After more than sixty years as its host, Bruce Banner is no longer the Hulk — a darker, more dreadful force has taken his place.
In Marvel’s The Incredible Hulk #30 (published October 15, 2025), the new menace unveils itself: the Infernal Hulk. In a brutal turn of events, the demonic Eldest lures the Hulk into a trap, seizes Abomination’s body as a vessel, and uses a terrifying mix of brute force and eldritch sorcery to pry Bruce Banner out of the Hulk. Banner is shunted into a nightmarish realm known as the Requiem Plain, left to die while the intruder claims the body.
Eldest — the firstborn of the ancient entity called the Mother of Horrors, who has stalked the run since The Incredible Hulk #1 in 2023 — has been working for thirty issues to appropriate the Hulk’s might and free her progenitor. When the Mother of Horrors refuses to answer, Eldest consumes her, absorbs her power, and is reborn as the Infernal Hulk. Readers will encounter this terrifying new incarnation in its own series later this year.
“I’ve been promising Hulk fans the biggest, boldest status quo change in Hulk’s history, and that time is finally here,” writer Phillip Kennedy Johnson said when Marvel announced the new series. “The next few issues of Incredible Hulk give fans all the answers they’ve been waiting for about Eldest and the Mother of Horrors, and Infernal Hulk is the beginning of a terrifying new normal, not just for the Hulk series but for the entire Marvel Universe.”
Image: Marvel ComicsBy the end of The Incredible Hulk #30, Eldest — now fused with the Hulk’s memories — mourns Banner’s loss and reflects that Banner was monstrous long before he became the Hulk. Eldest then muses that the Avengers may harbor similar darknesses, and seems poised to test that hypothesis firsthand. The Infernal Hulk’s look is grotesquely split: a blue-gray, hulking mass on one side and Eldest’s contorted purple demonic form on the other, with a searing green gamma scar running down the center where the two halves divide.
“There are monsters way worse and more powerful than anything we’ve seen so far,” Johnson added. “Bigger and stronger than Hulk, with origins that go back to the foundations of the Earth. It’s time to take this story to the next level, and no corner of the Marvel Universe will be left untouched before the end.”
Infernal Hulk — written by Phillip Kennedy Johnson with art by Nic Klein — is scheduled to arrive on November 26, 2025.
Related links: Bruce Banner’s history; more Marvel coverage.
Source: Polygon
