Before diving into the events of Hulk #202 (August 1976; written by Len Wein; drawn by Sal Buscem and Joe Staton), let's do brief review of Jarella.
We first met her in Hulk #140, when a villain named Psyklop shrunk Hulk down to microscopic size. The microverse Hulk ends up in is populated by green-skinned humanoids and ruled by the benevolent Jarella. When magically/telepathically taught the local language, Banner's mind takes over Hulk's body. He and Jarella develop a thing for each other before Hulk is enlarged back to normal. I reviewed that story HERE.
Since then, Jarella has taken a trip to our world and Hulk (with Hulk's brain) has paid a return visit to Jarella's world. When you think about it, Hulk gets shrunk down to microscopic size an awful lot.
Hulk #202, for instance, is the third time in three issues Hulk is shrunk. He was sent into Glenn Talbot's brain in #200, visited a microverse in #201 when shrunk even smaller, and now has been shrunk smaller yet to make a return to Jarella's world.
The "geography" of the various microverses must be interesting. Any one microverse seems to be in a different location ever time its visited. This time, Jarella's world seems to be located somewhere in Talbot's brain. There's even a brief pause in Hulk's saga to take us back to Earth, where Talbot is on the way to have microsurgery to get Hulk out of him. Well, Comic Book Science can make sense of anything. Perhaps there are natural "quantum waves" that act to draw people being minaturized to specific locations in the microverse. Yeah, that's it.
In any case, this story arc seems to imply that somewhere in your brain, entire sentient races might exist on individual atoms. CREEPY!
Anyway, the art by Buscema and Staton is a lot of fun. Hulk gets into a wonderful fight with giant warthogs. Once he beats these, he sees Jarella about to be shot by a catapult onto a nearby mountain. He pulls off a mid-air rescue.
Hulk learns that Jarella's people have been hit by earthquakes and were sacrificing her to the "god of the mountain" to put a stop to this. Hulk decides to see about this god himself. Jarella, who cares for her people even though they just tried to kill her AND cares for Hulk, accompanies him. They climb the slope--though why Hulk couldn't have just carried Jarella and jumped to the top is beyond me. Even if he didn't think of it, you'd assume that Jarella would.
That's a small glitch in a visually fun story, though. Atop the mountain, they find a castle. Within the castle, they find a giant. The giant, as we discover when Hulk destroys it, is really a robot.
The Hulk vs. Robot Giant is yet another cool fight. This issue is, from start to finish, a visual delight.
But Hulk doesn't get to live happily ever after. He's zapped unconscious by the villian Psyklop, who had built the giant and is presumably responsible for the earthquakes.
Why is he doing all this? We'll find out next week as we take a look at Hulk #203.
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