One of the more memorable Hulk stories in the character's long history, Peter David and George Pérez's Future Imperfect tale from 1993 saw the Hulk transported nearly 100 years into an imperfect dystopian future ruled by an even more powerful version of himself called, amazingly, the Maestro, and in complete command of his distinctly non-savage, less imperfect Bruce Banner mind. The story detailed Hulk's alliance with freedom fighters of the imperfect future and is very entertaining indeed, but more notably has proven influential for being among the first cape comics to depict a great big room full of ominous clues to the imperfect and inglorious futures of numerous superheroes, which would of course become a cliché in time travel/alternate future stories (and, most auspiciously, land Future Imperfect's Rick Jones on ComicsAlliance's list of the biggest hoarders in comics). Future Imperfect is also distinguished by being the first Marvel book to rename an imperfect future version of one of it's more physically monstrous heroes something as excessively prissy as the Maestro, who would be followed up by an imperfect future version of X-Man Beast in Grant Morrison's New X-Men called... Sublime.

Anyway, in 2015, Marvel readers will be transported back to that alternate, imperfect future where there is only Hulk as part of what we are increasingly believing to be a dimension of Jonathan Hickman and Esad Ribic's Secret Wars -- itself a callback of sorts to a famous if imperfect storyline of Marvel's past, whose possibly imperfect future arrival has been heralded by a torrent of teasers referencing other similarly momentous if imperfect events of the past. Hickman's New Avengers has slowly revealed itself to be a play on DC's multiversal apocalypse story Crisis On Infinite Earths, and such a structure would facilitate a return to the imperfect world of Future Imperfect and the other storylines referenced in Marvel's 2015 teaser campaign.

This teaser, provided exclusively to ComicsAlliance, was drawn by Dale Keown, one of very few Hulk artists whose visions of the green goliath could be described as definitive. Along with Maestro, Hulk and Banner, we can see the aforementioned remnants of Marvel's imperfect past, more of which are visible in this spread from the original 1993 work: