BHOC: MARVEL SUPER-HEROES #82

We were in the twilight days of the Marvel reprint line, even though certain titles, mainly MARVEL TALES, would continue on indefinitely for another decade and a half. But the need to carve out rack space on mainstream Newsstands was diminishing as the number of mainstream outlets carrying comic books in 1979 continued to shrink, and reprint books were of only minimal interest to the aborning Direct Sales market of comic book specialty shops. These books never made a lot of money, for all that they were relatively easy to put together, and so one by one they fell by the wayside. But one that went the distance for some time yet was MARVEL SUPER-HEROES, buoyed no doubt by the weekly INCREDIBLE HULK TV series which increased the visibility of the Green Goliath among prospective buyers.

These reprinted stories weren’t even all that old at this point, but they were new to me, so they felt like they came from a before-era. Pretty much any comic book published before 1973 felt that way to me, as that’s when I first started reading. This issue was another in the run of Roy Thomas as the Emerald Behemoth’s chronicler, and I have to say that Roy did a really nice job with the strip. Unlike some of his other assignments, it was never heavily steeped in his own fannish interests, and Roy was good at delivering the pathos the character demanded while also coming up with novel situations for the almost-unstoppable man-monster to face. I don’t know offhand how much or little Roy liked the assignment, but he did a good job with it.

This particular story has a very nice wrinkle to it, a set-up that seems absolutely obvious in hindsight but which hadn’t been explored until this moment. After an obligatory action moment where the leaping Hulk accidentally destroys an Air Force plane, he promptly turns back into Bruce Banner, who is headed towards Desert State University, his alma mater, in search of his old professor Dr. Herbert Weller. Weller is an expert on gamma radiation, and Banner thinks he’s come up with a way to rid himself of his monstrous alter ego–but he’ll need Weller’s help to pull it off. Unfortunately, Weller isn’t around due to events in a recent CAPTAIN MARVEL story, but Banner’s fellow student Raoul Stoddard is. With nowhere else to turn, Banner asks Stoddard for his assistance.

The pair head out to Stoddard’s concealed experimental laboratory, all the while watched by a spotter plane sent by the military. Moving quickly, the two men set up Banner’s latest breakthrough and bombard him with an additional dose of gamma radiation. This is meant to suppress his Hulk side, but instead it has an unintended consequence. In the manner of comic book scientist, rather than submerging the Hulk’s persona, the bombardment instead separates the titan from Banner’s body, incarnating him in a complete separate form. So Banner and the Hulk have now been split into two discrete beings.

This unexpected development has an obvious consequence: the Hulk hates Banner with a fiery passion, and now for the first time he’s able to come face-to-face with him. So as banner flees, the Hulk attacks, smashing his way through everything that comes between him and his quarry. It’s only the arrival of the military, who were shadowing Banner’s movements earlier, that buys enough time for Banner to get clear of the Hulk. But the Green Goliath is still relentlessly pursuing him, untiring, unstoppable. What’s more, without Banner’s presence within the Hulk’s psyche to tamp down his natural aggression, he’s more chaotic and destructive than ever before. And he can somehow sense Banner’s location and hone in on him no matter where he goes.

Realizing that he’s just as connected to his alter ego as he ever was, and that he’s the cause of all of the carnage that’s going on, Banner realizes that he and the Hulk must be reunited. So he grabs a nearby car and heads back out towards Stoddard’s lab, with the Hulk close behind him. Stoddard, meanwhile, has figured out the mistake that was made earlier, and so he’s prepared to take another shot at it when Banner reappears in his lab. But it turns out that Stoddard has been jealous of Banner all this time, and sees this as the opportunity to get rid of his rival. (He wasn’t smart enough to simply say that he hadn’t worked out a way to reverse the process and just let the Hulk do his dirty work for him, though.)

Banner is saved by the sudden arrival of the Hulk. But seeing the gunlike equipment and sensing that this is a trap for him, the Green Goliath decides that the smart play here is to leap away. He declares that he’ll finish Banner at some future time of his own choosing, and then he’s out of there. As Thunderbolt Ross and Betty help Banner out of the machine that might have re-merged him with the Hulk, it’s clear that there’s going to be a showdown in the offing–and that Banner’s only hope may be to kill that other part of himself. To Be Continued! Apart from Stoddard’s heel turn, which comes a bit out of nowhere and feels strange, like a choice of story necessity, this is a pretty good issue that sets up a nice cliffhanger for the future.

This issue also debuted the new month’s edition of the Bullpen Bulletins page. I loved getting the inside scoop on what was coming up in the Marvel books, so I inevitably devoured these pages when they first showed up. This time out, Stan Lee declares in his Soapbox column that the company’s upcoming HEAVY METAL-style magazine was going to be called ODYSSEY. Unfortunately, it turned out that some other publisher had a trademark on the name ODYSSEY, which forced Marvel to pivot to calling the publication EPIC ILLUSTRATED instead. It also chronicles a car accident that writer Marv Wolfman had gotten into, which seems like a strange thing to devote space to, but which certainly made the people mentioned feel more like regular old human beings to me.