By Stan Lee, Herb Trimpe, Marie Severin & various (Marvel)
ISBN: 978-0-7851-0795-8
Bruce Banner was a military scientist who was caught in a gamma bomb blast. As a result stress and other factors can cause him to transform into a giant green monster of unstoppable strength and fury.
After an initially troubled few years the gamma-irradiated goliath finally found his size 700 feet and a format that worked, swiftly becoming one of young Marvel’s most popular features. This second Essential volume, covering Tales to Astonish #92 -101, Incredible Hulk #102-117 and his first Annual (plus a rather tasty page-filler from Hulk #147) in bombastic black and white, covering his last days of shared occupancy before regaining a solo title when the company expanded its publishing output in early 1968.
Following directly on from the previous volume (ISBN: 978-0-7851-2374-3) this blockbuster tome opens with ‘Turning Point!’ (Tales to Astonish #92, June 1967) by Stan Lee, the superb and criminally underrated Marie Severin and inker Frank Giacoia, which saw the Jade Giant hunted through a terrified New York City as a prelude to a cataclysmic guest-battle in the next issue. The Hulk didn’t really team-up with visiting stars, he just got mad and smashed them. Such was certainly the case when he became ‘He Who Strikes the Silver Surfer!’ ironically driving off a fellow outcast who held the power to cure him of his metamorphing affliction.
Herb Trimpe, associated with the character for nearly a decade, began his tenure as Marie Severin’s inker with #94’s ‘To the Beckoning Stars!’ a terrific three-part thriller that found the Hulk transported to the interstellar retreat of the High Evolutionary to battle against recidivist beast-men on ‘A World He Never Made!’ before escaping a feral bloodbath in #96’s ‘What Have I Created?’. Returned to Earth, the Man-brute fell into a plot to overthrow America in ‘The Legions of: the Living Lightning!’, but the subversives conquest of a US military base in ‘The Puppet and the Power’ soon faltered ‘When the Monster Wakes!’ (this last inked by John Tartaglione).
Tales to Astonish was a “split-book”, with two star-features sharing billing, a strategy caused by Marvel’s having entered into a highly restrictive distribution deal to save the company during a publishing crisis at the end of the 1950s. At the time when the Marvel Age Revolution took fandom by storm, the company was confined to a release schedule of 16 titles each month, necessitating some doubling-up as characters became popular enough to carry their own strip. Fellow misunderstood misanthrope the Sub-Mariner had proved an ideal thematic companion since issue #70, and to celebrate the centenary of the title Tales to Astonish #100 featured a breathtaking “who’s strongest?” clash between the two anti-heroes as the Puppet Master decreed ‘Let There be Battle!’ and Lee, Severin and Dan Adkins made it so.
The next issue was the last. With number #102 the comic would be renamed The Incredible Hulk and the character’s success was assured. Before that however Lee, Severin and Giacoia set the scene with ‘Where Walk the Immortals!’ as Loki, Norse god of Evil transported Ol’ Greenskin to Asgard in an effort to distract all-father Odin’s attention from his other schemes.
The premiere issue (#102) of The Incredible Hulk launched with an April, 1968 cover-date. ‘…This World Not His Own!’ completed the Asgardian adventure and included a rehashed origin. The issue was written by rising star Gary Friedrich, drawn by Marie Severin and inked by veteran artist George Tuska. With extra pages came not extra plot but more action: issue #103’s ‘And Now… the Space Parasite!’ and #104’s ‘Ring Around the Rhino!’ (both inked by Giacoia) are paeans to the Green Goliath’s destructive potential and visceral appeal before a longer plot-strand, tinged with pathos and irony began in Incredible Hulk #105, courtesy of surprise scripters Roy Thomas and Bill Everett, ably illumined by Severin and Tuska.
‘This Monster Unleashed!’ found a radioactive and violently mutating victim of Soviet aggression dumped in New York, and easily capable of burning our dull-witted hero into glowing ashes. The second part, ‘Above the Earth… A Titan Rages!’ by Thomas and Archie Goodwin, was pencilled by Trimpe over Severin’s breakdowns, with Tuska inking; a muddle nearly as great as the story itself since the action abruptly switched from New York to Russia when the battling behemoths were abducted by Yuri Breslov, the Soviet counterpart to Nick Fury and his agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. who promptly lost them over the a rural farm collective.
The story neatly segued into a much more polished yarn in #107’s ‘Ten Rings Hath… the Mandarin’(Friedrich and Trimpe with wonderfully rugged inking from the great Syd Shores) as the oriental despot tried to enslave the emerald engine of destruction. The extended tale concluded with epic success as Stan Lee and Trimpe, inked by the legendary John Severin (yep, big brother) pulled all the strands together in the action-packed ‘Monster Triumphant!’ guest-starring Nick Fury, Yuri Breslov and even Chairman Mao Tse Tung!
The Incredible Hulk Annual #1 was one of the best comics of that year. Behind an iconic Steranko cover, Friedrich, Marie Severin and Syd Shores (with lots of last-minute inking assistance) had concocted a passionate, tense and melodramatic parable of alienation that nevertheless was one of the most action-stuffed fight fests ever seen. In 51 titanic pages ‘A Refuge Divided!’ saw the Hulk stumble upon the hidden Great Refuge of genetic outsiders The Inhumans, overpower Maximus the Mad and his band of super-rebels before fighting the immensely powerful Black Bolt to a standstill. This is the vicarious thrill taken to its ultimate, and still one of the very best non-Lee-Kirby tales of that period.
Incredible Hulk #109 takes up from the end of the Mandarin saga with the Hulk rampaging through Red China, but still without a settled creative team in place. ‘The Monster and the Man-Beast!’ was written by Stan Lee, laid out by Giacoia, pencilled by Trimpe and inked by John Severin, wherein the Hulk trashes the Chinese Army and interferes with a Red super-missile, only to be blasted into the Antarctic paradise known as the Savage Land. This preserve of dinosaurs and cavemen is a visually perfect home for the Hulk and the addition of Tarzan analogue Ka-Zar and an alien device designed to destroy the world ramped up the tension nicely.
‘Umbu the Unliving!’ (Lee, Trimpe John Severin) was another extraterrestrial device left to facilitate Earth’s demise, but Banner and his green alter-ego dispatch it with Ka-Zar’s assistance, leading to a two-part outer space epic ‘Shanghaied in Space!’ and ‘The Brute Battles On!’ which sees the planet-destroyer’s builders come looking for the saboteurs at the behest of the cosmic overlord, Galaxy Master.
Issue #113 returned the Hulk to Earth to battle an upgraded Sandman in ‘Where Fall the Shifting Sands!’ and the sinister silicon villain popped right back with the Mandarin beside him in #114’s ‘At Last I Will Have My Revenge!’, two fast-paced yarns that whetted the appetite for the extended return of the Jade Giant’s greatest foe.
‘The Leader Lives!’ began with the man-monster a prisoner of the US Army, when the Gamma Genius – as smart as the Hulk is strong – takes over the base for his own nefarious purposes. ‘The Eve… of Annihilation!’ revealed the Leader’s plans for our pitiful planet as the Hulk escaped and the saga – and this volume – explosively concludes in the ticking clock thriller ‘World’s End?’ notable not just for its tense dramatic denouement, but also for Herb Trimpe’s taking over the inking of his own pencils.
At least that’s where the book should have ended. Obviously a few pages short, the editors have included a wonderful short tale by Roy Thomas, Herb Trimpe and John Severin entitled ‘Heaven is a Very Small Place!’, a dream-like, wistful taste of a better world for the embattled emerald innocent that is both clever and genuinely poignant, but which here acts as an abrupt antidote to the emotional high generated by all the pulse-pounding, cathartic destruction and villain-foiling that immediately preceded it. If you can, try reading this tale after the Annual segment, because that’s the last slow-moment before the rollercoaster ride starts…
These tales, in raw and gritty black and white, are the dawning of a renaissance in pure-action adventures that carried the Hulk to the large and small screen and proved a constant reminder that sometimes “breaking-stuff” is a primal thrill and necessary delight for the destructive eight-year-old in everyone. Just remember to read, not do…
© 1967, 1968, 1969, 2001, 2007 Marvel Characters, Inc. All Rights Reserved.