I understand now, after reading Boiling Point, the second collection of Bruce Jones's Incredible Hulk run, how he earned himself the distain of comic book readers... Boiling Point's present action is a few hours. Four issues for--at best--five hours of story. It's "decompressed" beyond the acceptable limit. I read it in fifteen or twenty minutes--which is about right, these days, for four comic books--and it was a great read. Jones’s pacing isn’t off. For example, he does take the time to insure the reader gets the absurdity of the Hulk being a hostage. He also doesn’t follow the prescribed hostage story plot either. In fact, Jones deviates from it to a considerable degree, not so much in his juxtaposition of the hostage taker, the hostage negotiator, and Bruce Banner--but in these characters awareness of their odd relationship to one another.
Jones then switches gears and turns the last issue and a half into a high tension climax (he skips the denouement, something the ongoing comic book allows). It’s Bruce Banner being driven to his death, with the Hulk removed from the equation. Removing the Hulk isn’t what makes these scenes so good, it’s Jones’s relationship between Banner and the villain. These scenes are mostly dialogue analyzing poetry. During these scenes, actually, is when I realized the excellence of Boiling Point. Jones takes a comic book about a big green giant and instead makes me hang on every word of a poetry dissection. His pacing of the dialogue is masterful. When I got to the kicker, I was so impressed, I read it a couple times more, just to let it further affect me. Great stuff. Masterfully written stuff.
Also amusing--and there’s very little humor in Boiling Point--are Jones’s Die Hard homages. I shrugged at the first one, but when I got to the second, I had to check and make sure, and, yes, Jones does do two good references to the first Die Hard film. They don’t stick out and one has to be familiar with the film, but unobtrusive homage is the way to go.