Hitting the Wall VI: The Hulk

Even from a strong beginning as one of the earlier superheroes of Marvel's Silver Age, the Hulk would run early on into problems of concept and design, and would not really achieve workable and mature forms until he had appeared in stories over twenty years.

Nor would the stable versions guarantee any kind of coherent tenure to the character; the need to boost sales and the desire to explore different kinds of stories would once again push writers into a kind of experimentation that risks making the character unworkable.

These experiments, when they succeed, can produce syntheses that generate years of stories. When they fail, however, they dead-end writers into the kind of incremental tinkering that can become an ordeal for the reader. That such experiments began very early in the Hulk's tenure suggest that flaws of concept attach to the core character.

The Core of the Hulk

Jack Kirby once described the Hulk as an attempt to adapt Stevenson's "Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde" to superhero comics. However, some things (beyond the superheroic) disconnected the Hulk from his prototype in prose. Hyde represented a kind of cunning ill-will, whereas the Hulk remained a study in human anger, somewhat detached from moral context.

Other differences come easily to mind. The Hulk suffered a more grotesque physical transformation, acquiring more muscle mass than a rhinoceros (or two), changing color (generally green although sometimes, and originally, gray), and losing (generally) most of Bruce Banner's formidable brain power in the transformation.

From his earliest interpretation - indeed, before Lee and Kirby moved on from this concept to other, newer, fresher products they would later create - the Hulk seemed to lose some direction and require redefinition.

Early Adjustments

An editorial decision recolored the Hulk from his more dignified gray to a more grotesque (and perhaps more compelling) green. This change, however, did little to redefine the concept of the Hulk, but it did show a tendency to revise the character within his first dozen appearances.

The methods of transformation also changed in the Hulk's earliest history, and these did relate, ultimately, to the core concept. In the very first Hulk stories, Bruce Banner transformed into his larger counterpart at sunset, with his curse somewhat resembling that of the werewolf. During this early period, Banner tended to control the Hulk by imprisoning himself in a stone cell before nightfall.

Not long thereafter, though, Banner took matters into his own hands and contrived a means to force the transformation by bombarding himself with more gamma rays, something the conventions of superhero comics allowed him to do without real-world consequences like leukemia resulting. At this point, therefore, the Hulk could appear on demand, when Banner saw some crisis that the brute horsepower of the Hulk might somehow correct.

Even this, however, did not endure long. Marvel found a better formula for the Hulk's transformation by tying it to Banner's adrenaline and pulse rate - by becoming angry, frightened or (possibly) surprised, Banner would begin the usually-undesirable process of becoming the Hulk. This temper-based transformation endured for many years, from sometime in the sixties until sometime in the eighties.

Another early change - but not one for the better - involved the Hulk's speech patterns. The Hulk originally spoke something like a syntactically coherent English, though obviously not one of a particularly high literary quality. However, someone at Marvel - I don't really want to know who, at this point - figured that the Hulk spoke too intelligently and went about dumbing down his speech.

Thus we saw the birth of Hulksprach, an atrocious and idiosyncratic dialect thoroughly as annoying as the babble of DC's Superbaby. Hulk, for long and tiresome years, referred to himself in the third person - "Hulk smash!" - and garbled persons when attempting to speak otherwise, using "me" for "I" and making other affronts to the language that presumably made him seem more bestial. Unfortunately, this pattern of speech mainly stood as an embarrassment to the reader; it altogether lacked the charm of the mangled English that appeared in comic strips like "Pogo" or "Popeye."

On top of this, we confront the issue of wardrobe. Marvel recolored Hulk's skin, believing gaudier schemes offered more to the reader - assuming that "color sells comics" or something like that. So we have the classic green hulk. What genius of design, though, decided to inflict upon this tragic soul those atrocious magenta pants? Even in the sixties and seventies, where clothing went through da-glo riots of colors to studies in earth tones, nothing like the Hulk's pants appeared on the market for general consumption. The green-and-magenta scheme abused the eye just as the Hulk's speech abused the sensibilities of self-appointed guardians of the language.

Nonetheless, once the method of transformation had settled, and the Hulk's speech patterns congealed around a specific (and obnoxious) grammar, and his color scheme burned itself into his canon, the Hulk became stable for a remarkable stretch of time.

However, though easy to recognize and easy to write, this version of the Hulk had limited potential as a character. He could throw a tantrum, break something, move on, or transform back to Banner.

First Stability

Once the Hulk's appearance, wardrobe, ludicrous speech pattern, and means of transformation became constants, the character remained in that form for many years. At the dawn of the seventies, this had not yet come to limit Incredible Hulk as a title.

After all, a writer can deal with a very limited character even without doing things to deepen the concept. In the Trimpe - Severin days of the Hulk's title, for instance, the Hulk himself, while playing the center of action, nonetheless acted as a foil for other characters to contrast themselves against.

Frequently, Incredible Hulk stories might revolve around something else entirely, such as the unfortunate figure who attempted to cure his cancer by injecting some of Banner's blood into his veins in order to use gamma strength to fight the disease - in this case, the cancer got the power and consumed its host completely, before becoming a giant, mobile green puddle that the Hulk would eventually destroy by sticking a flagpole in it so that lightning could hit it.

While Bruce Banner, the Hulk's tormented alter ego, provided something of a connection to the reader by allowing him to have someone to relate to, the Hulk could do little more than break things, threaten his tormentors, and engage in philosophical soliloquies like "Hulk smash!" or "Hulk is the strongest one that is."

With the end of the Silver Age - defined in this case as mostly predating 1972 - Hulk stories became less and less interesting. The writing failed to compel, and Herb Trimpe would get inkers less and less able to make his work shine. Eventually the entire book would enjoy comprehensive turnovers in talent. Yet the Hulk continued, essentially unmodified, in the pages of Incredible Hulk and Defenders, playing to an exhausted formula.

This probably inclined my own abandonment of the title between 1972 and 1977, and only intermittent reading of it thereafter until my departure from comics altogether between 1983 and 1996. I suspect many other fans did the same.

Yet in the latter period the Hulk would enjoy a renaissance of definition that would keep the character vital for years.

Second Stability

The name Peter David attaches to the Hulk because of a remarkable tenure David spent writing the book. In the sixties, we might see the occasional piece where someone wrote a book for ten years - as official credits say Stan Lee did on Fantastic Four. In the eighties and nineties, however, keeping a writer on a book for around 100 issues or longer became a very rare thing. Writers would either burn out and leave, get into fights with editors and leave, receive better offers and leave, or get fired from titles long before anything like a hundred issues passed their pens (or keyboards).

For many readers, the Peter David Hulk remains the classic and canonical version. Particularly through David's resort to a Hulk more in keeping with Kirby / Lee's original interpretation of the character - a very powerful but suspicious gray giant - he made the character more workable, divesting him (for the most part) of the atrocious purple pants and equally vile stunted vernacular. In place of the "Hulk smash!" Hulk, David created a sardonic, powerful being that, though he did not necessarily have resort to Banner's intelligence (or identity), nonetheless enjoyed a certain native cunning. For some time, Hulk appeared in this, the "Fixit" role (from a handle he acquired while working as some kind of organized crime bagman).

The Blended Hulk

At some point during his tenure on Incredible Hulk, Peter David began exploring the questions of what made the Hulk tick. Why must he change forms? Where did the anger that drives the Hulk came from? Why did versions of the Hulk exist - why had the Hulk started gray, turned green, and then turned gray again? Why had his speech patterns changed?

At this point, the Hulk concept became considerably more psychological and delved into subjects surrounding the sometimes-dubious study of the multiple personality phenomenon.

The vehicle of Leonard Sampson, who had acquired the most benign of the gamma powers - he became muscular and green-haired, without the deformities that marked the Leader or the Abomination, and without the degradation of intelligence and personality that defined the Hulk. Sampson, a psychologist, got into Hulk's head to find out what made him tick, and discovered an ugly terrain of an unhappy childhood within a pathological family.

Through therapy, Sampson revealed and then integrated multiple personality components that expressed them separately as such entities as "Banner" and "Hulk" and "Fixit" (one manifestation of the Hulk) and created a compromise called the "blended Hulk" which allowed much of Banner's personality to control the Hulk's physical form.

By the time that Perez and David explored Hulk's own "evil future self" nightmare - a much abused theme that has worked mainly for Peter David and for Jim Starlin - we had a green, powerful Hulk who could control his actions and enjoyed Banner's intelligence, though his emotional makeup meant that a Banner-Hulk lacked the brute power inherent in a furious sixties-seventies version.

The blended Banner-Hulk has much to offer. One need no longer endure idiot dialogue; one need not ask "How come the Hulk still can't identify himself as Banner?"; one need not groan in aesthetic distress at the vileness of the Hulk's color scheme. On a storytelling level, one can relate better to a Banner-Hulk, particularly as he appeared in the Maestro saga, since this Hulk balances in one form Banner's humane instincts with the power and fury of the Hulk.

The Future

Through the nineties and into the turn of the 21st century, the Hulk continued in some kind of blended Hulk form, with the constant problem of balancing Banner's fractured personality into a sane and controllable whole replacing the earlier crisis-of-temper that once defined the character.

This version of the Hulk, like Fixit before him, has a few years left to him, but it seems likely that readers will tire of the pseudo-psychology and the stories that ask the question of who really occupies that giant green form. Once this happens, we can expect another round of experimentation, or, alternately, a fall back to some previous version of the Hulk - probably the baby-talking one in the purple pants.