Immortal Hulk: Grab Bag might be a better title as it crams together some specials created for a Defenders crossover and the "Absolute Carnage" and "King in Black" events. There's also a retelling of the life of Jennifer Walters/She-Hulk in light of all the Immortal Hulk revelations and revisions and the story of some guy in 950 B.C.E. encountering a gamma-ray infused meteor. It's all a bit incomplete, but aside from the stupid cosmic crap, I actually enjoyed chunks of these.

Most interesting for me was Immortal Hulk #0, which has a new framing sequence by Al Ewing bookending reprints of two seminal stories that have been mined extensively in Ewing's Hulk opus:
• 1985's Incredible Hulk #312, wherein writer Bill Mantlo pissed off Barry Windsor-Smith by jumping the gun and spoiling the story for Smith's in-production Hulk special about Banner's abusive father that was subsequently withdrawn and eventually reworked into the 2020 graphic novel, Monsters.
• 1997's Incredible Hulk # -1 (that's Minus One, a line-wide Flashback event numbering gimmick Marvel did) wherein the death of Banner's father is revisited.

I haven't had a chance to re-read these stories since I first bought them as new comics back in the day. Mantlo's writing is stiff and stilted, but it was interesting to pick out all the bits that survived into Monsters. And the Peter David issue reminded me why he was one of my favorite comic book writers of the 1990s, especially his run on Hulk. Good stuff.

Heh. Given how much I disliked some of Ewing's storylines in the main title, this may be my favorite Immortal Hulk collection. ( )