We’d previously devoted a piece to spotlighting and examining two of the lost pages from a story intended for INCREDIBLE HULK #4 that Marvel mainstay Larry Lieber had fished out of the trash after an irate Jack Kirby had torn them in half and discarded them back in 1962.
They turned up in an auction of some of Larry’s possessions at the Heritage Auction site, allowing a much clearer look at them, one that allowed us to decipher some of the border notes that editor Stan Lee had jotted down as he walked through the story with Kirby so that he’d remember what Jack told him he was intending with certain images, characters and moments. Since that time, another two pages from that same story have shown up in the same place, so that will allow us to do the same thing for them. So let’s go!
These two pages are from slightly later on in the story, Pages 11 and 12, but they do give us the opportunity to reverse-engineer some of what must have happened in the missing opening sequence. Here is what Lee jotted down on these pages:
PANEL 1
CAN’T ANSWER RICK’S THOUGHT WAVES BECAUSE HE’S IN A COMA
CRASHED INTO TOWN BLDG IN FOG
PANEL 2
BEGINNING TO STIR AS THOUGH TRYING TO ANSWER SILENT CALL
PANEL 3
NITE OF BIG GAME
(Looks like there’s another border note here obscured by the tape holding the two halves of the page together.)
PANEL 4
EVERYTHING OKAY–BALL IS NORMAL
There aren’t any notes on Panels 5 or 6, but what’s going on in them is pretty straightforward and obvious.
The scan of PAGE 12 at Heritage is cropped in on, eliminating the border space where any notes may have been visible. But the images are a lot easier to see than what we had before, and it’s clear that after the game-fixer’s ringer group of goons disguised as high school players engage in dirty tactics and continually clobber Rick, his increased state of anxiety and pain strengthens his mental connection with the Hulk, waking the slumbering monster from his coma and causing him to leap (fly) out into the night towards Rick’s side.
And since I’ve got it, I may as well include this lesser scan of the fifth page that Larry had, PAGE 13. It isn’t impossible that this one will turn up at Heritage as well at some point, but for now, we can still make out a few small things in terms of Lee’s page notes:
PANEL 5
UNDER (which seems like a not about the shadow and the fact that the Hulk is lifting the bleachers.
PANEL 6
CAREFUL–IF YOU INJURE ME I’LL GO TO HOSPITAL–NO BLUE CROSS–
The Tom Brevoort Experience 