Did Anyone Else Think Shooting The Hulk Into Space Was Actually Not A Bad Idea?

I'm not going to pretend the Illuminati haven't done a number of shady things, but I don't feel exiling the Hulk into space was one of them. Considering his unpredictably, violent nature and the amount of death and property damage he's caused, I'm actually surprised this decision wasn't made earlier, if not by the Illuminati then by someone else.

In addition, they didn't intend to send him to Skaar that happened by dumb luck and they were completely innocent of rigging the ship to explode.

Anyone else agree?

They could have asked Bruce first. Maybe then he wouldn't have flipped out when they tried. I mean, there's no one who wants to keep the Hulk from causing destruction any more then he does.

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I'm pretty sure there's a What-If that reveals that everything would have worked out fine (for the Hulk, at least) had he successfully reached the planet that the Illuminati had picked for him.

Yeah. I saw that on Scans Daily a long time ago. Like I said, they should have come to him honestly about it. Worked out something with him.

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Back in the '70s, Doctor Strange actually sent the Hulk on a journey off world through other dimensions, one of which is where he met and married Jarella. This was all with the Hulk's permission, though.

Exactly. Just ask permission first.

How strong is Jarella?

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Considering how often do aliens go to Marvel Earth, how populated Marvel's outer space is, and all that, it's just dumping your problems, which you as a warmongering society created in the first place, on different cultures that never asked for that. And at that point they should have known better, than it'd bite us in the collective arse one way or another.

According to the Marvel wiki, her strength level is "the equivalent of the normal human strength of an Earth woman of her physical age, height and build who engaged in intensive regular exercises." So, uh, normal? I guess?

they intended to send him to a planet where nothing could harm him and vice versa. Also, the Illuminati didn't create the Hulk.

That being said, there are a lot of things that could have still gone wrong even if they had talked it out with Bruce, and he'd agreed to it.

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It was a good idea, but they didn't consider whether something would go wrong or if he'd be able to get back to Earth and how he'd react if he did. So it was a good idea, just not thought out very well. Which is weird to me because the Illuminati consists some of the smartest people in the universe.

Supposedly smartest.

But when you are a genius in fiction, you're only as smart as the person writing you.

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It's only a bad idea in the sense that the Hulk would eventually have to come back to Earth, because that's how the Big 2 operate.

It's a bad idea.

Unless you also plan to send every single Hulk villain (and Hulk-like villains of other heroes) into space, you're just being stupid. The destruction caused by the Hulk isn't the greatest in the world, there's nothing suggesting it he deserves such punishment exclusively.

Really, why just the Hulk? Why not every other big beefy mutated thing that fought him? And then why not the other threats causing around as much damage?

Are you going to send Magneto to space? Every single Doombot?

Before you know it, "sending to space" becomes a standard punishment procedure for supervillains, then regular criminals, and then you really go into the ethical mess of things.

For that matter, unless you have a space colony ready to take them, one of the two things happens. One, they crash into something uninhabitable and die. So it's death penalty. Two, they land somewhere habitable, adapt, take over, and plot to come back royally pissed (a.k.a. what actually happened with the Hulk).

And if you do have a space colony prison, then how is it different from regular prison?

edited 23rd Jul '16 4:21:05 AM by Luminosity

Send everyone to space, you say? Well, how about just send them...to the MOOOOOOOOON, yeaaaaaaahhh.

Or you could just kill the villains. After all, the death penalty is tricky in real life since it's not always easy to prove guilt certain enough to warrant it. In comics, villains go on highly visible killing sprees or campaigns of world domination, so it's not like there can be that many cases of mistaken identity. Never mind there's a rather long and not really slippery slope between, say, robbery or even non-premeditated murder, and tearing down half a city block or turning the population of New Jersey into giant lizards or something.

Meanwhile, spacing the Hulk in particular isn't so much a punishment for any crime, but a way to deal with the fact that he isn't a villain, while still not being safe around people. Half the time, he just wants to be alone anyway; the other half, he wants some company that's just a bit less squishy than the average human. So, flinging him to a nice winter resort like Jotunheim wouldn't really be a bad idea.

(At any rate, I prefer the Avengers cartoons Hulk where he's basically a green Thing. The perpetual drama of his condition alienating him from everyone else is more than a little forced, what with half the population of New York being just as weird nowadays.)

Before you know it, "sending to space" becomes a standard punishment procedure for supervillains, then regular criminals, and then you really go into the ethical mess of things.

DC got there first.

Then, that's just problem asking to happen when there are hundreds of hostile civilizations in outer space with tech higher than Earth's, who perfectly could just break in and recruit themselves a whole bunch of very pissed off people who know Earth from the inside to help them.

edited 24th Jul '16 8:01:32 AM by NapoleonDeCheese

So I came across this article by a Hulk fan that reviews Civil War II issue 3.

http://www.delusionalhonesty.com/2016/07/mortem-viridi-civil-war-ii-3-dissected.html

I sympathize with him to an extent and I don't even like Civil War, but.... sorry, this idea that the Hulk is totally misunderstood and that he's never killed anyone just becomes impossible for me to swallow and Cho's theory is borderline comical. I just can't buy it. Maybe killing Banner was too far, but I don't think people are wrong to be afraid of him.

I also agree that efforts to frame the Hulk as completely victimless are ridiculous, but I do feel that Banner was unjustly victimized. The entirety of CWII #3 is pretty unambiguously framed around the rash of trigger-happy police shootings that have been happening in our country. "His eyes flashed green" is the Fantastic Metaphor for "I thought he was reaching for a weapon."

edited 2nd Aug '16 11:49:31 AM by TobiasDrake

My Tumblr. Currently talking Dragon Ball and working my way back to Danganronpa V3.

As with the Mutant + Minority metaphor, I find that story to frankly be a false equivalency and more insulting to the groups it's trying to represent. Especially, when you consider black victims have been (falsely) compared to superhuman monsters (the guy who shot Mike Brown claimed he was walking through the bullets) while the Hulk is a monster in every sense of the word.

Banner was depowered, though. That's the thing. The Hulk was never a viable outcome of this scene. For the sake of the metaphor, the Hulk was an imaginary threat in everyone's heads, just as much as the Black Raging Ubermonsters that police think of when they pull that trigger.

Banner, like many black men and kids in the real world, was flat-out murdered by a twitchy, trigger-happy law enforcer too busy panicking over an imaginary threat to see him for what he was: a scared, confused victim desperately struggling to understand why he was being accosted this way when he hadn't done anything wrong.

My Tumblr. Currently talking Dragon Ball and working my way back to Danganronpa V3.

Then again, superpowered beings in general do have a history of gaining their powers back even after being depowered, and most often in situations where the public couldn't know about it. That's a point where the cyclic nature of the characters and arcs plays against the genre's setting, because by now that's happened too many times for people to pretend those changes will stick no matter what, and that thinking otherwise would be ridiculous.

It also makes the whole scenario far less realistic, making comparisons to real world issues that much more ill fitting.

edited 2nd Aug '16 6:06:55 PM by NapoleonDeCheese

I kind of get what you're saying but, I don't know, I just feel like Marvel should be past this type of writing by now. Especially when they cancelled a comic that actually dealt with black people being unjustly targeted by the police in the literal sense instead of by metaphor. Combine this with the killing of Rhodes in issue 1 and Jen being put in a coma, and Bendis seems to be showing a tone deafness on ar with Mark Millar.

You expect a company that still makes money off the X-Men to "be past this type of writing by now"?

Except Hulk never killed anyone. He causes property damage sure, but he never killed. Hell, even Hulk's villains have pointed this out. And half the time, his villains know him more than he knows himself.

Plus, Namor would disagree. He said from the start it was a bad idea and he was right. Especially since it bit them in the ass.

@Tobias Drake: But the Totally Awesome Hulk book showed that Banner couldn't Hulk anymore, thanks to the fact that Cho took his powers.

Even the following issue which had Cho dealing with Banner's death had them again stating he was completely cured and Carol doesn't dispute it either.

And besides, before he was cured, the current Hulk personality was one of the smart ones. So he wasn't a danger to anyone anyway.

There's a reason why Banner was always distrustful of the Avengers for years.

@Luminosity: Funny you should mention that, because during Planet Hulk, there was a story where it was shown that there was nothing to stop the Hulk villains while the Hulk was exiled.

edited 11th Aug '16 12:15:03 AM by Cortez