Fricking heroes.

[colonel_green]

Four scans from Incredible Hercules #140.
 

So things are going south for our heroes as they fight to stop Hera from destroying the world and building a new one; we've pretty much shed all the guest-stars at this point, as Herc and Cho go after Hephaestus and Delphyne. Hephaestus monologues about his backstory: mom tossed him off a mountain at birth, then on recognizing his craft skills made 'amends' by marrying him to a completely faithless woman who found him physically repulsive. At his wedding, he caught sight of Athena for the first time, and was enchanted; surely the goddess of wisdom, of all people, would see past his ugly exterior and love him for who he was. He constructed his greatest work, the aegis, for her, hoping that all that bling would open her heart to him. That, of course, didn't work out ("In retrospect, perhaps my advance could have been perceived as inappropriate."). So he decides to settle for using her petrified body as a caste for the world's ultimate sex toy.

Herc and Cho are captured:





Now that was cool.

Delphyne now intervenes (apparently that's some powerful gun she's got), demanding that he stop and reverse the petrification thing; apparently, killing her (or whatever) is okay, but not using the corpse to make a companion robot. That's where she draws the line...'kay.

Even as this happens, the device is activated, and the world begins to disappear. We now join Kid Zeus and Hera:



I like how they write Hera here; she's not all bad, and Zeus is really at the root of most of her issues.

Typhon, however, declines to stop the machine, and reveals that the bands that Pluto placed on him to make him obey Hera don't actually exist anymore (I'm not clear why; either because they stepped into Hera's new world or because Pluto's power was dethroned when Herc and Cho went to Hades several issues ago). Typhon says that Gaea created him to destroy the gods, and now that he's got his finger on the trigger of the ultimate weapon, he feels inclined to use it. And then he blasts Hera's head off, laughing maniacally. 


  char: hercules/marvel, char: amadeus cho, char: hera/marvel, char: hephaestus/marvel, char: delphyne gorgon, char: typhon, creator: greg pak, creator: rodney buchemi, title: incredible hercules, publisher: marvel comics, char: zeus/marvel