BC: INCREDIBLE HULK ANNUAL #3

This INCREDIBLE HULK ANNUAL (or KING-SIZED SPECIAL as it was blurbed this particular year) was yet another book that had been given to my friend David Steckel by an older cousin who had outgrown comic books some time earlier. The books David got from this relative were pretty haphazard–it’s clear that his cousin wasn’t really a collector of any sort but rather somebody who bought the occasional comic book as it caught his eye. While it was a considerable stack of books, there wasn’t anything approaching a run of any given title. But it was a nice Whitman Sampler of the Marvel output of the late 1960s and very early 1970s.

This particular Annual collected five Hulk stories that had been serialized years previously in the pages of TALES TO ASTONISH. By the time I got to go through this issue, I’d already read those stories when they had been reprinted in the Simon & Schuster INCREDIBLE HULK Trade Paperback, so they weren’t new to me. Regardless, I was still fascinated by the book as an item unto itself, as well as seeing what changes had been made to them for this publication. Such changes always frustrated me–I wanted to read the stories just the way they had originally been published, with no alterations.

At the time these stories had first been presented, the series had been successfully revived after a few years laying dormant by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko. Ditko in particular applied some of the same narrative tricks that he’d pioneered in AMAZING SPIDER-MAN to the Hulk, making the strip a bit more grounded and realistic and focusing in on the personal conflicts more than over-the-top bombast. The Hulk strip was the first Marvel series to be presented from the jump as an ongoing soap opera, with each chapter leading directly into the next. In this manner, it set the style for what Marvel would evolve into in the mid-1960s. But eventually, Steve Ditko left. To keep the series going, Lee turned to his ever-reliable lead artist and plotter Jack Kirby. Jack picked up events from just where Ditko had left them, but suddenly the watchword was larger-than-life super-science adventures with just a hint of a James Bond bent to them. Everything became heightened from the Ditko days–you could tell pretty instantly that Kirby was now at the wheel.

For example, while Ditko had given the Leader, the gamma genius whose intellect had been super-charged in the same manner that the Hulk’s strength had, an army of artificial Humanoids to do his bidding, Kirby almost immediately rolled out a colossal Humanoid that was Kaiju-sized for the Hulk to contend with. This was the difference between the two approaches in a nutshell. Also, Kirby wasn’t doing full pencils on these strips. He was merely providing layouts (and plotting the stories as a result), with first Mike Esposito (credited here as Mickey Demeo) and thereafter Bob Powell finishing up the artwork. The end result was a bit crude and scratchy, but it still carried the hallmarks of Kirby’s storytelling, and that allowed it to succeed.

So what was going on in these stories? Glad you asked. As things open up here, Bruce Banner is apparently dead, struck in the head by a fatal bullet during a skirmish at the Leader’s stronghold. But Rick Jones isn’t ready to give up on his friend, and so he steals Banner’s body, races it out to their hidden laboratory and exposes it to an intense bombardment of gamma rays. This transforms Banner into the Hulk and revives him. What’s more, he’s now got Banner’s intellect as well. Unfortunately, the fatal bullet is still lodged in his brain, meaning that if he ever reverts back to his human form, he’ll die instantly. Meanwhile, to please his Iron Curtain benefactors, the Leader unleashes his colossal Humanoid against the nearby Air Force base. The Hulk winds up fighting the Humanoid, then escaping with Rick Jones as the military nukes it with their Sunday Punch Super-Missile. The Army tracks the Hulk and Rick back to the lab and begins to shell it. At which point the Leader appears before the Hulk as a hologram, offering to save him in exchange for a partnership. With no other way out the Hulk agrees, and the Leader teleports him away from the battlefield.

Once in the Leader’s lair, the Hulk struggles to remain in his brutish form lest he become Banner once more and perish. Examining his new ally, the Leader discovers the deadly bullet still lodged in the Hulk’s brain and performs laser surgery to destroy it. However, the intense gamma radiation that Hulk is exposed to during this procedure traps him in his Hulk form seemingly permanently. Now that he can change back to Banner, he’s unable to. And now the Leader reveals the ultimate mission that he’s got for the Hulk. The Leader has been observing the mysterious Blue Area of the Moon and become aware of the citadel of the Watcher. The Leader covets the Watcher’s Ultimate Machine, which contains all of the knowledge in the cosmos. So he teleports the Hulk up to the moon in order to get it for him. The Watcher, of course, is pledged not to interfere, even when his home is burgled. But before the Hulk can get his hands on the Ultimate Machine, he’s accosted by another powerful alien who has journeyed to the moon seeking the very same prize. It’s a fight!

The Hulk’s alien foe isn’t given any sort of a name in this story, but when he’s brought back many years later, he’s called the Amphibion (Qnax to his friends) . What’s important is that he’s every bit as strong and savage as the Hulk himself. Well, almost as savage, as the Hulk winds up winning their contest, booting the Amphibion off of the moon. He brings the Watcher’s Ultimate Machine back to the Leader on Earth, then watches as the villain puts it on and attempts to absorb all of the knowledge of the cosmos. But it’s too much for even the Leader’s gamma-powered mind to take in, and he suddenly has a seizure and drops over dead. And that’s where this chapter wraps up–exactly the same place where that INCREDIBLE HULK Trade Paperback also cut the story off. It’s a clean enough exit, though the next chapter will mop up some loose ends, such as the Watcher reclaiming his stolen property.

And the issue closes out with the Marvel Bullpen Bulletins page. This was right after Jack Kirby had left the company for rival DC, so a lot of the information contained on this page is about which new artist is bringing ever-greater glory to which strip following Kirby’s departure–Jack, of course, is never mentioned directly.

And there’s also a final House Ad for two more reprint specials, that year’s THOR ANNUAL and an issue of MARVEL’S GREATEST COMICS that reprinted the first meeting between the Green Goliath and the Fantastic Four from years before.