Let’s start this review off by getting right to the heart of Incredible Hulk #425’s story: I was utterly baffled for most of it, because it was full of characters I have never heard of, with confusing motivations and relationships to each other. It’s basically an excuse for the Hulk, in an incarnation who’s pretty smart at this point, to face something seemingly unbeatable, with lots of innocent people getting caught in the crossfire. I might have enjoyed it if I’d read any of the build up, but hey, there’s a very specific reason I ended up with this issue, and this issue alone.

Just look at that gorgeous hologram on the cover. I missed out on the craziest days of comic book gimmicks, because I bowed out of reading them just as they were getting stupid and pointless. I came back to comics way after this sort of thing crashed the market, when they’d started to focus on the quality of content again, rather than just how they could part fans with their cash.

Still, I couldn’t resist picking up this particular issue, because it looks amazing. The story really isn’t great, but that also could be because I didn’t know what was going on.

It did strike me that if Marvel were planning on selling this particular issue to lapsed fans who may have been tempted by the cover, that they could have made the story within a bit more accessible, but here we are, years later, no longer surprised that the comic market crashed so spectacularly back then.

As a reading experience, it’s not very satisfying. As a mid-90s time capsule, however, it’s utterly glorious. Beyond the cover, there’s ads for classic video games, less-than-classic movies and a Sega branded PDA that I would have properly lusted after back then!

So: not a great comic. Yet it’s still a fantastic little trip back in time, which you just don’t get when you read digital comics, or collections. That in itself is worth the price of admission, crappy story or otherwise.