Incredible Hulk #129. The Leader and the Glob

(Cover from July 1970.)

“Again, The Glob!”

Written by Roy Thomas.

Drawn by Herb Trimpe.

Inked by Herb Trimpe.

Lettering by Sam Rosen.

Never accept lifts from a stranger - especially one who’d give a ride to a man like you. It’s a lesson Bruce Banner should learn well as he inadvertently accepts a lift from the Leader who, to enact his latest plan, has reverted to his pre-mutation guise of a lowly truck driver. In this form, he’s a perfectly nice man and, remembering nothing of his alter-ego, strikes up a rapport with Banner, both of them being somewhat bewildered souls. From their conversation, however, the Leader learns the Glob was the one foe who might have defeated the Hulk and so, upon reverting to his high-headed guise, he revives the swamp monster and sets him on the Hulk.

Maybe it’s just me but as the long as the Glob’s in a story I’m happy. He’s like the Hulk pushed in a more extreme direction and it’s great to see our hero torn between the need to defend himself from the creature and the desire to make friends with it. It’s also good to see the Hulk defeat a foe by outwitting him. It must be conceded there aren’t many foes the Hulk could ever hope to outsmart but, in the Glob, he’s finally found one.

Herb Trimpe’s art’s much better this time out. He’s still using too thick a brush which gives the book too simplistic a look but it’s a huge improvement on the issue before, and the bolder lines suit the Glob well even if they’re not quite so ideal for normal everyday people. The impression you get is this is a period of experimentation for Trimpe as he tries different ways of doing things. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t.

Needless to say, despite his self-declared genius, the Leader’s as big an idiot as ever, determined to over-complicate his attempts at revenge on the Hulk, to the point of spurning a perfectly good chance of bumping off Bruce Banner right at the start of the tale. It also has to be said that, with the passage of time, his motivation’s gone down somewhat in the world. Once he sought to rule that world, then he wanted to destroy it. Now his sole purpose in life seems to be to follow the Hulk around, trying to come up with ever more arch ways to defeat him. You have to dig his aircraft though, which he’s clearly copied from the 1953 George Pal War of the Worlds movie. He might be a bit of an idiot but at least he has good taste in special effects.

Incredible Hulk #121. At last it's the Glob

(Cover from November 1969.)

"Within The Swamp, There Stirs... A Glob!"

Written by Roy Thomas.

Drawn by Herb Trimpe.

Inked by Herb Trimpe.

Lettered by Sam Rosen.

If we all know that the angrier the Hulk gets the more powerful he gets, I can't help feeling that the stranger he got the more compelling he became and he didn't get much stranger than The Incredible Hulk #121 where the green goliath comes up against the Glob for the first time.

Hanging around in the Florida swamps, our anti-hero loses his rag and kicks some radioactive barrels into the water. Within moments they've created a swamp monster possessed of the muddled consciousness of a long dead criminal who escaped the local prison in an attempt to be reunited with his dying lover. Being as muddled as he is muddy, the Glob abducts Betty Ross, in the belief she's the woman in question. That of course leads to a fight between Hulk and Glob which only ends when the Glob re-enters the swamp's waters, to be dissolved by a radiation-destroying liquid General Ross's men have flooded the swamp with, leaving the Hulk to ruminate on the fact he's just lost what could have been a friend.

Despite featuring plenty of action, it's a wonderfully eerie and slow-burning tale, capturing the alienness of the swamp. And the flashback to the dead prisoner's escape from jail's beautifully done, never giving us even a hint as to his identity, bestowing a dream-like feel to proceedings. You could just imagine this tale filmed in the style of one of the more esoteric 1930s horror movies and, indeed, its climax does have hints of Boris Karloff's Mummy. As a monster, the Glob's a genuinely strange and haunting presence, presumably based on Hillman Periodicals' Heap but providing a precursor to the Man-Thing and Swamp-Thing.

I love this story. For its off-beat nature and otherworldly pathos it has to be one of my favourite tales of the era, and a number of its themes clearly became the basis for various Hulk stories that followed. Rightly so because it's simply an example of the strip at its very best.