future imperfect

Maestro, the despotic senior incarnation of the Hulk from Peter David's classic "Future Imperfect" storyline, is back in one of the Battleworld zones of Secret Wars, and in the pages of the new Future Imperfect series from David and Greg Land. From the looks of the fancy jewelry he's wearing on Rafa Garres' fantastic variant cover for issue #2 --- debuting exclusively on ComicsAlliance --- the other Marvel heroes haven't fared so well in Maestro's domain.

For the third week in a row, Marvel has released a string of teasers for summer 2015 comics that revisit or at least reference previous Marvel events, at a rate of one a day -- except Tuesday, which was all about the movies. Last week, the wrench in the gears was a teaser that seemed to imply that the Ultimate Universe was coming to an end. There's nothing quite as big in this week's batch, which included Avengers vs. X-Men, Age of Apocalypse, and Future Imperfect. But one event of the bunch does seem... kind of risky. It's called Amazing Spider-Man: Renew Your Vows and it revisits Peter Parker's marriage... and daughter.

One of the more memorable Hulk stories in the character's long history, Peter David and George Pérez's Future Imperfect tale from 1993 saw the Hulk transported nearly 100 years into an imperfect dystopian future ruled by an even more powerful version of himself called, amazingly, the Masetro, and in complete command of his distinctly non-savage, less imperfect Bruce Banner mind. in 2015, Marvel readers will be transported back to that alternate, imperfect future where there is only Hulk as part of what we are increasingly believing to be a dimension of Jonathan Hickman and Esad Ribic's Secret Wars -- itself a callback of sorts to a famous if imperfect storyline of Marvel's past, whose possibly imperfect future arrival has been heralded by a torrent of teasers referencing other similarly momentous if imperfect events of the past. This teaser, provided exclusively to ComicsAlliance, was drawn by Dale Keown, one of very few Hulk artists whose visions of the green goliath could be described as definitive.