Adam’s father attempts to stop them but he is no longer of any value to these former men. The only reason they don’t kill scorpion is because Monica forbid it. Scorpion tries to fight the cyborgs but is overpowered and hauled out of their way. Monica hears her daughter scream at her over the com channel to stop; that she would never forgive her if she killed Banner but Monica doesn’t seem concerned. She can make Scorpion forgive her. The cyborgs move to their target and let lose with fiery blasts from installed forearm weapons.

No use though. Guess who’s awake again? Hulk proceeds to smash the attacking cyborgs. He makes quick work of them while Adam’s father flees the scene. Scorpion is understandably excited to see the Green behemoth. Hulk responds to her question of how he woke up by saying that Hulk never sleeps. Monica could never plant a suggestion than he couldn’t ignore.

Hulk isn’t done just yet. A door opens behind them as they talk and behind it walks a giant cyborg, at least three times as tall as even the Hulk. The two monsters begin fighting and quickly end up punching their way to the city streets above. Down below as surviving cyborgs try to flee, Scorpion picks up Jon, the immigrant girl’s boyfriend that started her investigation. They limp to the surface and find themselves watching the Hulk’s fight. Monica is also watching from a balcony above the city. She informs the still excited Dr. Lazlo that she plans to blame the entire affair on him. When he objects she pushes him from the balcony to his death.

Down below the fight ends as Hulk rips a shell from the roof of the Sydney opera house and impales the giant on it. He uses another to crush the creature’s head, ending the fight. He then proceeds to destroy the rest of the Opera house. Hulk hates opera.

Later, back at Banner’s new government building, Monica lies through her teeth and blames everything on the now deceased Dr. Lazlo. She claims that she had no idea about any of it. Scorpion and Dr. Issacs protest this. Banner doesn’t seem impressed by anyone but Monica however. He orders all AIM agents off of Australia. Monica is the only one that gets to stay. AIM has no choice but to comply.

Later Bruce is still sitting in his office when he receives a visitor. A holographic projection of Magneto understands exactly what Banner did. He exiled his friends and bed his allies; similar to keeping your friends close and your enemies closer. Magneto suggests that Bruce give power back to Exodus but Bruce tells him that he rather likes being in control. He warns Magneto to stay out of his way or he’ll see if he can’t remake the world into a place where mutants aren’t in control. Magneto only response is to say “What an interesting world…that would be.”

Review: I have to say I am disappointed. While I certainly appreciate the idea of putting Banner in charge of a nation (not entirely new but still cool), I feel like David missed an opportunity to better explore this. The arc’s second chapter took a strange turn toward Having the Hulk fighting cyborgs and then a giant cyborg. It was all rather silly. A lot of the humor was also missing from this issue and what jokes were in there seemed forced, or worse yet like they were being used to fill up pages. An entire page of hardly changing panels to get a “Hulk hate Opera” gag was unnecessary. David’s use of Scorpion also seemed to suffer this issue with most of her dialogue serving only to further the borderline ridiculous plot instead of voicing herself as a character. I was bored with her. I was bored with the whole thing really.

It’s a shame because I really loved this tie-in at its start, but I feel like it went out with a whimper. There is almost no connection to the HOM world at large. I’m willing to bet that if this makes it into the main mini it will be the briefest of mentions. That’s a shame. It makes me wonder why the story was written at all. It served no point. I really wish David had, if not committing to the idea of Hulk as a monarch, at least revisited his aborigine friends and their awareness of the reality change. If this issue had even just ended with Banner realizing what happened and go off to join the rebellion against Magneto, I would have liked it more.

Oh, well David is capable of much better than this and I’m sorry to say this issue just didn’t entertain. The art was good but not good enough to make the pages of useless fights seem worth the loss of story.