Comics Rainbow - Hulk

This past week saw the launch of the Totally Awesome Hulk.  This new iteration of Marvel’s Gamma powered behemoth will be a departure from mainstay Bruce Banner for his previous supporting character Amadeus Cho.  Switching up the Hulk’s mechanics and identity are hardly new, I’ve already burned through the incredibly massive list of gamma powered beings in the Marvel universe in case you need proof of that, but the Hulk himself has gone through a ton of variations as well.  Most folks know about the Gray Hulk but there are so many other insane and bizarre alterations to the Hulk’s history it’d be a shame not to showcase just how ridiculous Marvel got with this character, in all their shades, shames, and successes. 

Created by Peter David, a reoccurring name in this series, Mr. Joe Fix It was a weird reinvention of the classic concept of the Gray Hulk.  We’ll be covering the Gray Hulk in a few slots but till suffice it to say Mr. Fix It is probably not the best way to have approached the problem.  Essentially, due to coloring issues, the Hulk was originally meant to be gray but ended up green so Marvel ended up with 2 versions of the character so during Peter David’s Hulk run he revived the Gray Hulk as Mr. Fix It, a mob enforcer in Las Vegas. 

This is one of those ideas that’s almost so stupid it’s charming but pulls back right at the edge to land in dullsville.  If this had been executed in the ‘60s it’d probably be looked on as a charming relic of a previous age but as it is Mr. Fix It is always an awkward chore to slog through.  The mob enforcer angle means he’s rarely smashing stuff, the whole reason we like the Hulk, and his plain clothes design really isn’t that striking more memorable.  He did pal around with Wolverine during this era, which is kind of amazing, but there’s a good reason no one was really desperate for more Mr. Fix It after David left the comic.  There is only one Hulk but the world of comics is full of muscle-bound jerkos in bad suits like Mr. Fix It. 

The Indestructible Hulk is a very recent entry into the Hulk canon but a new favorite all the same.  During the incredible if short-lived era of Marvel Now Marvel had Mark Waid take over their Hulk comic in the wake of Hulks’ major success in Avengers.  Waid’s vision of the Hulk was a Bruce Banner who accepted that the Hulk could never be removed from his being and, instead, was trying to utilize his own intelligence to do as much good as possible while loaning the Hulk out to S.H.I.E.L.D. as a kind of WMD.  It’s a nifty concept and best of all, it strips Hulk of the unbearable doom and gloom from the tomb that always blights the Hulk comics. 

One of the big problems with the Hulk has always been that Bruce Banner’s goal is the opposite of the audiences’.  Bruce Banner’s whole purpose in most stories is to destroy the Hulk yet we, the audience, are only reading this because we’re interested in seeing the Hulk.  Nobody is buying The Incredible Hulk because they’re desperate for the adventures of Bruce Banner, mild mannered physicist, they’re buying it for the giant green rage monster who punches things to bits.  Stripping Banner of his constant gloomy atmosphere and finally getting out from behind his quest to make himself more boring made this book a riveting delight for its brief run. 

Maestro is the kind of character the yellow section was made for, a character I liked for a long time before Marvel ran him right into the ground.  Maestro is an evil version of the Hulk from a distant future where all Earth’s heroes were killed in a nuclear war.  He ruled over the ruins of his civilization as a mad tyrant steeped in hedonistic excesses and opposed by an incredibly small rebellion force.  He’s another evil Hulk created by Peter David but unlike Mr. Fix It Maestro was a damn near perfect idea within the context of his original story.  He worked as a perfect embodiment of the ‘90s trope of the evil twin, a dark twisted anti-hero version of a kinder and more friendly hero hiding a deadly secret persona and living by their own twisted ethics.  This was the same pitch Marvel used to turn Venom into the ever lovin’ idol of millions only Maestro’s story is more aware of just how despicable and amoral its dark twin really is. 

So where does it all go wrong?  Well, lack of context basically.  Despite his story showing off how evil and hateful Maestro was people still liked the character and wanted to see more of him and the more he appeared the more he shifted from dark and subtle inversion of the hero to “evil strong guy.”  Seriously, Maestro has reached a point now in the All-New All-Different Marvel where he might as well be God for all the undo power and ability that’s afforded him as a character.  He can still work if slotted back into his original context as a criticism rather than a power fantasy but it’s a rare sight. 

Let’s not mince words here, for the longest time the Hulk was the only Marvel character outside Spider-Man and the X-Men who could be called well known in the mainstream.  A lot of that was thanks to the Bill Bixby TV show but at the end of the day it comes down to the character and the classic conception of the Hulk’s character is rock solid.  Sure Bruce Banner’s hunt for a cure we know he’ll never find is taxing but if you’ve got a version of him that’s just trying to avoid incident and isn’t that gloomy the classic Hulk stories all stack-up incredibly well.  A lot of this has to do with how rock solid the Hulk is as an inversion of the classic concept of power fantasies. 

Where DC heroes like Superman or Green Lantern are all about classical power fantasies the Hulk is the complete inversion of that, someone who gains incredible physical power beyond measure…at the price of all humanity.  In many ways, Hulk’s position as a borderline villain makes him a quintessential Marvel hero.  The Marvel universe is defined by the ethos that great power must always come with great cost whether it’s Captain America’s strength at the cost of being time displaced, Spider-Man’s abilities at the cost of the only person he truly cared about, or Hulk’s incredible power at the cost of his own humanity.  Also, I’d be lying if I said I didn’t find Hulk’s hilarious “Hulk Smash!” speak incredibly charming. 

Professor Hulk was a weird experiment in the ‘80s, Marvel’s experimental days, where the Hulk ended up retaining Bruce Banner’s personality and identity even when transformed.  Since then Professor or Doc Green versions of the character have popped up numerous times but the classic ‘80s one is probably my favorite.  I get why people don’t like this version of the character, mainly because it’s too far the other direction from the standard Hulk problems.  Rather than trapping us with sad sack Bruce Banner trying to avoid being the Hulk we’re trapped with Bruce Banner: super strong green guy.  That wrinkle of power with a cost is gone from Bruce’s character, making him much more of a basic power fantasy than he normally is.  Even the Indestructible Hulk came with the caveat that things could go horribly wrong during the transformation or mission.

I get those complaints but I can’t help but have a soft spot for Professor, mainly because of how cheesy and macho he ended up.  As you can see in this picture, he often ended up cover in bandoleers and energy guns and other sundry ‘90s gobbledygook, which remains weirdly endearing to me.  It’s a kind of earnest, heart on sleeve, approach to things that seems almost too dumb to realize how ridiculous it is but without the pretensions of depth that would normally sink such stupidity.  Call it a guilty pleasure but I’m always happy when Professor Hulk rolls around. 

Told you we’d get back to the Gray Hulk.  The biggest reason Gray Hulk exists is due to how much Marvel changed and sort of evolved into the company it would become by the mid ‘60s.  Originally, almost all of their flagship characters were drawn from the B-movie and schlock adventure stories that were so popular in the 1950s.  There was some overlap with growing ‘60s space fever, hence the Fantastic Four’s space race origins, but for the most part weird science and strange fantasy ruled the day and the Hulk is the perfect embodiment of that atomic paranoia turned superhero adventure.  Originally, he was basically meant as an atomic Jekyll and Hyde, with the radiation turning the benevolent but puny Bruce Banner into the malevolent and mighty Hulk.  However, as superheroes became more dominant Hulk’s malevolence was downplayed and better inking let Marvel make him more definably green. 

This has always left the Gray Hulk as a kind of homeless leftover of a bygone era.  He pops up every now and again but no one really seems to know what to do with him other than making him a more pronouncedly evil version of the Hulk.  However, it’s not as if gray Hulk ever teams up with bad guys or the like.  I like the idea of the gray Hulk a lot and the visual design is weirdly striking but there’s just no place in the Marvel universe for ANOTHER big muscled evil guy like Thanos or Apocalypse but without the compellingly unique persona.  Maybe if someone tried to give him a more unique or at the very least defined goal like staying as the Hulk forever that’d be interesting. 

Of the many Hulk events that have marked the last eventful decade Planet Hulk has probably been the most revolutionary.  For most of the late ‘90s and mid-2000s Hulk was stranded in a downward spiral of weird stories without substance and dumb ideas without restraint.  Ditching all the insufferable pop psychology and ill-advised dimension hopping for a stripped down story of Hulk as a gladiator on a distant alien world was exactly the kick in the pants the series needed.  Seriously, I’ve never met anyone who disliked Planet Hulk, especially the warrior gladiator turned revolutionary leader Green Scar persona the Hulk adopted.  

A lot of that also has to do with the fairly faithful animated film Marvel made out of the event though the original comics still stack up incredibly well, mainly owing to how little Banner we have to deal with in the series.  It’s not really that surprising this era set the tone for Hulk going forward, creating a domino effect leading to further stories like World War Hulk, the Red Hulk, Hulked Out Heroes and more.  The most impressive thing about this era is how simple its success was, it’s a comic that just let the Hulk smash bigger, uglier monsters than him: that’s all it needed to be. 

And the winner for stupidest name ever is…Kluh, the Hulk’s Hulk.  Kluh popped up during the incredibly ill advised Axis event that already feels dated and forgotten.  The point of the event was that the moral compass of the heroes and villains ended up swapped, so while folks like Dr. Doom and Red Skull became good guys the heroes like Iron Man and Thor went evil.  Hulk was one of the effect heroes but his transformation was infinitely stupider, turning him into the massive, rocky, dumb looking monster known as Kluh.  

It wasn’t really made clear what Kluh’s deal was, he seemed really powerful but like a lot of Axis it all added up to a big pile of not very interesting.  This was super star author Jason Aaron’s second attempt to nail down a blockbuster Marvel attempt after the equally disastrous Original Sin in 2014 and after those back-to-back embarrassments it’s nice Marvel has let him take the reigns on stuff more suited to his talents.  As for Kluh there’s really not much to him other than the stupid name and hilariously overdesigned look.  Like a lot of the Axis-swapped heroes he was just kind of a jerk, nothing else to it.

Remember how I mentioned late ‘90s and early 2000s Hulk was really stupid and full of pop pseudo-psychology and weirdly out of place interdimensional shenanigans?  Well meet Guilt Hulk, the perfect embodiment of everything wrong with that era.   Guilt Hulk was a monstrous lizard-looking version of the Hulk that Banner encountered during an interdimensional trip through physical manifestations of his own psyche.  This was during the same time that Ang Lee drew from for his pretty lackluster Hulk movie, where the Hulk’s dad is an abusive jerk and Bruce Banner has all kinds of pent up rage even before he became the Hulk, presumably because he was always predestined to be the Hulk because that’s the most boring explanation possible.  

This was the same era that gave us Hulk poodles so I don’t really know why the Hulk writer’s were straining for profundity and adult oriented stories with all the child abuse and psycho-babble.  Regardless, Guilt Hulk was a Hulk fueled by Banner’s pent up guilt over all that abuse or something, it’s all very unclear and unengaging.  Like a lot of that era and far too much of Hulk mythology overall it relies on the thinking that because Bruce Banner’s life is tragic our sympathy will translate into engagement.  But aside from just not being a monster that celebrates human misery there’s really no reason to invest in Banner’s tragic life of tragedy and it all comes off disingenuous and trying way too hard.    


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