Mighty Marvel Masterworks: The Incredible Hulk Volume 1

When I was a kid I had a paperback collection of the first six or so issues of The Incredible Hulk, so basically the same comics as are collected here. I read that book until it fell apart, but didn’t have any other books like it. I don’t think that experiment really took for Marvel, but this Mighty Marvel Masterworks series seems to be doing well. They’re cheaper reproductions in a smaller format than the Epic Collections, but as long as you’re not a comic purist who gets upset at any tampering with the format or colour of the original then they do the job.

So what we have here is the Hulk’s original origin story, with Dr. Bruce Banner being irradiated from the blast of the gamma bomb he designed. He should have been observing the blast from a safe distance but he had to go out to rescue 16-year-old Rick Jones, who had driven out onto the test site. Rick Jones will, unfortunately, continue to be the Hulk’s sidekick for all of these early comics and he’s a pointless burden. Literally as he holds on to the Hulk’s back as they go hopping around.

Stan Lee was just trying out ideas here, looking to see what would work. In the first issue the Hulk is actually gray but this turned out to be too hard a colour to manage so in subsequent issues he experienced a chromatic shift (without any explanation) into the more familiar green. As initially introduced he also turns into the Hulk only at night and is Dr. Banner by day, which was too limiting for the character and so was discarded nearly as quickly as the gray skin. Then for a while Banner built a gamma ray machine that allowed him to change himself into the Hulk and then back again, but you could tell that device was wearing thin already by the later issues here. And finally there’s the question of how the Hulk gets around. In issue #3 Rick easily runs away from him: “Lucky for me the Hulk can’t move too fast!” But later in the same issue the big green guy is literally flying around with his island-hopping jumps.

In short, things were very much in a state of flux and it wasn’t clear what sort of a character the Hulk would be. Though that’s something that has stayed with the Hulk over the years, as evidenced by the different forms and colours he’s taken. Essentially this is another take on the Jekyll-Hyde dichotomy, the “milksop” scientist and the unleashed beast, and it’s always been a live question how much the one bleeds into the other.

The writing is slapdash in the extreme. Apparently Dr. Banner and Rick have excavated that underground hideout where the Hulk can be locked up all by themselves. And when the Hulk breaks the door down and smashes the elaborate mechanism used to shut it, it can be quickly repaired. “Lucky I was able to replace this shattered steel ramrod!” Rick tells us. Lucky indeed. When the Toad Men arrive from outer space their “grapplers” are quickly able to identify “the most brilliant scientific brain on Earth” (which would be Dr. Banner). When the Hulk and Rick and Betty Ross escape from the underground kingdom of Tyrannus the Mighty, Betty is in a state of shock that is like “some kind of amnesia!” Which means she conveniently won’t remember any of their adventures. You can see how comics had a lot of growing up to do. At this point superhero comics were juvenile entertainment and made no bones about it.

Originally published from 1962 to 1963, there’s the usual Cold War overlay, something I mentioned before in my review of the contemporary Ant-Man comics. The Hulk faces off against such Red menaces as the Gargoyle (whose defeat might signal “the beginning of the end of the Red tyranny too!”), Mongo (not a “gladiator from space” but a robot built by the “wily Reds”), and General Fang (a Chinese Communist warlord who leads his hordes against peaceful neighbours). “Do those commies think they’re playing with kids?” the Hulk asks, as he crushes one of their grenades in his hand. If so, they are soon disabused of the notion.

I liked this well enough when I was a kid, which isn’t surprising given that was very much who these comics were aimed at. That’s obvious just from the presence of Rick Jones and the Teen Brigade. These kids are actually the most dated part of all these books, saying things like “Daddy-O.” But that’s the price you pay for being hip.

Graphicalex