Taking back the reins of Hulk from former Heroes' producer Jeph Loeb (Although, don't worry, he's going to continue telling stories about Rulk), Planet Skaar sees io9 favorite Greg Pak return to writing Bruce Banner in time to finish a trilogy that started with 2006's Planet Hulk and continued with the following year's World War Hulk. After accidentally sending the Hulk into a life as an intergalactic gladiator on an alien planet - and then dealing with his wrath when he returned to Earth - Reed Richards has discovered that the Hulk has a son. Only problem being, he hasn't realized that said son has now come to Earth for a family reunion that's centering more on the "I will kill you for being born" variety.

The storyline begins in Planet Skaar Prologue, available on Wednesday, and continues in the next couple of issues of Skaar, Son Of Hulk.

Planet Skaar Prologue #1 Preview [Comic Book Resources]

Celebrating the publisher's 70th anniversary (Marvel has always been very elastic about their age; in 1986, they celebrated their 25th anniversary), Captain America killers Ed Brubaker and Steve Epting are working on a new series called The Marvels Project for a June release, which promises to reveal the "true origins" of Marvel's earliest heroes.

One of the publisher's newest characters - Skaar, Son of Hulk - will get a chance to discover his own true origin this summer, when creator Greg Pak brings the character to Earth for Planet Skaar, a sequel to his earlier Hulk stories, Planet Hulk and World War Hulk. Will Skaar get to meet his dad? Pak wouldn't give a definitive answer, but he did tell fans to "keep your eyes open and your wallets open." Planet Skaar begins in May.

The final big announcement of the con for the publisher was Spider-Man: The Short Halloween, a oneshot written by Saturday Night Live's Seth Meyers and Bill Hader and drawn by Justice League International's Kevin Maguire about a case of mistaken identities between a fake Spider-Man confronted by bad guys and the real Spidey hanging out with the impostor's friends on Hallowe'en. Don't be too surprised to see SNL injokes in the background, according to the creators, although Hader does admit it'd be "weird" to see his fellow cast members in the comic. Well, not if they're the previously unknown bastard children of the Hulk... That kind of thing seems to be happening more often than you'd think, really...

It really is a week where you can pick up those classics that you never quite got around to reading. DC are putting out an oversized reprint of Frank Miller's pre-Dark Knight series Ronin (soon, like almost everything else Frank Miller has touched, to be a motion picture, as they say) as well as a regular sized new edition of apocalyptic superherofest Kingdom Come (You'll believe a man can fry!), while Image reissues Madman creator Mike Allred's secret origin of rock'n'roll odyssey Red Rocket 7 (in preparation for Neon Monster's Red Rocket 7 party a week on Saturday, of course), IDW collect some of the best Star Trek comics ever made in Star Trek Archives Volume 1: The Best of Peter David, and even Marvel gets in on the act with a new hardcover edition of Grant Morrison and JG Jones' very enjoyable Marvel Boy miniseries from the beginning of the century... all of which are easily recommended (especially Red Rocket 7).

Equally as recommended is Wonder Woman: The Circle, the hardcover collection of the start of Gail Simone's run on DC's favorite Amazon, which is just one of the non-contemporary collections also hitting shelves this week - In particular, you should pay attention to Star Wars: Clone Wars Vol. 1: Shipyards of Doom (for the title alone, I mean, come on), Marvel's time-traveling cyborg mutant book Cable Volume 1: Messiah War, and the weird-but-enjoyable Uncanny X-Men: Divided We Stand, which makes io9 hometown San Francisco seem even weirder that normal.

In terms of all-new material this week, it's a tough one: do you go for Marvel's Skaar Son Of Hulk Presents The Savage World Of Sakaar, which spins a one-off special issue about the home world of the Hulk's son, or Dark Horse's one-off My Name is Bruce, where Bruce Campbell kicks ass in a way that the Hulk could never manage?

Much easier to choose is the collection of the week - even with all of those classic books available above, there was no way that anything would seem more essential this week than Star Wars: Luke Skywalker, Last Hope for the Galaxy, an 800 page hardcover collection of comics from the last thirty years proving why George Lucas' favorite son isn't entirely overshadowed by Han Solo after all. In case you need some convincing, here's a preview of what to expect inside.

Whether you're following the force or just out for your own personal gain, you can find a complete list of this week's new comic releases here, and the whereabouts of your closest comic store at the Comic Shop Locator Service. Now let's blow this thing so we can all go home.

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]

Skaar is really the offspring of io9 favorite Greg Pak, who came up with the idea while working on the year-long "Hulk As Space Barbarian" epic Planet Hulk:

I remember pitching the idea to Marvel Editor-in-Chief Joe Quesada at a Marvel Christmas party a few months before the first issue of Planet Hulk hit stores. [Fellow Marvel writer and playwright] Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa happened to walk by while Joe and I were excitedly talking through the science of how a half-Hulk, half-alien embryo could survive the incineration of his mother and thrive in the radioactive soup after a nuclear explosion - I remember Roberto cracking up and saying something like, "This is what comics is all about!"

It's an exploration of what you get if you raise a person in a war-torn world stripped of every vestige of civilization - and then ask him to play nicely with others. Skaar will absolutely come of age during the course of this story - but not exactly in that heartwarming, afterschool special sort of way.

Skaar: Son of Hulk launches in June.

Greg Pak on Skaar, Son of Hulk [Newsarama]

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.