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Abomination may be one of Hulk’s deadliest enemies, but he’s never really shined like he does in the opening pages of Maestro: World War M.
WARNING: The following contains spoilers for Maestro: World War M, available now.
The Hulk’s entire rogue’s gallery is bursting with underappreciated villains who rarely get the limelight they deserve, but the gamma-irradiated powerhouse Abomination has had perhaps the worst end of the deal over the years. Despite a relative boost in profile that quite frequently features him as the Hulk’s arch-nemesis, and with the villain quite frequently boasting that he is even stronger than the Hulk himself, the Abomination’s true potential has rarely been tapped before.
But in the dystopic future of Maestro: World War M, comic fans may finally be getting the Abomination they deserve. It turns out that what the villain needed all this time was not more boasts about how strong he is, but to be an underdog the audience can root for.
In the opening pages of the comic, the man known as Emil Blonsky certainly seems to be on top. While still in his form s Abomination, he oversees the leadership of the KGB from his headquarters in the Kremlin. Shortly thereafter the Maestro bursts in, murders his wife Nadia, and Abomination wakes up to realize that the entire fantasy was an artificial construction made by the A.I.M. holding facility that kept him asleep while civilization collapsed in the fallout of nuclear war. The truth of his situation is that he has no country, has no wife, and the Maestro rules over the remains of humanity as a despot. In a word, Abomination is the underdog of the story.
And that proves inherently far more interesting than the position the character has occupied in the mainstream continuity since his inception. With his origins in the Red Scare roots of many Cold War-era villains, Emil Blonsky was about as sympathetic as any other interchangeable Soviet spy from the Silver Age. His transformation into Abomination made him fall into the classic archetype of a villain who is a physically superior version of their opposing hero, like Bane or Doomsday or Venom, only that dynamic never truly worked for Abomination because of one simple fact: Hulk is the strongest one there is.
Without any distinguishing characteristics, Abomination quite often languished among Hulk’s rogue’s gallery as never really offering much that was interesting. But in the Maestro series there is a unique opportunity to embrace everything that works about the character. Rather than playing up his physical superiority that in the past always gave way to the Hulk growing strong enough to defeat him anyways, the comic instead leans in to Abomination’s inherent inferiority. He is a man with nothing when the future version of the Hulk known as Maestro has everything. Indeed there is something touching in seeing him mourn over the wife his hallucination constructed. It’s seldom there are such insights into Abomination’s private life, but these humanizing details make all the difference.
The comic sees Abomination wander aimlessly through the wasteland of the world before he is contacted by Atlantean soldiers on behalf of Namor. Concerned that Maestro may restore humanity to a position where it would rival the aquatic civilization once more, Namor seeks Abomination’s help in resisting the Maestro. Other threats, like the original Human Torch and the scheming Doctor Doom, conspire against the Maestro as well. But out of all of them it may just be the Abomination the audience has the most reason to root for.
Such explorations of under-explored characters are quite often a chief virtue of comics set in alternate realities. It can be hard in a Hulk comic to give his villains the space they deserve, and it is no wonder that the Abomination spent so many years spouting generic dialogue with cartoonishly evil motivations.
But in World War M there is real potential for the character to shine like never before. With enough popularity and support such inventions can carry over into the mainstream comics or even the MCU where the character recently reappeared. Even together, he and his allies may not be strong or cunning enough to stop the Maestro. But its when the odds are most stacked against them that we root for underdogs the most.
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