Incredible Hulk #157. The Leader becomes the Rhino

(Cover from November 1972.)

"Name My Vengeance Rhino!"

Written by Archie Goodwin.
Drawn by Herb Trimpe.
Inked by Sal Trapani.
Lettering by Jean Izzo.

Bad tempered? You'd be bad tempered if you were the Rhino. It seems like every time we're reintroduced to the horny henchman he's in a coma. Not only that but he's only ever roused from those comas by people who want to use him for their own evil ends.

This time, the Leader wants to revive him, so that, like Satan himself, he can take possession of his body. The cranially capacious villain managed to paralyse himself the last time he took on the Hulk and so, to get round the slight problem of not being able to move, he wants to take over the Rhino's body in order to claim revenge on the Hulk. When the Leader/Rhino finds the Hulk, he promptly discovers Betty Ross is to marry Glenn Talbot, promptly changes tack and promptly sets off to bushwhack the wedding and kill Betty.

It's a bit of a make-weight tale, with the Leader not really even having an initial plan other than finding the Hulk and hitting him a few times, and the combination of the Leader, the Rhino, the Hulk, and Betty Ross's nuptials has already been done in The Incredible Hulk # 124, meaning there's a certain feeling of redundancy about it all. Still, at least we get the return of Jim Wilson and we get the Leader's cyber-lackey Omnivac warning him his plans have become muddled and over-complex. A Leader plan becoming overly-complex? Surely not.

It has to be said Betty Ross is a fickle one. All those years while he was the Hulk, she was hankering after Bruce Banner but the moment he lost his Hulk powers she started dating Doc Samson. Almost as soon as Doc Samson lost his super-powers, she started dating Glenn Talbot. It's just a good job Talbot has no powers to lose or you'd fear for him too. We do however know that, deep down, no matter what she says, Betty loves Bruce Banner most of all.

Of course she does. For one thing, this is a comic and, "Bruce and Betty," alliterates. But more than even that, the great god of human drama demands she does.

Incredible Hulk #156. The Smart Hulk vs the Stupid Hulk

(Cover from October 1972.)

“Holocaust At The Heart Of The Atom!”

Written by Archie Goodwin.
Art by Herb Trimpe and Sal Tapani.
Lettering by Artie Simek.

So John Severin vacates the inker's seat, and Sal Trapani moves in. It's a fair old contrast to go from Severin's softer style to Trapani's determinedly angular one. The odd thing is that, despite their differences, both approaches seem to suit Trimpe equally well. Severin's style lending Trimpe's work a subtlety, detail and depth it might otherwise lack, Trapani's giving it a greater boldness and definition.

Back on Jarella’s world, the Hulk - once more with Bruce Banner’s brain - finds her kingdom in ruins, with Jarella captured by the evil Lord Visis. Being the Hulk, he quickly rescues her and then agrees to face Visis’ champion to decide the victor in their war.

But the devious warlord has a trick up his sleeve and a machine in his armoury and uses it to make Banner face his worst fear, a version of the Hulk out of all control.

It’s a perfectly pleasant and readable tale but there’re really no new elements introduced from those seen in previous Jarella tales, plus, as I’ve said before, not being a sword and sorcery fan, I don’t find Jarella’s world and its politics all that interesting. That problem’s not helped by the fact that yet again the bad guy’s the somewhat run-of-the-mill Lord Visis who we’d all have forgotten about long ago were he not in the habit of reappearing every time Jarella does.

Still it’s appropriate that the one thing that can defeat an intelligent Hulk is a stupid Hulk. With other Marvel heroes, it’s their intelligence as much as their powers that make them unbeatable. With the Hulk, not for the first time, we’re left in no doubt it’s his total lack of intelligence that does it.

Inevitably, the Hulk survives his encounter with his stupid self but is once more snatched by cruel fate from the arms of his would-be queen. Poor old Hulkie, will he never find happiness? I don’t like to be negative but I think we all know the answer to that one.

Incredible Hulk #155. Captain Axis and the Shaper of Worlds

(Cover from September 1972.)

“Destination Nightmare!”

Written by Archie Goodwin.
Art by Herb Trimpe and John Severin.

Eye-patch wearing chanteuse Gabrielle once told us that dreams can come true. Well, Otto Kronsteig doesn’t wear an eye-patch - although he could do with one - but I’ve no doubt he’d agree with her sentiments, as the still-shrinking Bruce Banner lands on a world where the would-be Hitler’s re-staging World War Two. This time, Germany’s winning and in the process of invading the United States.

To achieve this, Kronsteig’s relying on the Shaper, a giant alien who looks like a cross between a skrull and a Meccano set. As well as being too full of himself, the Shaper has the power to make men's dreams a reality but has no dreams of his own.

Writer Archie Goodwin’s clearly been reading his back issues of The Fantastic Four because last month we had a reference to the time when Dr Doom shrank the FF to the size of atoms and now he gives us a villain, in Kronsteig, who helped Doom develop that technology, before it was used against him by the Latverian despot.

Inevitably the Hulk soon puts a stop to such shenanigans, by being stronger than Kronsteig could possibly dream and, when the Hulk refuses to live in a Shaper-created fantasy of being reunited with Jarella, the Shaper has no choice but to send him to the world of the real Jarella.

It’s another classic tale as we see a world ruined by one man’s megalomania and a bored alien’s desire to be entertained. The sight of Bruce Banner being strafed by a German plane in the streets of a bomb-ravaged New York’s especially memorable, as is a dead German pilot reverting to his real, inhuman, form, and there’s some great art by Trimpe and Severin throughout, not least a closing page in which the Shaper, finally bored with the world he’s wrecked, gives it and its “people” his farewell address before setting off in search of a dream of his own.

Incredible Hulk #154. Ant-Man and Hydra

(Cover from August 1972.)

“Hell Is A Very Small Hulk!”

Written by Archie Goodwin.
Pencils by Herb Trimpe.
Inks by John Severin.
Lettering by Artie Simek.

I’ve always felt the loopier The Incredible Hulk gets, the better it gets.

And it doesn’t come much loopier than this, as the Hulk’s shrunk to the size of a Barbie doll and still gets to whup Hydra’s ass.

Out to be reunited with Jarella, he breaks into the lab of Henry Pym - otherwise known as Ant-Man - and drinks the experimental formula Ant-Man first used in Fantastic Four #16, the one that can shrink its user down to sub-atomic level.

Sadly, being somewhat unstable, it only shrinks the Hulk to doll size, whereupon he’s captured by the Chameleon who hands him over to his Hydra pay-masters who want to unleash a deadly plague on the world.

Happily, even then the Hulk’s too much for the ever-hapless Hydra to handle but, transformed back to Bruce Banner at the tale’s end, what can save him from death at the heel of the Chameleon?

Frankly I’d despair of anyone who didn’t love this, as the Hulk teams up with the world’s least impressive super-hero, to fight the world’s least impressive super-villain, and Hydra demonstrate that, no matter how much the odds might favour them, they still can’t get it right.

At heart it’s just fun to see the mini-Hulk still ripping things to pieces, albeit on a smaller scale, and you have to love his epic fight with a bunch of rodents which ends on a conveyor belt of doom. “No!” He declares, “Hulk will not be cheese for giant rats--!” It’s plain irresistible -- even if it does throw up a question that’s obvious but was never addressed at the time.

Just how, in issue #148, did they get Jarella back to her own world? Looking back at it, she’s there, on the planet Earth, in the penultimate panel of that tale but then, in the last panel, they tell us she’s been returned. This issue reveals that Bruce Banner asked Ant-Man if his know-how could do the job but it’s clear the answer was no. So, this revelation in mind, just how was it done?

Incredible Hulk #151. It's all gone Quatermass

(Cover from May 1972.)

"When Monsters Meet!"

Written by Archie Goodwin.

Drawn by Herb Trimpe and John Severin.

Lettering by Artie Simek.

One of the things that strikes you when you read issue after issue of The Incredible Hulk is just how amorphous the strip is. One issue it's science fiction, the next it's fantasy, the next it's super-heroics. One month the Hulk's a hero, then he's a villain, next he's a catalyst and then he's just plain irrelevant.

To some degree this is true of all super-hero strips as - faced with deadlines - writers and artists filch from any source they can find but, perhaps because the Hulk as a character concept originally drew on strands from the worlds of Fantasy, Horror, Science Fiction, Fable, Fairy Tale and Super-Heroics, this approach seems to fit him better than any other. And, given this amorphous nature, it's perhaps appropriate that one of his strongest and most memorable tales features a truly amorphous foe, because it's time for The Incredible Hulk, the Horror Movie.

Exactly which horror movie's pretty obvious. It's The Quatermass Xperiment, the one based on the BBC Nigel Kneale TV shows of the 1950s. In that, an astronaut, upon returning to Earth, finds himself transforming into a shapeless mass, along the way losing all vestige of humanity. In The Incredible Hulk #151, it's the turn of congressman Morton Clegstead to do the same after trying to cure his illness by injecting himself with some of the Hulk's blood.

This really is a special tale, mostly for the mood Trimpe and Severin create as the events unfold in a Washington that can never have been so rain-swept. In panel after panel, rain pounds at characters and buildings alike, as though trying to wash them and the nightmare events of the night away, and the Hulk finds himself facing a foe that even he's completely out of his depth against.

Something that leaps out at you for a story of this era is the nature of Clegstead's illness. For once in a comic book, he doesn't have some vague unspecified malady that's never existed outside the pages of four-color land. You're told straight up he has cancer. I don't think I've seen a Marvel comic from this era or before that even acknowledges the existence of cancer let alone makes it a central feature, as the Congressman literally becomes a malevolent mass of Gamma powered cancer cells with the ability to eat away at the flesh of even the normally indestructible Hulk. The taboos and fears that still surround the disease all these years later make the bluntness of all this genuinely unsettling, as we're forced to face up to something that doesn't sit at all comfortably in the normally escapist realms of a comic book. The Hulk's vulnerability too is unsettling. I'm also fairly certain this is the first time we've ever seen him bleed.

The resolution's something of a cop-out, as the wounded Hulk rams a flagpole into the thing in a last ditch attempt to save himself and, at that moment, lightning just happens to strike the pole and destroy the creature Clegstead's become. That aside it's a great tale. I'd say that, thanks to its literally creeping horror, blunt intrusion of real-life illness into a comic strip, and the genuine helplessness of the Hulk, one of the best that Trimpe ever worked on.

It's also good to see Thunderbolt Ross getting more or less centre stage in this story as he goes to Washington to defend his activities at Project Greenskin and we get to see his willingness to sacrifice his career to save the project and also his motives for doing so. I hate to admit it but I'm starting to grow quite fond of the old warhorse. Whoever would've thought we'd be saying that one day?

Incredible Hulk #150. Havok and Polaris

(Cover from April 1972.)

“Cry Hulk, Cry Havok!”

Written by Archie Goodwin.
Art by Herb Trimpe and John Severin.
Lettering by Sam Rosen.

Sometimes a comic can be defined by just one panel, and Incredible Hulk #150’s just such a case as the Hulk lifts an entire cliff face while the helpless Lorna Dane kneels atop it. It’s a glorious image by Trimpe and Severin, the kind that might linger in the memory long after the rest of a comic’s forgotten. Fortunately, the rest of the issue’s not in the mood to be overshadowed and gives us an atypical but memorable tale.

Fleeing Thunderbolt Ross’s Project Greenskin, the Hulk finds himself in the desert where he encounters a green-haired woman he thinks is Jarella. In fact it’s Lorna Dane otherwise known as Polaris of X-Men near-fame but that doesn’t stop him doing the King Kong thing and abducting her, prompting sometime boyfriend Alex (Havok) Summers to take him on.

It may say The Incredible Hulk on the cover but this story’s well and truly about Lorna Dane and Alex Summers and how Summers comes to find himself. We’ve seen the Hulk as a supporting character in his own mag and now we’re seeing another use for him, as a catalyst in the life of others. I’m not sure if he’s played this role before - I can’t think of an occasion when he has - but, given his intellectual limitations and his force-of-nature disposition, it’s a role that suits him and the comic well.

Meanwhile, Betty Ross finds out something that definitely doesn’t suit her well as she finally finds out about Jarella. With this, and Thunderbolt Ross summoned to Washington, it seems Alex Summers isn’t the only one about to have a turning point.

Incredible Hulk #149. The Inheritor

(Cover from March 1972.)

“…And Who Shall Claim This Earth His Own? The Inheritor!”

Written by Archie Goodwin.
Drawn by Herb Trimpe.
Inked by John Severin.
Lettering by Sam Rosen.

I complained that the events of last issue didn’t advance the overall story of the Hulk in any way, shape or form and could be excised from the strip’s history without anyone noticing.

Well, the same’s true of this one.

The big difference is, while last issue was a fairly low key tale that by rights should therefore have explored and developed the characters, this outing's just an excuse for a slug fest between two monsters and therefore, as such, doesn’t actually need to advance anything.

Somewhere in the woods, a space ship crashes. A strange and huge creature emerges. It calls itself the Inheritor.

And it’s out to conquer the world.

It turns out the Inheritor’s one of the High Evolutionary’s beast men, exiled years ago by its creator but now returned to Earth. To avoid regressing to whatever its original form was, it needs radiation - and Thunderbolt Ross’s Project Greenskin base just happens to be the nearest source of that. It’s also where Bruce Banner’s working on a cure for himself. I doubt it’d take a psychic octopus to tell you that, confronted by such a menace, Bruce Banner becomes the Hulk and we get a punch-up in which tanks are crushed and concrete and steel are treated like tissue paper.

I love this tale. After a couple of issues that’ve been somewhat flawed, it’s great to see the strip get back on track with a return to its very basics. At heart it’s just the set-up to a fight, followed by a fight. In terms of plotting, you’re going to struggle to get less sophisticated than that but, after the somewhat unfocused offering last month and the overly rushed one the month before, the return to roots is welcome. Plus, it’s The Incredible Hulk and the sight of two monsters hitting each other rarely goes down badly in such a setting.

I also have to say that, being a bit on the dim side, I didn’t guess just what kind of creature the Inheritor was until the big reveal in the final panel. It’s a neat ending and nicely handled by Trimpe and Goodwin, using just one little symbol to do a job that would've been corny if done through dialogue.

Incredible Hulk #148. Jarella’s back

(Cover from February 1972.)

“But Tomorrow-- The Sun Shall Die!”

Written by Archie Goodwin.
Plot assist by Chris Claremont.
Drawn by Herb Trimpe.
Inked by John Severin.
Lettering by Artie Simek.

Far be it from me to suggest someone do the obvious and send Bruce Banner to anger management classes but it’d be a whole lot cheaper and, you suspect, more successful than all the high-tech attempts to cure him put together. Just about everyone else in the Marvelverse has had a go and this time it’s down to space boffin Peter Corbeau who wants to harness the rays of the sun for the task.

Like all the other attempts, it works.

And, like all the other attempts, it fails.

Why? Because, in search of Bruce Banner, Jarella’s come to our world to try and take him back to hers. Unfortunately, the two events combined have destabilised the sun and if she doesn’t go back sharpish, minus the Hulk, it’ll go supernova. Meanwhile, an assassin of Lord Visis has followed her here and, in order to save Jarella from him, Banner finds himself having to transform back into the Hulk.

We can hardly claim it’s unfamiliar territory. Yet again Bruce Banner gets cured only, the first chance he gets, to turn himself back into the Hulk. If you were suspicious you’d start to think that, for all his complaining about being the Hulk, he actually likes it.

It’s pleasing to see Jarella back, although I can’t say I find her world and its political turmoils overly interesting and we barely get to see Lord Visis, the true villain of the piece. Dramatically it would’ve been much stronger if it’d been he, rather than a lackey who’d followed Jarella here.

In the final analysis it’s an issue that doesn’t change anything. At its conclusion, Bruce Banner’s still the Hulk, and Jarella’s back in her own world. It also probably suffers from being a single-parter, meaning we don’t get to see enough of Bruce Banner with Jarella and we don’t get to see what Betty Ross makes of this sudden appearance of a love rival she never knew existed. That should, after all, be the main source of human conflict in the story but instead it's nowhere in sight.

It’s not a bad tale but, in its unwillingness to change anything, it feels like a solid piece of filler rather than a vital tale. In the end, for all its readability, it’s a story you could remove entirely from the strip’s history and no one would ever notice.

The Incredible Hulk #106. The Missing Link

(Cover from August 1968.)

"Above The Earth.. A Titan Rages!"

Written by Archie Goodwin/Roy Thomas.
Layouts by Marie Severin.
Drawn by Herb Trimpe.
Inked by George Tuska.
Lettering by Artie Simek.

Pinpointing exactly when the Herb Trimpe era began is a bit like settling on which day of the week the age of the mammals started. The vagueness is because Trimpe was eased into the title, initially merely inking Marie Severin's pencils for a few issues before disappearing completely from the strip.

Bearing in mind how bad his inks looked over Severin's work, readers might've been forgiven for thinking his name would never again grace the credits box but, by issue #106, it was back and, this time, he was pencilling. However, the fact that he was pencilling over Severin's layouts, suggest he was still not quite trusted by the Powers-That-Be to do it all on his own.

Were those Powers-That-Be right to not trust him?

On the strength of this tale, yes. It's the conclusion of the Hulk's first meeting with the Missing Link. For those who don't know, the Missing Link was a neanderthal revived from being frozen in a block of ice, by a Chinese atomic test which promptly turned him into a bright pink equivalent of the Hulk. To say the tale takes off at a tangent in this issue'd be no exaggeration as, just as the Hulk and the Link are getting stuck into each other, Russia's answer to Nick Fury kidnaps them, in Russia's answer to SHIELD's heli-carrier. Somewhere along the way, The Missing Link explodes and we get the Hulk ending the tale as so many times since, by re-enacting the Frankenstein's-monster-with-the-child routine.

It has to be said it's not a great start to Trimpe's pencilling career on the strip. The combination of Marie Severin's layouts and his work, under George Tuska's inks, isn't a happy one and, for the most part, it looks like something culled from a fanzine, there're signs though, even here, of the later Trimpe style showing through, especially in the second part of the issue but, for now it all seems somewhat amateurish and the artwork isn't a patch on the issue before, which some of us would see as Severin's best work on the title.

Apart from the Missing Link, by far the best thing about this tale is Colonel Yuri Brevlov who, as well as being Russia's answer to Nick Fury, is torn between his sense of duty to his nation and his desire to do the right thing, making him a far cry from all those one-dimensional commies of Marvel's early years.

The other highlights have to be a wonderfully comical moment when the newly-transformed Hulk punches the Missing Link square in the kisser, and an earlier moment when Betty Ross saves Bruce Banner, Major Talbot and a strangely redundant Rick Jones by driving her car straight into the Missing Link. After years of vapid and useless Stan Lee created women, it's great to see one finally showing cojones in a crisis. Cojones in a Crisis, there's a title for a blog.

To be Hulk-inued.