I'm watching a three-hour long retrospective/summary of Immortal Hulk. I write these words at the 35 minutes mark and, my goodness, it's messed up. The One Below All is really one of the scariest villains in comics that I saw recently.
oh that's very good to hear! I would love to hear more in depth thoughts on what you think of Immortal Hulk once you've seen more of it, and I would be glad to give my own thoughts as well. Not only is Immortal Hulk just about my single favorite Hulk work since Planet Hulk and a major influence on my particular vibe for Bruce Banner and the Hulk system overall, but it is a tremendously complex and ambigious work that is well suited for analysis.
The One Below All is a very interesting entity in that its absolutely a Cosmic Horror story antagonist, and yet it has a lot of unsettling elements going on around it that FEELS more malevolent on a fundamental level, even if its mostly a force than a specific being in its own right. It can be VERY difficult to make this kind of character interesting or compelling, but the horror it leaves in its wake creates that interest, as those wounded by it can only plead 'WHY'?'. All it can say, is that with these hands it breaks, and with this mouth it howls, and it is left to the reader to contemplate how eerily similar this is to the Hulk, and how further he has to fall if the Hulk succumbs to hurting who he is by giving into his desire to lash out.
It also works very well because, in the Hulk In Hell arc, the OBA specifically is personified by Brian Banner, who is a vERY human antagonist, and a deeply unsettling one because of how real he is. Even in consideration for him being back from the dead multiple times (and there's something to say about how abuse and trauma resurface, and he just won't stop coming back), his actual character here is unsettlingly real. He's a self-pitying abuser who constantly blames everyone else for the things he did, refuses even years after his death to acknowledge that he ever did anything wrong. Often while its an effective tactic to contrast a more abstract villain with a very hatable down to earth one, it can be difficult to have the bigger but less understandable villain seem important but by having Brian effectively be OBA's mouth piece in a lot of ways in this arc, it works very well towards resolving that issue.
I think i might consider this the Lich Problem; in Adventure Time fandom, a frequent criticism of the recurring end-game antagonist the Lich was people saying he wasn't relatable, or difficult to write because he was hard to understand, and some people insisted he was a flat character, and I contend that he is a tremendously interesting one; he's profoundly alien and monstrous. (Also i have to love an arc where a triumphant moment is the slow build up towards analyzing what a devil might be, as a positive, and the Devil Hulk being both gruesome and heroic as he effectively says that since destroying the world is HIS job, he's not about to let anyone scab on his bit.)
