Hulk: Grand Design

The acclaimed Grand Design franchise—begun by Ed Piskor’s X-Men: Grand Design and continued by Tom Scioli’s Fantastic Four: Grand Design—found its perfect next subject in the angriest monster of them all. Hulk: Grand Design is Eisner Award-winning cartoonist Jim Rugg’s monumental two-issue reimagining of the Incredible Hulk’s first forty years, from Bruce Banner’s volatile upbringing to the fateful gamma bomb detonation to decades of running, smashing, and just wanting to be left alone.

Published by Marvel Comics in 2022 as Hulk: Grand Design – Monster #1 and Hulk: Grand Design – Madness #1 (later collected in a treasury edition in 2023), the project gave Rugg the keys to one of pop culture’s most enduring characters. “I’m covering 40 years of this character’s history—in the comics and in our world,” Rugg told ComicBook.com. “I looked at this project as part comics and part history. Let’s look at one of the most popular characters to come out of 20th-century storytelling.”

What sets Rugg’s contribution apart from his predecessors is his background in graphic design. Where Piskor and Scioli focused on narrative compression and stylistic homage, Rugg leaned into the “Design” half of the title with spectacular results. His pages are dense with alternate takes, fake merchandise, trading cards, and visual riffs that treat the Hulk not just as a character but as a cultural phenomenon. One standout sequence—“Faces of the Hulk”—shows the character rendered in the styles of different artists who defined him over the decades, from Jack Kirby to John Buscema to Dale Keown.

Rugg worked on the book during the pandemic lockdown of 2020, with Marvel editor Wil Moss giving him remarkable creative freedom. “Marvel gave me a lot of leeway,” Rugg recalled. “I would send things in like outlines and pages, and they mostly just said, great, keep going. Ultimately, if you love Hulk Grand Design or you hate it, it’s on me. Marvel was awesome in that they hired me to be me.”

The collected edition spans 120 pages of Rugg’s singular vision, tracing the Hulk’s journey from misunderstood monster to world-breaker to hero—and back again. It’s a love letter to the character that first captured Rugg’s imagination through licensed merchandise in the 1980s, before he ever read a Hulk comic. “Hulk Smash. That’s the character,” Rugg said. “Hulk’s a monster and that’s why we love him.”

Perfect for fans of Ed Piskor’s X-Men: Grand Design, Tom Scioli’s Fantastic Four: Grand Design, and anyone who wants to see a master cartoonist distill forty years of comic book history into something fresh, personal, and gloriously designed.