Incredible Hulk #88-91 (2006)

The Illuminati were introduced in the pages of New Avengers, but it’s here that they become TOTAL DICKS. Same with Nick Fury.

Hulk has (grown a beard and) found peace, living alone in Alaska.

For most of issue #88, he’s just doing his own thing. But of course trouble comes along–this time, in the form of some guys gang-raping a woman in the woods. Hulk stops them by literally crushing one of the dude’s heads. All of that is really just setting the stage for what will come at the end of this arc. It’s establishing that it is, in fact, possible for Hulk to mind his own business and find peace. The scene where he kills the rapist appears to be an attempt to reconcile what happens later in the arc, which is to say that even at peace Hulk commits some morally ambiguous actions. (I’m not sad for the dead rapist, but it’s easy to see how a being capable of casually killing in the name of what he perceives to be right is problemative and undermines societal structures designed to promote justice).

Fury shows up at the end of issue #88 with a mission for Hulk to go out into space and destroy a world-breaking weapon being created by Hydra. Hulk does it (with a little bit of a twist), but at the end of the mission the SHIELD shuttle that is supposed to take him from outer space back to Earth instead begins flying in the opposite direction–taking him deeper into space.

We don’t learn until the next arc that Fury was working with the Illuminati when he concocted this trick.

This story is by Daniel Way. He’s not an author who I generally dig very much, but he does a good job here. Also, it’s setting the stage for the phenomenal run by Greg Pak, which comes next.