The Hulk is notoriously hard to take down, but Maestro #5 evens the playing field with a new weapon designed by X-Men's Forge to kill the Jade Giant.
Figuring out how to defeat the Hulk has always been one of the greatest challenges in the Marvel Universe. The Jade Giant is strong enough to lift billions of tons and has a healing factor that rivals even Wolverine. But, despite his incredible power, he’s not unkillable. In fact, Marvel just unveiled a weapon capable of putting Hulk down for good.
Maestro is an ongoing series from Peter David focusing on a future, evil version of the Hulk. After waking up in a post-apocalyptic world ravaged by nuclear warfare, Hulk decides humanity no longer deserves its freedom. He kills Hercules and replaces him as the Maestro of Dystopia, a city of survivors, which he rules over with an iron fist - and an army of massive robotic dogs. In issue #5, Hulk hosts a city-wide funeral procession for Hercules, though the event is more to solidify his rule than it is to honor his former Olympian comrade. However, things don’t go quite as planned.
In the middle of the procession, the citizens of Dystopia voice their desire to have a fair election, to which the tyrannical Hulk responds by letting loose his dogs of war, created using the remnants of Spider-Man 2099's company Alchemax. However, a powerful laser beam destroys the dogs before they can do much damage, revealing a squadron of armed civilians led by a woman wielding some kind of laser cannon. “Crap! That gun’s supposed to be down here!” Rick Jones says, watching from his underground base. “Forge built it…to kill the Hulk!” Forge is - or, in this timeline, was - one of the X-Men, whose powers include a superhuman talent for creating any kind of mechanical device, including weaponry. If anyone could craft a gun capable of killing the Hulk, it would be Forge, but a weapon is only as good as its wielder, and the people of Dystopia are simply no match for the Maestro.
Hulk manages to disarm the rebels by striking the ground, causing a miniature earthquake. In that same moment, however, the fiery corpse of Hercules suddenly comes back to life for one last go at the Hulk. The vengeful God of Strength trounces the Jade Giant, but his revenge is cut short by the Minister, who finally sends Hercules to the afterlife using the laser cannon. The beam completely disintegrates Hercules’s body, proving that Forge knew what he was doing when he designed the weapon. Hulk has an impressive healing factor, but even he can’t recover if there’s nothing left of him to heal, and a direct hit from this laser cannon would do just that.
Seeing as Maestro now has the weapon in his custody, he shouldn’t have much to worry about. Then again, who knows what other superhero tech Rick Jones has tucked away. He’s already been shown to have Thor’s hammer and a new wielder, as well as many other relics of heroes gone by, so Rick’s armory could very well be the key to taking down the Hulk.
