SPOILER WARNING: The following contains major spoilers for Al Ewing and Joe Bennett’s Immortal Hulk #4, on sale now.
Al Ewing and Joe Bennett’s Immortal Hulk has made a habit of toying with the history of Marvel Comics’ gamma-irradiated heroes and villain, most notably in the Hulk, who recently went from merely incredible to downright immortal. Beyond that, Immortal Hulk #3 saw two classic Riot Squad villains updated for the times, but this week the bell of retconning tolls for Sasquatch, the founding Alpha Flight member who has sadly perished… sort of.
One common theme connects all these characters, though, and that is the pervasive, mysterious and potentially eldritch Green Door, the shimmering vestibule that is seemingly only visible to the gamma-touched. We get our first good look at the Green Door in Immortal Hulk #4 and, while little can be gleaned from the portal itself, we learn some key facts about it. We also get a look at Sasquatch’s revised origins, which aren’t terribly different from those outlined in Alpha Flight #11 but do hold some fun nods to the first comic to recount in detail Walter Langkowski’s attempt to Hulkify himself -- along with one major revision.
In Immortal Hulk #4, Walter meets up with Jacqueline McGee, who has been trying to track down Bruce Banner. Walter recounts how he met Bruce and, inspired by the scientist’s work, subsequently became Sasquatch. He rolls through all of the major and minor details, ending with his transformation into Sasquatch, along with a curious addition that didn’t appear when the hero’s origins were recounted back in the ‘80s -- Langkowski remembers a Green Door appearing, first before his eyes when the gamma bomb went off and then later when he was outside, having already transformed into Sasquatch.
The first critical thing we learn about Immortal Hulk’s Green Door is that it has been around for some time now. Marvel Comics has something of a sliding timescale because superheroes can’t necessarily age out of active duty (where’s the fun in that?), but we can say for certain that Sasquatch is a longtime superhero -- long enough to have had a career as a hero and then graduated to the vaunted rank of space diplomat. The addition of the Green Door to his origin story confirms that whatever is happening to Marvel’s gamma-irradiated folk has been going on for some time.
The second major thing we learn is that Walter’s origins might not be as clear cut as we thought. It has always been a statement of fact that Walter turned into Sasquatch during his attempt to recreate Bruce Banner’s gamma experiment because of his location in the north, a place where the veil between realities is thin. The Great Beast Tanaraq was able to merge with Walter due to a temporary connection between Earth and the Realm of the Beasts. The inclusion of the Green Door adds an additional mystery to Sasquatch’s history.
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If we’re to dive even deeper into the revised story of Walter’s transformation, it might be meaningful to ask if, somehow, he ended up inadvertently creating the Green Door. Walter says that gamma experiment did something “outside conventional science,” that it “opened something.” It’s reasonable to posit that such a thing would be the Green Door. How that connects to the Realm of the Beasts and Tanaraq is anyone’s guess at this point, though -- it’s not clear if the Green Door leads to the Realm of the Beasts or… somewhere else.
As a brief aside, Walter describes getting hit by a gamma bomb as “a trip.” This may or may not be Immortal Hulk #4’s reference to a crucial page from Alpha Flight #11, but it’s an apt description of John Byrne’s visual representation of what it must feel like to become something akin to a Hulk. The art is too good not to republish here, so enjoy.
