Review: Maestro #1

Hey there everyone, and welcome back to another comic blog for this week. I know we’re kinda starting to inundate you with blogs after such a long stretch of relative quiet, and I am pleased to report that I am hoping to keep this trend up. Our Kitten and I are trying to step up the production of various blogs, videos, and more to bring to you our followers to help bring you some happiness during this weird shit show we have so far called 2020. Yay, we’re 3/4ths done with this year, let’s all hope and pray that 2021 is better! I for one don’t think it can come soon enough….unless it’s worse. And if that is the case, someone please find me a benevolent alien race that can kidnap me and the family (No not kidding there….aliens please come take us away to a Utopia…please).

Aaaaanyway we’re here to discuss comic books and as you probably know by reading the title unless you just blindly click on pictures this blog will be about a future form of the Hulk known as the Maestro!

So looking up the history of Maestro to tell you what came about brought me to a lot fo alternate forms of the Maestro and a lot of cross reality wibbly wobbly timey wimey eXiles level shit. The basic rundown is that this is an insane future version of the Hulk from a comic called Future Imperfect done in 1992. Professor Hulk was brought forward in time to deal with this future version of himself. Eventually, this future version was sent to the past to be destroyed by the same gamma bomb that created the Hulk to create a lovely little time loop that would probably drive Doctor Who just a little bit mad.

I always assumed this took place in the main 616 universe but according to the wiki, I found this took place in the 2900 universe but it sounds like the death was in the 616 universe? It’s a very confusing read on this wiki but the main point of all this is that this comic is basically the premise of “What the hell happened to the Hulk to finally create the Maestro?”

Long story short, this comic really doesn’t tell us much yet. This is a very introductory issue to what can possibly be a very long or very short saga, depending on how the writers want to do this. I don’t know how much of an ongoing title this is supposed to be so this can honestly fall either direction.

What is known so far is that there was a huge war with nuclear bombs basically killing most of the earth. There are places with roving bands of people kinda Mad Max style it seems. M.O.D.O.K and A.I.M captured Hulk and other irradiated super beings in the hopes they could study them and maybe find a way to help those people who have survived. All these beings are kept alive in a huge VR stasis thing but the Hulks program has broken down after about a hundred years give or take. Hulk breaks out, Mayhem ensues until surprisingly M.O.D.O.K is able to bring Hulk down from the rage and explain everything that I have just explained for the rest of the comic. Hulk has to see for himself and instead of just asking for the door to be opened he does it Hulk style and rips his way to the surface and sees everything just destroyed in the Hollywood area. He remakes the sign to say Hulk and then leaps off to do god knows what because thats saved for issue 2.

Eventually, this series will bring things full circle to show how Hulk goes insane, gets super beefed up powerful from all the radiation on the world, and builds his own civilization of Dystopia and makes himself ruler of it. How long this will take is anyone’s guess, and what he goes through is also anyone’s guess.

I’m of mixed reactions about this book. If this was a new series and I knew nothing about the Maestro I wouldn’t care a thing about this story after reading this book. It was a meaningless fight followed by a data dump of information that is generally frowned upon in writing but can sometimes work in comics. The thing is though I do know what became of Hulk and what Maestro is eventually but this is also a kind of double-edged sword. Yes, I would like to see what made him into Maestro, however, this comic was so lackluster to me and the actual Future Imperfect stuff hadn’t really impressed me back in the day. So, I just don’t have any real investment personally to keep going with this series. I enjoy seeing backstories for good characters. However, I don’t think the Maestro character was necessarily a good character in my opinion and so any lead up to him, especially with such a meh opening, just hasn’t clicked with me yet. I’ll probably give issue 2 a try, but unless it picks up and gets really interesting, I probably won’t give it any more of a chance than that. Then the Maestro stuff just got muddied up with the eXiles and reading up on his history which may or may not be from an alternate universe but end up in this universe thing is just too convoluted for me to invest in really. It’s just like some of the people that carried over from Battleworld when 616 got rebooted. Some of them I was like cool…like Miles Morales because I was able to get invested in his character. But then there were others like Old Man Logan and a son of Wolverines from one of the BattleWorlds areas and a vampire version of Storm and I saw them and just shrugged because they just didn’t click with me at all. That is where I am so far on this one is it just hasn’t clicked with me yet.

So I can’t really recommend this one. If you have read it, I would love to hear your take on it in the comments below. Do you agree with my assessment or are you excited to see how this one plays out?

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