk #0, a September 2020 special, the Hulk encounters a mysterious figure who claims that the Hulk literally willed himself to have the ability to perceive ghosts because he was that afraid that his father might come after him again from beyond the grave.
• Prior to this run, Bruce's transformation to the Hulk has always looked essentially like Bruce swelling up and getting bigger, but since freeing the Devil Hulk he's transformed like a creature from John Carpenter's The Thing (1982). Viewed in the context of Bruce's alters compartmentalising aspects of his self, the explanation is clear. The "Savage" Hulk is his forgotten childhood, and that transformation was not unlike a child puffing himself up to face a bully; the same goes for Joe Fixit, the teenage revel he never got to be. When it comes to the Devil, though, Bruce is still unwilling to fully reckon with that aspect of himself - the cruel, calculating monster with apocalyptic ambitions - so his transformation is always going to be a struggle.
• Up until #32, Gamma mutates have shown up in the Below-Place in their pre-gamma forms - the Hulk as Bruce, Samson without his muscles, etc. Sterns turns up throughout #32 as plain old Sam Sterns, up until he chooses to return to the Below-Place under his own power. When he approaches Brian Banner, he has his big head and green skin again. In the Below-Place, everything goes into reverse: as opposite to the mortal realm, here the Leader is the most powerful Gamma mutate of them all.
  • Not to mention, though Sterns implies he has found the capability of returning to the Below-Place under his own power, it's never revealed how. Either he's simply killed himself, or he's developed a process that continually simulates the sensation of dying in order to carry out his macabre plans...
• Why does the One Below All's main plan involve hijacking Bruce and the Hulk to use as a body/identity while waiting out the lifespan of the cosmos so that it can be the one to take the sentience of the cosmos' power and become a destructive entity like Galactus that will wipe out everything in the next universe/multiverse? It most likely has tried to wipe out everything repeatedly in the past by pushing evil entities like the Chaos King or Mephisto towards universal destruction and given that it's an Almighty Idiot with no true mind or sense of self and others just pure dark ID and evil impulses it is also, most likely, what pushes every sentient creature towards destruction, it has until recently only chaotically pushed beings towards destruction without any real plan. Than,probably for the first time, it gains a flash of inspiration when it sees Brian Banner searching for it and realizes it can use him. Even then, it only thinks that Brian has something to offer so it influences Brian and his Son Bruce so that they can be useful later. Then it engineers the events of the day Bruce was subjected to gamma bomb and gains the strongest gamma signature and the most direct connection to the below place. Later it influence the Chaos King and Mephisto so that Brian ends up fighting the Hulk family and ends up falling into the Below Place. Once the One Below All has Brian and uses his mind to start making a plan, it realizes that the Hulk's nature gives it the chance to highjack the process where the last person in a dying universe is empowered by the sentience of the present cosmos and gain a powerful weapon. But more than that, there is a truly terrifying reason what it's best to have a subject starting from the big bang. Each cosmos is a multiverse and each universe is created from branches in the time stream. What better way to ensure that it's destruction of every universe is inevitable that the be there before time begins and (due to it's infinite power infused into the greatest weapon of hate) means that the One Below All ensures that Hulk or The Breaker-Apart becomes a multiversal constant and that is doesn't matter which universe you go to, The Breaker-Apart will always be present in every universe in the next multiverse and it's only a matter of time before The Breaker-Apart smashes every universe.
• Storytelling-wise, the "origin story" of the Devil Hulk in #38 becomes a tragedy when viewed through the lens of #39: it's not establishing what makes him formidable (his fierce love of Banner/the Hulk), but his fatal flaw (his willingness to kill - and the Hulk's reluctance to let him).
• The One Below all has been personally responsible for the circumstances around the creation of every single gamma mutate. For all of the heroic gamma mutates, it has influenced the bad or less moral people around them into setting up the good guys to become gamma mutates or influenced the less moral desires of the good guys while thinking they were acting for the greater good. Several bullies push Rick Jones on a dare to enter the site of Los Diablos where the gamma bomb was being tested. It also made sure that people like Ross and Glenn Talbot, guys who at the least try to limit civilian casualties and keep civvies out of harms way, would be pushed enough to write up Jones' death as an unfortunate accident while Banner wouldn't allow that and ran onto the field to rescue him. For Samuel Sterns who didn't start off as evil, it made sure his employers stored the gamma waste where it shouldn't have been and cause the explosion of gamma as Sterns walked by. It influence the mobsters and circumstances around Jen Walters so she would end up being shot and that Bruce was close by to give a blood transfusion. The military wanted its own Gamma super soldier so they tapped Leonard Sampson and the same for the Department-H in Canada for Langowski who was pushed by the One Below All with the temptation of power. For evil Gamma mutates that started off as bad guys, it simply directed them into situations where they could transform themselves tempting them again with the promise of power and using evil gamma mutates to make more mutates. Every time a gamma mutate has been created, it has been in circumstances to convoluted with too many variables to allow a new gamma mutate to be created yet it always happens. While the One Below All can't affect physical reality without a host, it can control gamma energy and cause explosions or how it moves and is transferred. And of course it can influence the hearts and minds of anyone and everyone in the multiverse based on the negativity in their souls. While it is an Almighty Idiot without a host, it can sense when it can reach out to people and "mark" them as one of its "children". Eventually it will have enough pieces and potential hosts to claim that it will be able to create and enact a plan to destroy everything.
• The One Below All is the definition of Evil Only Has to Win Once. The instant it succeeds in destroying the multiverse completely, that's it. Not new universes, dimensions or anything at all period. Good has to constantly fight back against the Once Below All who cannot die or every truly be defeated constantly. It's currently only the 8th iteration of the multiverse and it's only had 8 chances to succeed. But if it can keep trying indefinitely, then by law of averages, eventually, It will succeed.
• Issue 40 has some serious fridge horror when Sampson uses Langowski's body to escape the below place. Sampson used Langowski's green door to come back and is possessing a composite Sasquatch/Sampson form. Thing is, up until now, Langowski was assumed Killed Off for Real as he had all of his gamma drained by the hulk and couldn't become sasquatch anymore. But even with his gamma drained, he still had a green door. This is awful for anyone that becomes a gamma mutate and is "marked" by the One Below All as one of its "children" because it means there's no way to remove its taint of your soul and be free of the One Below All. Once the One Below All claims, there is no being free ever again, not even in death.
• In his early appearances in "Immortal Hulk", Dario Agger pointedly remarks that he is spending all his time in his Minotaur form because interactions with the public have shown him he can keep getting away with it. By the end of his time in the book, Xemnu attempts to 'convert' him, as his employees were converted, into a mindless drone - and the process is botched, leaving him in incredible pain and mutilation. Likely because he's a minotaur and not a human...
• After he massacred his village, it's never revealed what happened to Tammuz, the main character of Immortal Hulk: Time of Monsters, until the final issue of Immortal Hulk. His skull is in Samuel Sterns' lab, mistaken for a forgery and a curio; but one Stern can't bring himself to get rid of as he works on his 'Sterns Ray', aka the earliest manmade form of Gamma Radiation.
• In issue #15, Devil Hulk explains that the Mindless Hulk resurrected by Hydra during Secret Empire was the result of Bruce Banner's nihilism and self-desctructiveness reaching the point where he arranged his own death, which is why it was so violent and completely unreasoning. He reassures Samson that he's locked that personality away in pieces and says "[as] Long as I'm around, he's never getting out." But as of issue #39, Devil Hulk isn't around anymore, and the Mindless Hulk could be free to return at some point.
• According to the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe, the One Above All is described as the highest power in the Omniverse. What's the Omniverse? Put simply, it's without hyperbole everything, fictional and nonfictional. According to the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe: Alternate Universes, "It includes every single literary work, television show, movie, urban legend, universe, realm, etc. ever. It includes everyone from Popeye to Rocky Balboa to Ronald Reagan to Romeo and Juliet to Luke Skywalker to Snoopy to Jay and Silent Bob, etc." There's also the fact that Marvel has crossed over with numerous properties not listed, like The DCU, Capcom, Star Trek, Evil Dead, Archie Comics, Fortnite, and that time Deadpool killed literary classics. And, the Transformers are on two Earths in the multiverse, the Doctor is on another Marvel universe, and Nineteen Eighty-Four came true in yet another universe. As His dark reflection/dark half, the One Below All's destructive influence extends to all of fiction and our world as well.

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