Russell T Davies had a rule when writing Doctor Who - all his stories needed to be set on Earth or planets with human colonies on. He reasoned that it was far harder to make audiences care about obvious non-humans. Heart of the Atom is proof of the truth of this; the entire concept depends upon us caring about green skinned warriors on a fantasy planet we say hello and goodbye to inside 20 pages at a time. As Morrissey once said of Breakdance: THe Movie I found it almost impossible to care.

The central conceit springs from a Harlan Ellison short story with a typically understated title - 'The Brute that Shouted Love at the Heart of the Atom'. Roy Thomas riffs off this to fine effect, energetically selling a high-concept doomed romance aided by Sam Grainger's energetic, primitive art which is at its best in memorable full page panels. It goes on to collect the Hulk's subsequent expeditions to the heart of the atom and Princess Jarella's journeys in reverse. The problem is that what may seem epic when spread intermittently over 108 issues - nine years worth of story - is robbed of any epic power when compressed The story doesn't breathe and love, am emotion that gains resonance with time, appears compressed. It's the central problem with collecting pre-1980s comics; at this point they're written to fill the monthly quota of pages and don't tend to build their stories in a satisfying form. We're still dealing with haphazard RKO style storytelling.

Where it does presage the 80s is in focusing on the angst of the central character - the romance works fine, even if in abbreviated fashion, and there's definite pathos to the way things work out. But for a modern reader this concept - the Hulk finding contentment and love as ruler of another world - is done far more effectively in Planet Hulk where the decompressed storytelling allows the story room to breathe. Fascinating as a summary of the weakness of the approach to storytelling used in the decade and the futility of trying to create a unified narrative from something never intended to be a coherent story. ( )