This week sees the release of Fall Of The Hulks: Alpha, the first chapter in a story promising some level of closure to storyarcs that have stretch back to 2006 and, with any luck, thinning the Hulk Herd just a little. Because, yes, there are now seven different Hulks co-existing in the Marvel Universe, and that seems like at least five too many. We've come up with a scorecard for the Hulks of various colors, just to make it easier for you to jump onboard Marvel's latest big event.

The Originals
Bruce Banner and Jennifer Walters, these are your lives.
The Reds
Bruce Banner and Jennifer Walters, these are your potentially evil dopplegangers.
The Bastards
Bruce Banner, these are your children. Jen, you're off the hook for this one.

Fall Of The Hulks: Alpha is released on Thursday.

As the Hulk's son, he has the same enhanced strength and healing power as his dad, but is into tattoos and bad rock music.

Lyra
The result of the Hulk's DNA being stolen by a time-traveling feminist who came from a future where no man was worthy to father her child and sabotage had left technology unable to propagate the human race - I promise, I am not making this up - Lyra has returned to the present day to assure the future of her kind, Terminator-style, by breeding with Norman Osborn. Understandably, she realized that wasn't really something she wanted to do, but decided to stick around in this timezone to fight crime and find some other way to keep the future (and her past) safe.

Unlike her father, Lyra actually gets weaker as she gets angrier, as the result of genetic manipulation by her mother's race, the Femizons. Yes, the Femizons. I refer you to the part about me not making this up.

Hiro-Kala
After Skaar had left to go to Earth, Hiro-Kala was revealed to be the other Son of Hulk. Raised unaware of his parentage and as a slave, Hiro-Kala inherited his mother's powers, and has revealed himself to be an able and more-than-a-little-ruthless little bastard; he managed to avenge Galactus' destruction of his home world by tricking him into eating another planet that he'd "poisoned". Sure, destroying an innocent civilization and planet for revenge may seem extreme, but it got the job done.

As opposed to all of the other Hulks, Hiro-Kala isn't on Earth right now - which is probably good, or else he might poison here as well - and hasn't met any of the rest of his family yet.

We're not sure whether or not the Red Hulk has some large plan behind all of his actions, or whether it's just unsubtle writing, but so far we've seen the character kill two long-standing Hulk foes (The Abomination and the Wendigo, AKA the character that Wolverine fought in his first appearance - A moment of silence, please) and cause an earthquake in San Francisco, before joining up with various time-tossed supervillains in order to prevent the Hulk from finding true love. That's right, he's definitely evil. We just don't know why.

Red She-Hulk
If little is known about the Red Hulk, even less is known about the Red She-Hulk, other than the fact that she has similar powers to her male counterpart, and may or may not be the original She-Hulk, former X-Men spin-off character Domino or even former Daredevil spin-off character Elektra in a new radioactive form.

After a particularly destructive rampage, a collection of Marvel's superheroes decided that everyone would be happier if the Hulk was sent to a nice alien planet where he could do whatever he wanted without hurting anyone. Of course, things didn't go plan, and he ended up on a planet filled with enslaved aliens that he helped free, becoming that planet's ruler and, in the process, falling in love with Caiera, who becomes his bride before being killed by the explosion of the spaceship that brought him to the planet. (All of this is from the Planet Hulk storyline, soon to be a DVD animated movie:

In many ways, that trailer hits the highpoints of the story.)

Following the death of his wife, the Hulk got together with a bunch of freed slaves and returned to Earth to punish the heroes who'd sent him to space in the first place, blaming them for the explosion and Caiera's demise. After fighting a lot of superheroes and turning New York's underground into a modern Gladiatorial battle between Iron Man and Mr. Fantastic, it was revealed that it was one of the slaves who'd caused the explosion - He was worried that a happy Hulk was a soft Hulk, and so wanted to make him mad. Never a good move with the Hulk - and the Hulk pretty much let himself get defeated, turning back into Bruce Banner and being contained by the US military (This was World War Hulk).

He was released from captivity to fight the Red Hulk, but ended up having all the gamma radiation in his body drained by his crimson counterpart, meaning that he was stuck as Bruce Banner forever... Or, at least, for a couple of months; while Incredible Hulk #600 made the "Bruce Banner forever" claim in July 2009, it only took until October for Banner to get re-irradiated for future Hulk adventures.

She-Hulk
Jennifer Walters became a Hulk when she had an emergency blood transfusion from her cousin Bruce Banner. Unlike her cousin, though, she's had no history of mental illness, and so keeps the same personality when she hulks out, meaning that she's the respectable member of the family. That probably explains why she's been a member of so many superteams, including the Fantastic Four, Avengers and Defenders.

Currently, she's missing, following an explosion. The Red She-Hulk has claimed that she's dead, but, come on. It's comics. That never works.

Created both as a primer to bring new moviegoing fans up to date with the character's status in the comics and also as an introduction to this week's Skaar, Son of Hulk series, the digital comic - Sorry, people who hate the shitty Flash-based interface of Marvel's official digital comic site - does its best to quickly run through the last couple of years of Hulk comics in ten pages, telling you all you need to know about how the best laid plans of Iron Man and Mr. Fantastic resulted in the destruction of a planet and getting their asses kicked by grumpy aliens as a result. Sure, you miss out on the subtlety and explosions for the most part, but that's the kind of thing that you have to pay money for.

Hulk Saga [Marvel.com]

When we watched Battlestar Galactica: Razor, it reminded us of your BSG comics. Did you invent the idea that Adama's call sign as a pilot was Husker? Or was that in a bible you were given for the show?

I wish I could take credit, but Adama's call sign was introduced in the miniseries that launched the new show. Adama's crew has restored his old Viper from his days as a pilot — and "Husker" is painted on the side. Originally, I misread that as "Husher," and in the comic book I had him explain it with the sardonic line, "Guess I was always running my mouth." When the our sharp-eyed letterer Simon Bowland caught the glitch, we tweaked Adama's explanation to: "Just had a sore throat the day they handed out nicknames."

I did notice, however, that I did scoop "Razor" on another detail. When we showed the old school Cylons for the first time in the comic book, their first words were, of course, "By your command." "Razor" played their version of the scene the same way, which made me chuckle. Guess we're all osBSG fanboys at heart.

Your comics were also the first time we came across the idea that the human-looking Cylons could have been patterned on actual humans. Sharon Valerii thinks she's the "original" Sharon whom the others are patterned on. Was this something you came up with, or were you told it might be true?

I came up with that idea and wrote those stories before the show itself had made any big reveals about the origins of the Cylons. I think Universal let us run with it because in the comic, Sharon's belief that she's "Sharon Prime," a real human that all of the Sharon Cylons are modeled after, turns out to be part of a fantasy — the kind of dream that a machine with emotions and no clue about her actual origins might have. I'm just as clueless and curious as you regarding the actual explanations that may come in this next season of the television show.

Speaking of robots with emotions, one thing that really blew us away about Robot Stories was its portrayal of robots having unexpected emotions. At one point, two androids designed only for office work fall in love. At the same time, you have people having emotional reactions to robots that clearly can't feel anything (like action figures). Do you think people will have trouble telling the difference between humans projecting emotions onto robots and robots having emotions of their own?

Absolutely. I read something recently about people already attributing emotions to things like Aibos and Furbies — even after being told that the machines are absolutely non-sentient. And no doubt robots will be designed to recognize and mimic emotions long before they have any of their own. On an everyday, individual level, I don't see any real problem with that — people already personalize their stuffed animals and computers and cars — it's just in our nature. The big challenge will come the day everyone who fantasized that their robots had emotions will have to confront the responsibilities and moral and ethical challenges that arise when robots really do have emotions. The fantasy's so much easier — because the main thing we'll fantasize about is unconditional love, or maybe a bit of cute mischievousness. But the reality very well may include less pleasant emotions such as anger or contempt or more complicated things such as neediness, existential dread, or mental illness.

That sounds like it could lead to some awkward moments.

I imagine it could be a bit like the experience of some folks who adopt baby raccoons — so cute! But then they turn into adult animals with very distinct needs and instincts that have very little to do with the comfort level of their owners.

We loved Planet Hulk, your storyline where the Hulk gets trapped on an alien world and forced to become a gladiator. One of the coolest parts was the planet Sakaar itself, with its patchwork of different species and cultures. How did you come up with that concept for the planet?

I'm mixed race — half white and half Korean — which I think made me hyperaware of race and racism and the promise of a genuinely pluralistic society from a ridiculously young age. So it was a natural thing for me to populate Sakaar with a variety of different sentient species interacting in a society dominated by racist and classist ideology — and then to turn the various prejudices and stereotypes about the various characters on their heads as the story progressed.

Was the planet's mix of cultures something that evolved in the process of writing the story, or did you spend a lot of time on world-building beforehand?

Under the expert guidance of Hulk editor extraordinaire Mark Paniccia, I spent a huge amount of time developing the world ahead of time, but also developed a great deal of the specifics as we went along. It was a great way to work — I'd nailed down all of the big picture ideas about the planet's ecology, history, society, politics, mythology, zoology and theology before I started writing the first issue, so I knew how all the working pieces fit into the story we were telling. But there was space to explore and expand and discover along the way, which was incredibly invigorating.

The most engaging character in Planet Hulk was probably Miek, the cute bug who turns into a warlord. In some ways, Planet Hulk seemed to be Miek's story as much as the Hulk's. I was glad he turned out to have a pivotal role in the end of World War Hulk, the sequel. But do you think the ending of World War Hulk would make sense to people who only read the World War Hulk miniseries and not the Incredible Hulk issues (which focused more on Miek)?

No doubt folks who have been following the story from the first issue of "Planet Hulk" will get the deepest appreciation of Miek's journey. But having talked to tons of fans at Wizard World Texas in November, the ending seems to work pretty well with folks who only read World War Hulk. One of the things I'm pretty proud of, actually, was the way we worked important moments for each of the Hulk's alien Warbound companions within World War Hulk proper. It's not every day that that many new characters get such a big spotlight in the Marvel Universe.

And we're going to see more of the Hulk's companions from Sakaar, who came back to Earth with him on his mission of vengeance, right?

Yes, I'm getting the chance to feature these characters in a brand new adventure right here on planet Earth with the Warbound miniseries (the second issue of which hits stores on January 16).

Another great new character is Amadeus Cho, the angry coyote-carrying teen super-genius who took the Hulk's side during World War Hulk. We're hoping the "Incredible Hercules" issues of the Hulk comic will be basically a vehicle for Amadeus. Is that true?

Heh. Someday we'll do an Amadeus Cho solo book. But the "Incredible Hercules" is definitely the right place for the character right now. And it's definitely a shared book with Herc and Amadeus playing equal roles as foils for each other — the world's most irresponsible god and incorrigible teen genius get each other into a ridiculous amount of trouble in the wake of World War Hulk! What's not to love?

So is there any chance you'll make another independent movie?

Absolutely. I have a dream project or two that I'll get made one way or another in the fullness of time. I can't spill the beans just yet, but I have a few creator owned comic book projects coming up in the next few months that could help the process along.

So what are you working on right now? Anything besides the Warbound and "Incredible Herc" comics you can talk about?

My craziest new project is "Skaar: Son of Hulk," a new Marvel series that launches in the spring. It tells the tale of Skaar, the son of the Hulk and the alien woman warrior Caiera the Oldstrong, as he struggles to survive and conquer on the savage planet of Sakaar. More epic science fiction adventure that picks up right where Planet Hulk left off. And then I have a couple more top secret projects I can't talk about just yet — but the latest news can always be found at pakbuzz.com.

SPACE PRISON [is] as bleak and horrible a book as you'll find in science fiction. Four thousand humans are dropped on a high-gravity planet, rejected by a slaving alien invasion force. One thousand one hundred of them die during the first night. And it really doesn't get any more cheerful from there. [Author] Tom Godwin, on almost every page, says to the reader, "oh, you liked this character? He falls off a mountain now. That one? Dies of exposure. This one? Eaten by goats. That one? Stabbed into meaty chunks by psychotic unicorns." And on and on. I must have read that book twenty times. It just rips along (in many senses of the word "rips"), as shamelessly gleeful as a short genre book should be.

Space Prison by Tom Godwin [Project Gutenberg, via Warren Ellis]

Famous names: Greg Pak, Carlo Pagulayan, Aaron Lopresti, Gary Frank

Crunchy goodness: 5

Sequels: World War Hulk, in which the Hulk comes back to Earth with an alien army and vengeance in mind.

Elevator pitch: It's just like Spartacus — except this time nobody has to ask which one he is.

The shit: Pak and his collaborators put in major overtime on the world-building, creating an incredibly complex society with tons of alien races, not to mention the rampaging robotic wildebots. But what really makes Planet Hulk unforgettable is the Hulk's insect sidekick Miek, who evolves from scared larva to giant bug king to grief-stricken widower. Most comic book characters don't get that much development in twenty years.

Review of Planet Hulk