The following article contains major spoilers for The Immortal Hulk: The Best Defense #1 by Al Ewing, Simone Di Meo, Dono Sanchez-Almara and Cory Petit, on sale now.

The Hulk is wrapped up in quite a few mysteries at the moment. Not only is there the mystery of The Green Door in the pages of The Immortal Hulk, he’s one of the heroes trying to figure out who stole their memories and why in the pages of Marvel Knights.

Now, he has a third mystery to solve, as someone seems to be targeting the original four Defenders for some unknown purpose. That manipulation has drawn Bruce Banner to an abandoned New Mexico town where he finds two things that cause him great concern: The skeletal remains of Doctor Stephen Strange, and no Eye of Agamotto, meaning that someone out there has access to an artifact few in the Marvel Universe are equipped to wield.

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The Face Underneath

Banner finds himself in Happy Trails, New Mexico in the middle of the day which is somewhat of a problem, as since he’s returned from the dead he’s only able to unleash The Hulk at nighttime. Plus, there’s the mystery of The Green Door and The One Below All (which is answered somewhat in this week’s Immortal Hulk #10, but we won’t spoil it here) meaning Banner is more cautious than usual when it comes to letting the Hulk run loose. An inspection of the town leads to Bruce discovering just one occupied home, where a man and his elderly mother are hiding out from whatever force came down on their neighbors.

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After a fight, Bruce discovers that the man who did all of this has been holed up in the nearby bar, and learns the truth about what happened to Stephen Strange and the Eye of Agamotto. The man was simply a homeless individual just trying to get by, who was attacked by the local marshals for representing the town’s own failing. They said it was for vagrancy and disturbing the peace, but really it was easier for them to eliminate the discomfort they felt at seeing a person in need than confront the factors that caused it. Dumped outside of town, the man found the body of Stephen Strange, already dead, and the Eye of Agamotto, and used it to return to Happy Trails and get revenge on those who beat him by forcing them to confront who they really are.

NEXT PAGE: How The Eye of Agamotto Affects the Hulk's Current, Immortal Situation

All-Seeing Eye

If you know the Eye of Agamotto from the Doctor Strange movie and the Marvel Cinematic Universe, you know it as the receptacle of the Time Stone. Guarded by the Sorcerer Supreme, the Time Stone is capable of rewinding time itself and was instrumental in Doctor Strange’s defeat of Dormammu inside the Dark Dimension. However, in the comics the Eye of Agamotto is quite different and has nothing to do with control over time; instead, it represents an all-seeing eye which can uncover the truth of a person, a place or a situation. The one Doctor Strange wields is actually one of three; the other two represent Power and Prescience respectively, and it was gifted to him alongside his Cloak of Levitation by The Ancient One after Strange banished Dormammu for the first time.

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With the all-seeing Eye of Agamotto, the homeless man was able to force the marshalls who beat him to confront their own brutal nature in a manner that seems somewhat similar to Ghost Rider’s Penance Stare. When discovered by The Hulk, the marshalls have been stood in place for days without moving, not through any magic but out of fear of being subjected to the Eye of Agamotto again. Bruce understands the man’s quest for revenge but tells him that he’s going to need the Eye back to make sure it ends up in the right hands. When the man refuses, he sics the marshalls on Banner who beat him down until Bruce is able to get his hands on the Eye of Agamotto and use it to reveal the truth that lies within him… The Immortal Hulk.

The Eyes Have It

As we mentioned before, The Hulk is usually unable to come out during the day under current circumstances, but the magic of the Eye of Agamotto allows him to emerge in the daytime, and possibly without the negative effects foisted on him by The One Below All. He even tells the homeless man that he understands he had to punish those who hurt him and references his Worldbreaker incarnation when he says “Never stop making them pay” which became somewhat of a mantra for The Hulk when he was stranded on Sakaar.

However, Bruce went through a lot to get the Eye of Agamotto, and that’s the homeless man’s fault. The only reason he’s not dead at the hands of The Immortal Hulk is the fact that he didn’t kill Stephen Strange. As a matter of fact, The Hulk says he knows who did kill the Sorcerer Supreme as we see some sort of astral form of the homeless man, wearing an eyepatch over his injured eye and the Eye of Agamotto around his neck, who tells Hulk that he can explain everything.

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What happened to Stephen Strange remains a mystery and the events of this week’s other instalment of The Best Defense doesn’t hold any clues; we’ll likely have to wait for next week’s Doctor Strange installment for those answers. Right now though, The Hulk has the Eye of Agamotto, and while he’ll want to get it back to Doctor Strange — who, let’s admit it, probably isn’t dead — right now he’s the one to wield which doesn’t just make him the strongest one there is, it makes him one of the most powerful and dangerous beings in the entire Marvel Universe.

Whoever is messing with The Defenders and pulling their strings should be very afraid of a ticked off Hulk with the power to make you confront the worst things about yourself.