(Panini Books �14.99)

THE insidious Intelligencia, a cabal of genius-level supervillains, has set out to capture the world’s eight smartest people, including Fantastic Four leader Reed Richards, Black Panther T’Challa and the size-shifting Henry Pym, in a bid to secure their power base and take ultimate control over the Earth.

Meanwhile, despite being robbed of his ability to transform into the green goliath by sometime adversary and occasional reluctant ally Red Hulk, Bruce Banner proves his real worth lies in his incredible mind, now no longer shackled to the curse of his gamma-spawned alter ego…

After an auspicious start which set up the idea of the Intelligencia conspiring against Banner and his friends through the creation of various new Hulks, the narrative seems to veer off into incomprehensible directions in this second volume, leaving the reader with the overwhelming feeling that they’ve missed out on vast sections of the plot.

Pulling together sequences from a variety of Hulk books in a bid to create a single, consistent storyline may have worked in the first collection, but here it results in chronological jumps, unresolved narrative threads and gaping plot holes. There is no obvious conclusion, suggesting it may be continued in a future volume, but with no suggestion of this in this particular book the frustration felt when reaching the conclusion is compounded by a general lack of awareness as to how to actually find out how everything is wrapped up. A missed opportunity.