Marvel has released this insanely awesome cover for “Skaar: Son of Hulk” #2, written by Greg Pak. Ron Garney is the penciller of both the cover and the interior art.
“Skaar” #2 hits comic book stores in July — tell your local retailer to pre-order a copy for you today!
From the Marvel solicitation for the first issue, hitting comic book stores June 4, 2008:

Born in fire. Raised by monsters. Destined to destroy. On an alien planet shattered by war, no one is stronger than Skaar, the savage Son of Hulk. But as a Fillian warlord, an Imperial princess, and a mysterious Earthman spread chaos through the wastelands, will Skaar save the puny survivors — or smash them? Another epic fever dream from Greg Pak, writer of “Planet Hulk” and World War Hulk” — featuring the return of legendary Hulk artist Ron Garney!

From the Marvel solicitation from the second issue, on sale July 30, 2008:

Whose terrible stride shakes the war-torn wastelands of Sakaar? Whose blind Shadow Priest calls for the blood of babes? Whose barbarian horde rides monsters through your nightmares? Behold and lament, my beautiful son, for the Axeman Cometh!

Writer Greg Pak and artist Ron Garney have been interviewed by WizardUniverse.com about their upcoming “Skaar: Son of Hulk” series. An excerpt from the Pak interview:

What is it about the world of Sakaar that has really dug itself into your brain? How different is the world now from the rather dire state we saw it in at the end of “Planet Hulk”?
PAK: What makes Sakaar such a rich milieu for storytelling right now is that the war against the Red King and the explosion that leveled Crown City have destroyed all central authority and social control. This is a shattered, war-torn world plagued by monsters and bandits in which the stakes are as high as they possibly can be. Every second of the day is a fight for life and death—and when the survival of some means certain death for others, every second becomes a test of what it means to be a hero in a world this brutal and lawless.

And an excerpt from the Garney interview:

I know you haven’t done any pages yet, but do you have any feelings about what you’re most excited to draw in this story?
GARNEY: To be honest, I’m really most excited about the idea of the flavor of this character. Like I said, he’s a Conan-like character. On his planet, that’s their way. He’s more of a warrior-type, and it’ll be fun to remove ourselves from this planet and go to more fantasy land—add a Frazetta-type flavor to the book. I’m probably the most excited about that. It’s different.
And I hadn’t really done anything like that. I mean, I did Silver Surfer. And I wanted to do that on Silver Surfer, but when I’d first taken over that book, he’d been in outer space for so long with the Ron Lim era. But I wanted to do even more. I wanted to do sci-fi fantasy with that book and not so much comic book as fantasy illustration. I think I’ll be able to do that more with this book.

Vaneta Rogers has interviewed penciller Ron Garney about his upcoming gig on “Skaar: Son of Hulk,” written by Greg Pak. Here’s an excerpt:

NRAMA: What type of visual tone are you hoping to bring to the character and the comic? Do you have some ideas, having seen the character’s initial design?
RG: Yeah. I guess the challenge for me, and what I have been thinking about — it’s been sort of brewing in the back of my mind — is how I’m going to make him more enigmatic than the Hulk himself. Because you really run the risk of it being a watered down version of the original character. And for me, the trick is, you know, you can put tattoos all over him and have him swing big axes, but there should be something in his attitude and demeanor that will bring about that feeling. That’s the challenge here, is to make him as interesting as his father.
‘Cause when you think of the Hulk, you can’t help but think in terms of awe-inspiring power, the most powerful creature in the Marvel Universe, basically. As his son, how is he going to stack up against that? For me, that’s the challenge. Visually I have to convey that feeling. I have to make him feel as enigmatic as his father.

Click here for the full interview.

Vaneta Rogers has interviewed Greg Pak about “Skaar: Son of Hulk” for Newsarama. Here’s an excerpt:

NRAMA: Seeing as Skaar is, basically, a newborn, is this a coming of age story?
GP: It’s an exploration of what you get if you raise a person in a war-torn world stripped of every vestige of civilization – and then ask him to play nicely with others. Skaar will absolutely come of age during the course of this story – but not exactly in that heartwarming, afterschool special sort of way.

Click here for the full article.

At the Sunday afternoon “Mondo Marvel” panel at WizardWorld Los Angeles, Marvel announced that penciller Ron Garney will join writer Greg Pak on the “Skaar: Son of Hulk” series that debuts in June. Marvel.com has more. Here’s an excerpt:

SKAAR: SON OF HULK focuses on the child of the Hulk and Caira the Oldstrong, his now-deceased wife. With his mother dead and his father back on Earth, Skaar grows up fending for his life on the post-apocalyptic planet of his birth, Sakaar.
“There’s a grand tradition of stories that explore the fantasy of savage survival,” explains Pak. “Maybe the more civilized and protected yet weirdly complicated and exposed the real world becomes, the more we’re attracted to stories about barbaric worlds where the rules are brutally simple. After battling bureaucracy and petty hypocrisy all day long, it can be nice to escape into a fantasy world where people survive by their wits and fists and swords.
“But there can be an element of wish-fulfilling denial to these kinds of stories—an artificial dream of noble savagery that can hide the true costs of brutalization and war. With SKAAR: SON OF HULK we’re embracing—and exploding—that fantasy, mining it for all its epic adventure and harrowing subtext.”

Click here to read the whole thing.