Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko & The Incredible Hulk That Failed

1.

It's always a relief and an inspiration to realise again that Stan Lee, Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko didn't invariably know quite what they were doing during that creative high summer of Marvel's in the first half of the 1960s. For there's a terrible danger in looking back on the run of marquee-headlining characters created by those three gentlemen between the summer of '61 and the spring of '64 and assuming that the excellence of their work can be explained with reference to some vaguely-defined form of temporary and collective genius. In retrospect, it can indeed seem that Mr Lee and Mr Kirby and Mr Ditko were together locked so deeply into what sports psychologists call the zone that there's nothing that we relatively unblessed mortals might learn from their achievements beyond perhaps the need to keep praying that the next life brings us such remarkable skills of our own; The Fantastic Four, The Hulk, Spider-Man, Thor, Ant-Man, The Wasp, Dr Strange, Iron Man, The Avengers, The X-Men, Daredevil, and all the host of supporting characters and story-concepts that've helped to float an entire cross-medium industry ever since, all debuting in that period of less than three years. And in the face of that achievement, rather than asking "How did they do it?", we're all too often reduced to asking instead "What did they do to ruin their own good luck?", because it often seems impossible to believe that they didn't have the creative process under their control, and that they therefore must have done something to ruin what otherwise might have continued for years more. Did they, perhaps, disrupt their own fine fortune through poor communication, or power politics, or the mis-distribution of financial spoils, or any number and combination of factors that might be considered in hindsight as relevant to the eventual tailing off of all that incredibly inspiring work?

At what point, in the context of the creation of the modern superhero comic, did Lee and Kirby and Ditko become mortal and fallible, and who's to blame? Where lies the Yoko Ono-factor in this story?


Yet the heartening truth about the work of Marvel's hallowed creative trinity is that for all of their undoubted brilliance, and I don't think "brilliance" is too strong a word, they weren't ever able to simply put finger to typewriter and pencil tip to page and create one market-dominating masterpiece after another. In truth, it doesn't take more than a moment to note that the run of books mentioned above hardly arrived fully-formed and fit-for-purpose, since only Spider-Man and, after their second issue, the Fantastic Four, didn't require some measure of radical conceptual surgery to ensure that the characters prospered. Indeed, to a greater or lesser degree, every single one of the "first-wave" books needed recurrent and often fundamental redesigning to ensure that they competed as best they could on the newsstands and in the comic racks of the Sixties, and of course beyond. And many of those properties which now seem to have arrived as complete-in-themselves and fighting-fit, as Superman and Batman had in their turn appeared to do so in their day, actually struggled simply to tick over as middle-ranking sellers. Of these, of course, none had such an impossibly confused and difficult early life as "The Incredible Hulk", whose own comic lasted but six issues before being cancelled as its final chapter hit the stands in the January of 1963.

For the story of Lee, Kirby and Ditko and the Silver-Age Marvel revolution is, as we all know, one of perseverance as well as inspiration, of flaws as much as of perfection, and of hard and often counter-productive effort as much as the unveiling of one good-for-fifty-years franchise after another, and their mutual achievements are made all the more impressive and inspiring by realising again that they were mortal, that they had games where they left the pitch muttering after scoring a duck, and that sometimes the books that they lavished their attentions upon suffered not in the absence of their best efforts, but in part because of them.

2.

If there ever was a practical textbook for how not to write a superhero tale, then it was those first six attempts in the pages of The Incredible Hulk to turn Lee's idea of a superhero/monster hybrid into a viably reader-friendly shape. Misjudgement after mistake follows on one after another in that initial short run, and every issue is marked by radical changes to the strip's fundamental premises in a futile though instructive attempt to take Mr Lee's confidence about the ill-defined character and indeed power-set of the Hulk and make something substantial and successful of it. Much of these difficulties, of course, were caused by the fact that Mr Lee was in uncharted waters, trying to reinvent the superhero with one eye on sales and another on his own tastes and emotions, and where his inspiration, improvisations and craft had paid dividends with the radically left-of-centre superheroes of "The Fantastic Four" and "Spider-Man", the Hulk posed a quite different challenge.


Quite frankly, Lee and his colleagues never quite established what the Hulk's purpose in the stories which bore his name was. Did he exist as the antagonist of his own comic, to unthinkingly threaten the status quo of early Sixties America, or was he perhaps even a world-threatening super-villain, possessed of both unrivaled strength and super-intelligence.? Or was the Hulk in some way a down-at-heel and cruelly misunderstood superhero, a protagonist who despite being hated and hunted down, faced up to his wider moral responsibilities and saved the Marvel Universe from even-more fearsome foes? For the Hulk was in fact all of those things, and often all at the same time too. In his second appearance, for example, he fought the invading Toad Men, but only to secure his own freedom and to get his great green fingers on their alien super-weaponry. (At 2:10:8 he declares; "With this flying dreadnought under me, I can wipe out all mankind! Now the Hulk can be the hunter instead of the hunted!") And that in itself was an incredible whiplash change of direction from the Hulk's introduction just two months before, when he'd been portrayed as an almost mindless Frankenstein Monster-esque creature, where his one coherent ambition seemed to be best declared in his haltingly expressed desire to " ... get away -- to hide --". (1.6.6.)


The Hulk in his first short-lived and ever-changing incarnation was, therefore, either portrayed as a passive or a quite frankly threatening if not entirely evil character. Neither quality, it might be argued, is a particularly winning characteristic for a book-headlining superhero to bear, and that would be particularly true for the far more conservative tastes of 1962's comic book market. For a Hulk who merely wants to be left alone creates nothing of purpose in his own stories. He has no mission except to find somewhere quiet and secure, and stay there. A successful adventure from the point-of-view of that Hulk would be one which began in silence and darkness, progressed through the same, and ended quite as it had started, meaning that drama had to be continually generated by the accident of people stumbling upon the Hulk or vice-versa, leaving the narrative constantly lacking any purposeful direction. And although later incarnations of the Hulk turned that passivity into a childish and endearing quality, here the monster is a growling and murderous beast, and even now it's hard to feel sympathy for this ugly, selfish and violent take on Bruce Banner's alter-ego, a monster who had no mission to fulfil, and yet no winning personal qualities to inspire sympathy by either. With his thick and broad brow protruding above the tiniest of noses, his eyes buried deep into his skull and sheeted in shadow, this Hulk is Karloff not as alienated child but brooding psychopathic killer, and the reader couldn't help but know it.

Trying to inspire the reader's affection while giving the Hulk some purpose saw the character's intelligence and personality radically alter from issue to issue, as if the Hulk were an engine which just needed to be correctly calibrated before letting it run efficiently on forever. (The fact that there might be a fatal flaw or two in the Hulk's conception was obviously one which the confident tinkerer that was Stan Lee refused to at first accept.) So, the Hulk was transformed into a mean, intelligent and world-threatening super-baddie in issue two, and a mindless golem under the control of Rick Jones in the comic book following that. The first solution solved the problem of the Hulk's passivity, but replaced it with the problem that readers were unlikely to want to buy into the adventures of a creature who wanted to destroy all of mankind, and the second collapsed on the back of the problem that Rick Jones lacked an agenda beyond wanting to keep the Hulk hidden away too.

And as each issue tries to recombine the strips various components in an attempt to make them gel and function effectively, the whole business starts to become rather desperately amusing. This is the single example of a Lee/Kirby/Ditko superhero strip from this period which starts off badly, if intriguingly, and then tapers off quickly into confusion and abject commercial failure. (Even the adventures of Hank Pym survived longer in the marketplace than this, albeit with the sales support of two of the Fantastic Four, and then of course the Hulk himself, as co-features.) And the attempts in the second half of this first run to recast the Hulk as a superhero, while retaining something of his distinctive fierceness, gutted the comic of much of its remaining power, and lead to the most cringe-worthy moment of all in these six comics, where we're shown the Hulk stroking the hair of some teenage radio hams who've helped him to defeat the Metal Master while declaring "I guess you kids deserve most of the credit! If you hadn't rounded up all the junk I needed to make that gun, it woulda been too late." (6.21.8) It's a compassionate volte-face that doesn't just fail to make sense in terms of the character's previous behaviour, but also in terms of hpw the creature behaves and what he says just two panels before, where he's aggressively declaring that " ... most of you dumb humans always lose your heads when somthin' happens!" (6.21.6) Stumped to discover how to make the Hulk both Frankenstein and Superman, Lee is here reduced to having him be both in different and quite contradictory panels, and in just six issues, the Hulk had been transformed from a super-powered horror to a gruff Ben Grimm-like superhero with an embarrassing gang of teenage sidekicks demanding gruffly-delivered cuddles from him.

3.

We know that this period saw Stan Lee becoming more and more certain that one of the key components of the new Marvel superhero was the presence of a tragic alter ego, the human Achilles Heel which inspired pity as much as the super-powers inspired awe, and Banner is certainly such a piteous figure. The "milksop" scientist held in contempt by General Thunderbolt Ross who suddenly and terrifyingly finds himself hyper-powerful, but unable to reveal himself to the world, would seem to fit Lee's schema very well, except that of course Banner carries all the weight of the disadvantages of being the Hulk without experiencing any of the benefits for himself. In fact, Banner doesn't ever become a super-powered character at all, because his mind as well as his body mutates as the Hulk takes control. He's all pity and no glory, a perpetual victim despite his early successes in saving Rick Jones' life, transforming the Gargoyle back to normal and repelling the invasion of the unfearsome Toad Men, for he's doomed to wait helplessly for the sunset before surrendering his own mind as well as his body to the Hulk. This is a character who cannot win, and the reader knows that, for if Banner cures himself of the Hulk, the comic book itself ceases to exist. This simple fact robs the narrative of anything other than a weary knowledge that while punch-ups will be won, the satisfaction of seeing the curse of The Hulk lifted will never arrive.


Indeed, it's terribly hard to see how Lee and Kirby imagined that Bruce Banner might serve in any fashion as a heroic lead in The Hulk at all. For, even beyond the problems outlined above, Banner's situation is so terrible that none of the enjoyment-through-association that younger readers in particular gain from comic books was possible. Banner doesn't ever become a super-powered character because his mind as well as his body mutates as the Hulk takes control. The Hulk is, by any rational calculation, therefore a mental disorder as much as a physical mutation, and Banner himself is utterly diminished by both processes. There's little more disturbing in all of Marvel's history, for example, than the scene at 1:14: 6-8, where Banner sits impassively before a window as night falls and waits to be obliterated by his alter ego's arrival. As the shadows across his face deepen, his eyes widen and his teeth clench with horror, and finally his features are entirely obscured by darkness. It's the comic book equivalent of a man awakening briefly from Alzheimer's only to realise that he'll inevitably be reclaimed, and it's a thoroughly unsettling scene.


There's no wish-fulfillment to be had here, although there is a fascinatingly powerful metaphor of how indeterminate our personalities are when we're possessed by extreme emotions, and it was quite literally too dark a place for a superhero book to occupy so unflinchingly in the Marvel Comics universe of 1962. I'd imagine that many readers took one look at the panels (1:4:6/7) where Banner's irradiation by the Gamma Bomb is expressed by his endless screaming and decided, consciously or not, that this wasn't very much fun at all. After all, to the fact of Banner being a victim of extreme and uncontrollable mental illness had been added every trauma and neurosis of the atomic age, an era in which American school-children practised hiding beneath their desks in order to prepare for when the bomb dropped. This, the comic was telling its readers, is what happens when the bomb drops, and radioactivity here went beyond a plot convenience that might give you spider-powers to a deathly force that would ruin your body and your mind before setting out to wipe out everyone around you too. The Hulk was therefore an ill-considered metaphor for just about every substantial public fear of the period; the disruptive and violent outsider, the mentally disordered, the physically diseased, and the horrible awareness that the atom-bombers were always airborne and ready to destroy the world with the press of a red button or two.

Taking all that and mixing it in a commercially successful manner with a superhero tale was always going to beyond Mr Lee and Mr Kirby's abilities, because it would've been beyond anybodys in the context of that time and that market. The Hulk in his original form was everything that's most fearful about the early Sixties to the white majority of America beyond the unthinkable taint of Communism. And any effort to make him heroic and compensate for those would only diminish the horror, causing the character's uniqueness to dissipate, as indeed soon happened in issues 5 and 6. But attempting to retain that menace would only produce a brew far too bleak and unappealing even for the new audience that bought into the travails of Peter Parker and The Thing.

4.

There are moments when it seems clear that Banner and not the Hulk has been given the job of playing the tale's protagonist, such as when he does free the Gargoyle or when he pops up at sunrise to destroy the Toad Men's fleet. Yet, in the very next issue after that, Banner is entirely absent from the story, and then his situation shifts again as he gains the power to maintain a greater measure of his intelligence when the Hulk emerges each night at dusk. Time after time, the story becomes something utterly different to what it was before, and though surely the sales figures couldn't have been returned in accurate detail in time to influence the next comic book off the rank, something was making Lee corkscrew around with the narrative's set-up. By issue 5, the Hulk is back as a quite separate personality from Banner's and acting, as we've said, as something of a superhero in taking on the "brutal hordes of General Fang", (5.15.6) while by the final book of the run, the relationship between the two characters is even more protean and even more uncertain. Banner is now at times retaining some of the Hulk's muscles and strength after transforming back, while the Hulk is forced to wear a Hulk mask to hide the fact that Banner's white face, and presumably his short-sightedness too, hasn't changed while the rest of him has. (Having the Hulk appear wearing a mask of his own features surely takes the award for the daftest example of jeopardy in any Marvel Comic from the period, though I fully accept there'll be considerable competition for that.)

In all of these situations, Banner, whether the hero of the tale or its victim, is portrayed as the character in the text most worthy of our sympathy. "How much longer can I endure this?", he asks himself at 6:4:2, and it's something which the readers must have been asking themselves too. Because at the core of Banner's character lurks a moral cowardice which is shared by no other Marvel superheroes alter-ego, and although I wasn't conscious of this as a boy, I'm now sure that I was aware on some level that Bruce Banner's behavior was never a simple and goodly counter-weight to the Hulk's at all. For there was always something about Banner which made General Ross's crass and bigoted insults seem almost appropriate, some wretched quality of his which they seemed to illuminate even as the text tried its best to cover the truth of the matter up. And that truth is that General Ross was right, for Banner as a character was fatally flawed when it came to occupying a heroic space in the text. He's an appallingly selfish and anti-heroic man. His first response upon awakening as himself after the Hulk has violently kidnapped Betty Ross is to express gratitude that she's remained unconscious throughout the whole affair; "Perhaps it's better this way." he says, "She cannot know my terrible secret." (2.22.9) Now, you and I might think that everybody should know Banner's secret. The Hulk is the most dangerous of monsters and even by the character's second issue, it's obvious that he can't be controlled. He's even menacing Banner's so-called true love in a thoroughly aggressive and disturbing way. Yet Banner arrives at the belief that secrecy is the best option without any reflection on his own responsibilities at all! Imagine the lives that might have been saved, the existences unshattered, if Banner had been a decent man who put the community's needs before his own. He's the equivalent of any patient zero, of any Typhoid Mary, who continues to wander through the world despite knowing of their own contagious sickness because they don't want their freedom curtailed.


Banner's intention to maintain his everyday existence while attempting to lock his alter ego away every night is more than a reprehensible attempt to hide the reality of his situation away in the name of his own privacy. It's also the act of a profoundly selfish scientist as well as a utterly self-obsessed man. Because if Banner's Gamma Bomb creates such monsters, then Banner is the best means by which science can study, and perhaps learn to deal with, the situation. (There's no indication that this Marvel Universe is one where governments would sanction Banner's medicalised torture, and such state corruption won't appear in the MU for years and years, and so the good doctor isn't hiding the truth in order to avoid losing anything but his own liberty.) Yet he doesn't even inform Ross, or indeed anyone else, that the Gamma Bomb can cause such mutations, let alone that it's already done so and that everyone, both near and far, is now in appalling danger.

But Banner wants to be normal, and Banner wants to be with Betty, and so Banner doesn't end up sounding like a very different character to the various selfish Hulks at all. If Banner didn't see how immoral his decision to hide the truth of his situation was in the wake of the horror of his first few mutations, he really ought to have done so after a few dozen of Hulk-caused disasters. And so it's not Ross that demeans Banner in the reader's eyes, but rather Banner who does it to himself. If he had any of what General Ross would surely refer to as "moral backbone", he'd have given himself up. Yet he constantly puts others at risk in his own interest. It's actually unforgivable, and whether its present in the text or the sub-text of the story, it leaves us with a character who can only run and hide while only very rarely inspiring admiration or sympathy.

5.

With the ever-changing status quo of "The Hulk" in this brief period, where the heroic and villainous roles in the stories are constantly being filled in confusingly different ways and to different degrees by Banner and the various Hulks, it's no surprise to note that the super-villains present in the text appear both redundant and irrelevant. Redundant, in that "The Incredible Hulk" already has an antagonist present in the great green shape of the title character, and irrelevant because each of the villains on show in the first six books tell us little about the Hulk at all. In fact, they're a selection of generic baddies and run-of-the-mill communists which could, and regularly were, dropped into the pages of most every Marvel book except for Dr Strange. It's certainly no surprise that the only one of them has been regularly used in the Marvel Universe in the years since and that's the openly-derided Ringmaster, the truly unimpressive possessor of a big top and big hypnotic hat. Quite what a carnival huckster can tell the reader of the Hulk through comparison with and conflict against Banner's alter ego escapes me, just as I'm baffled about what Tyrannus, the cad from far under the ground, means in the context of the Hulk's tales. These super-villains stumble into the Hulk's orbit, get bashed around rather considerably and then limp off without anyone being changed, anything being altered, and nothing being learned beyond the fact that Hulk is, yes, stronger than anyone.

But there were two antagonists who offered a great deal more than a standar-issue evilness to the Hulk's nascent mythology, and these were the Gargoyle and, less significantly, the Metal Master. Both possessed mental abilities which could be played up in comparison to the Hulk's raw and excessive power and brutish thinking, but, regretably, the Gargoyle barely meets the Hulk and the Metal Master is faced by a Hulk with much of Banner's scientific knowledge. More confusingly yet, the Gargoyle is cured of his own deformities by Banner, and, bereft of his mutant intelligence, turns against his Communist masters in an act of nuclear self-immolation. What can this possibly be telling us? That any advantage caused by mutation is a difference ill-earned which should be eradicated whenever possible? That those who've been mutated should allow themselves to die in recompense for their sins? That nothing is so precious as being "normal"? That Banner's mission is to assist others who've suffered as he has to die?


The list of possible and confusing readings stretches on for far longer than just those three suggestions, but I hope the point is made. This is a book whose creators simply didn't know what they're were doing, and bereft of the kind of luck combined with inspiration and hard work that grounded Spider-Man immediately as a metaphor for adolescence, and which then lent any of his opponents the metaphorical threat posed by the adult world to the youthful Peter Parker, the Hulk stumbled along from crisis to crisis without generating a single convincing antagonist at all. And even as the Hulk might at any moment morph from hero to villain and back again without any good reason for doing so at all, so too can the meaning of his adventures turn on a sixpence and race in the opposite direction to whatever had been cannon two months before.

6.

General Thaddeus E. "Thunderbolt" Ross is the vilest of characters, a blustering old toothless Patton screaming at Banner before a full control room of scientists and technicians that the inventor of the Gamma Bomb is " ... a milk-sop! You've got no guts!" (1:2:6). But he's also the single most convincing and semi-admirable protagonist in all of these six issues, a fact which again speaks of how confused the whole construction of "The Incredible Hulk" is. Ross is J. Jonah Jameson writ unpleasantly large, a stereotype of a stereotype, and given that I loathed the character as I did no other in comic books as a boy, and given that it's still hard for me to read his bellyaching and bullying without wanting to see him thrown out of the army, and indeed off of the planet, for cruelty as well as braying arrogance, that's saying something. And yet, despite the lack of respect that he and his opinions are shown in Mr Lee's text here, General Ross always occupies a position of moral correctness that exists quite independently of his unpleasant personality. He's a public servant dedicated to preserving the social status quo against the violations of The Hulk, and regardless of how we might hate him for insulting dear saintly Dr Banner, he's absolutely right to do so. The Hulk is a menace, Banner is a coward, and the actions of the two are a terrible threat to the United States, if not the world. And when Ross listens to his trembling daughter express her fears that " ... The Hulk! He came from the darkness! He -- he was terrifying!"(1:21:5), and swears that "I'll find him and destroy him!" (1:21:6), he's stepping into the role of the traditional monster-slayer, and monster the Hulk surely is. Ross is doing no more than defending his daughter as well as the rest of us, and his judgement of the Hulk was correct, for this Hulk wasn't the misunderstood child of the later decades in any way at all.


In fact, General Ross is one of the few characters in The Hulk who displays some genuine competency on any consistent basis. He leads the Earth's resistance to the Toad Men and brings down one of their orbiting space-ships, although how he fills the post of managing the Gamma Ray programme and running Earth's missile defence shield is a touch puzzling. He's as brave as we might expect a career military man to be, having presumably begun his career in World War One, refusing later to bow to the Toad Men's fleet with a sub-Churchillian "We'll never surrender! We'll fight 'em! We'll beat 'em! Somehow, someway, we'll save Earth for mankind!" (2:16:6), and he nearly manages that where the Hulk is concerned by later trapping him in a rocket and blasting him away from the Earth more than forty years before the Illuminati thought to do so.


Smug, self-obsessed, nasty and the bearer of an authoritarian personality he might be, but General Ross is the closest to a hero that the pages of "The Incredible Hulk" got to, which must in itself rather insistently point to some pretty serious flaws in the structure of the book itself.

7.

But any book which starred such a genuinely unpleasant man as Ross as its supposed protagonist was never going to survive in that marketplace, not even back when the political youthquake of the counter-culture was yet to shudder its way up to the attention of the American mainstream. Sadly, neither was the token teenager of these stories, Rick Jones, one of the least invigorating serial superhero-sidekicks in the history of American comics, ever going to win a substantial book-selling readership either. For regardless of how Marvel Comics have constantly underplayed his sole culpability for the ruination of Bruce Banner's life and the creation of the Hulk, Jones is one of the least sympathetic and most catastrophically ignorant supporting characters of all time. As such, he occupies a singularly odd place in the narrative as a whole. On first appearance, there's a suspicion of James Dean if not Marlon Brando, a counter-cultural rebel. "Cool it, man! The kids bet I wouldn't have nerve enough to sneak past the guards ... " (1:4:1), he says, while


posing with a harmonica just a few feet away from ground zero. Yet any hope that Jones might bring with him a set of values which would set him radically apart from the military status quo of the book's cast swiftly collapses, because Jones isn't a rebel so much as an idiot without a cause. He's a nice boy, an under-achiever with a sweet nature, and very little is made of the fact that he unleashed the Hulk upon Marvel Earth, because how could a sweet kid be such an irresponsible and culpable idiot? It's as if any teenager might by chance and irresponsibility cause such a beast to be created, as regrettable as crashing dad's convertible on a country lane or burning down the tree house after falling asleep while surreptitiously smoking there. How those "kids" who wagered with him to drive into a bomb testing sight must have wanted rid of him, and how much better it would've been for everyone else on Marvel-Earth if it had been Jones that'd had been "... bathed in the full force of the mysterious gamma rays". (1:4:5)

Comic books lie to their audiences, as all fictions do. Lee and Kirby's "Hulk" almost convinces us that Jones is a dynamic presence, a true friend and something of a hero in himself, just as it twists our perspective until General Ross becomes the butt if not entirely the villain of the piece. And, yes, Jones does nurse and support Banner, even somehow learning to operate a "complex ray-machine" (5:1) and how to replace a "shattered steel rambo" weighing several tons (4:11:6), two achievements which are as mysteriously achieved as any the Hulk might pull off in an alien dimension. (Where the requisite strength and knowledge came from is something the text avoids dwelling on.) But Jones is the villain of the piece in so many ways, and not simply in that he caused the Hulk to be created. He's also party to all of Banner's deceptions, and every single disaster that the Hulk causes is aided and abetted by him. If the text didn't constantly portray him unconvincingly as a heroic figure, he might have made the most fascinating study in self-deception, a well-meaning but immature and guilt-stricken lad who started off by ruining the world and then made it worse.


However, by the time Jones has decided to not only continue to help keep the Hulk at large but to assist the green-skinned beast by organising the Teen Brigade, "typical American teen-agers" (6:15:4) who serve as an information-providing radio network for the Hulk in his struggles with the alien Metal Master, the narrative has tumbled over from playful comic-book exaggeration into idiocy. The super-Frankenstein Monster is now the leader of a children's after-school activity club, and whatever potential the terrifying first appearance of the Hulk had possessed has now been twisted and twisted again into a strip which has no idea at all of what it's trying to achieve beyond being popular.


And in the end, I'm shocked to find that General Ross's opinion of Jones is the most sensible one in the book. For where Banner is of course creepily fond of the boy who is collaborating with him to keep him out of the hands of the authorities, Ross is able to take a step back and think of Jones's best interests rather than his own. For we might suppose that General Thunderbolt Ross would be so flattered by Jones asking how he might get to sign up that he'd march the boy right down to the recruiting office then and there without caring about anything except his own five-star ego. But instead Ross pushes aside the chance to at least get Rick Jones to commit to a future in the army at some more appropriate coming date and instead compassionately explains, at 6:12:5/6, that;

"You're only sixteen, you're too young. But if you really want to serve your country...the best thing to do is (to) stay in school! America needs trained men, in every field -- even in the army. And then, when you're old enough ... "

I never thought I'd say it, but General Ross was right. Rick Jones needed to be back in school rather than playing at being a monster's keeper.

8.

If it was impossible over the first year or so of "The Incredible Hulk" to clearly and consistently identify who the good guys and bad guys were, or whether when identified they were worth the paying of any measure of attention to, it was always obvious who the chief romantic interest and hostage-in-peril was, namely Betty Ross, the General's daughter and the only woman to have a speaking line, beyond a single girlish bystander proclaiming the Toad Men's defeat at 2:24:4, in the whole 150 and so odd pages. (Women only rarely appear even as sketchy half-figures in crowd scenes in the Hulk, with the exception of a rather jewellery-obsessed fat lady who gets a whole panel to herself in the Ringmaster tale at 3:18:3) And Betty Ross is the only regularly-appearing representative of a saner, non-militarised world in the whole strip, but she's hardly a figure to inspire anything other than a mild fondness and a slither of pity for. For unlike the other female romantic leads of those first three years of Stan Lee superhero strips, Betty has no life of her own at all beyond trailing around behind her father. She's not a secretary like Karen Page or Betty Brant or Pepper Potts, or a nurse like Jane Foster, let alone a genuine superhero and hostage-in-waiting such as the Wasp or the Invisible Girl or the Scarlet Witch. Betty sniffs and mopes around modestly behind her father, longs implausibly for things to be "... as simple as in (Thunderbolt's) day. When a cavalry charge or a squad of infantryman could solve anything." (1:19:2), and faints whenever danger is close. There's not an atom of independence to her beyond wanting to step out with that nice Mr Banner, who must be at least a decade older than her teenage self and therefore, shall we say, a dubious self-nominated candidate for her hand, as well as other things. (Ross was right about that too.)

Betty Ross is, it must be be said, well worth coming to the aid of, because she's a harmless young woman who deserves nothing less, but there's little to inspire the audience to care for her. She's obviously there to be in jeopardy, because she's a young woman, and she'll obviously always survive, because she's a young woman, and, ho-hum, if she's not being captured by the Hulk, then the Hulk's rescuing her from Tyrannus. It's a game of musical chairs, where the purpose of the game is to kidnap Betty Ross before anybody else can, and the whole situation once again emphasises how slack and counter-productive the drama of these books is.

9.

If only Rick Jones were a representative of a genuinely anti-establishment youth culture. If only Betty was a secret peace campaigner, or even a quietly-radical socialist longing for a summer serving tables in Bleeker Street's folk clubs. If only Ross had been moved to the centre of the narrative and been allowed to be an old knight in the last years of his service hunting down the monstrous beast that is The Hulk.

If only Banner had been played as that which he was, a thoroughly irresponsible and manipulative figure, hiding from responsibility and manipulating young boys to serve his interests rather than that of the wider world.


If only the Hulk had been either a fully-fledged super-villain and Banner both his alter-ego and his main opponent, or a monster embodying all the fear of the "other" that had so characterised American society in the decade and a half prior to 1962, or some terrifying fusion of the two.

For the story and art of "The Incredible Hulk" is so strangely constructed, and so constantly reworked, that all the later reader can do is follow in Mr Lee's footsteps, noting potential, sniffing out new twists, rebalancing the various elements, and flailing around for inspiration, because there's obviously so much untapped potential in this "The Incredible Hulk", and yet the very act of changing one element changes much of everything else, until all that's left is a great soggy mess of Teen Brigades and Bruce'n'Betty holding hands under what had once been a baleful moon.


And yet hindsight doesn't bring any obvious solutions either where these 150 pages or so are concerned. There probably isn't any solution as such anyway. This material is incredibly promising, but it wouldn't be enough to simply shuffle this pack; a new Hulk would need to be introduced, a childish and sympathetic one, in order for the comic to find a workable equilibrium, and eventually, an almost-completely original take based on Banner's D.I.D. under Peter David would ground the comic in a way that'd never been achieved before. And yet, like Kirby, Lee and Ditko themselves, that first take on "The Incredible Hulk" is an ideas machine. Even broken and unsuccessful, it sits there full of promising concepts and interesting mistakes and challenges the reader, just as it challenged Mr Lee and Mr Kirby and Mr Ditko, to make sense of it, to be inspired by it, to make it work.

John Byrne was quite wrong to once suggest that he was returning the Hulk to the character's original roots. There never was anything so set and functional as that. But there were all those wonderful unsolved questions and inspiring quandaries ....


Coming soon, in addition to more on the JMS Thor and the return later this week of "I Know Nothing", reviews of this week's new releases; the top dozen moments of these first 6 Hulk issues. I fear the above sounds a touch superior and snotty, but the point is that even compromised Lee, Kirby and Ditko is far more inspiring than the pinnacle of most people's careers. And Hulk # 1 is one of the most brilliant Marvel Comics of all time, or at least it is until the Commies get in on the act, and there's a great deal to celebrate in 2-6 too. The scene of the Hulk hammering away at a concrete wall while Jones waits fearfully on its other side that closes issue 2 is quite haunting, for example, as Mike Loughlin pointed out in a comment way back in April of this year.



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