One of my regular stops whenever my family would make a weekend shopping trip to the Smith Haven Mall was one of a number of book sellers. It's hard to imagine today, when finding locations that are devoted to selling nothing but books is a difficult proposition in a lot of places, but in the … Continue reading BHOC: INCREDIBLE HULK POCKET BOOKS
I was quite happy to find this issue of INCREDIBLE HULK, in one of those plastic-wrapped bundles of coverless comics my local drug store had been selling--in fact, it may even have been the reason why I bought the bundle in question. Because I already owned issues #206 and #208, and #206 had ended with … Continue reading BHOC: INCREDIBLE HULK #207
By this point, my brother Ken's interest in the Incredible Hulk had waned, as it typically did with his passing fancies for one comic book or another. But having read the most recent bunch of issues from his copies, and getting further and further into the Marvel books, I was hooked enough on things to … Continue reading BHOC: MARVEL SUPER-HEROES #72
From the vantage point of hindsight, we view the Hulk as a super hero, the second in a string of new creations unleashed in the earliest years of the 1960s on an unsuspecting public, the building blocks for what would become known as the Marvel Universe. But that's really an impression that has been colored … Continue reading Lee & Kirby & Ditko: The Development of INCREDIBLE HULK
Stan Mack's Real Life Funnies was a documentary comic strip that ran in the pages of the Village Voice for just over twenty years starting in 1974. Its creator and author, Stan Mack, created the strip by overhearing and transcribing conversations between real people and then dramatizing them on the page. And in this particular … Continue reading Stan Mack’s Real Life Funnies: Inside Marvel Comics
Here's another new book that I picked up during my first trip to the Batcave comic book shop in the South Shore Mall, and it represents, I believe, the first issue of INCREDIBLE HULK that I bought for myself. My brother Ken had been following the series prior to this, but was beginning to drift … Continue reading BHOC: INCREDIBLE HULK #224
From time to time throughout the years, writer/editor Stan Lee would attempt to put a particular focus of quality on a given title, and try to make it stand out from the rest of the many offerings being published by Marvel, then Atlas. These efforts typically didn't last long, and one gets the impression that … Continue reading Forgotten Masterpiece: MENACE #7
This issue of INCREDIBLE HULK was another book that I got from my 5th and 6th grade friend Donald Sims. He was a sporadic source of issues that came out before I started reading, in particular Marvel titles, which was very valuable in these days before trips to back issue outlets became more common. This … Continue reading BHOC: INCREDIBLE HULK #176
A few days ago in the post concerning the prototype versions of Aunt May and Uncle Ben that had appeared in an earlier Lee/Ditko fantasy story, I mentioned an actual prototype for the Hulk that Lee and Kirby worked on prior to launching that character in his own title in 1962. So I thought it … Continue reading Lee, Lieber & Kirby: The Prototype for the Incredible Hulk
I continued to prowl through the 3-Bags at all of our local department stores and toy stores whenever I got the opportunity, and it was always exciting whenever a new batch would show up. They represented another batch of comics that I had missed buying when they were new on the racks that I had … Continue reading BHOC: INCREDIBLE HULK #208
