Da Hulk

Here's my first REAL post - it's the oldest Across The Pond I can find online. I'll put these here at the rate of one or two a week until I catch up with myself.

The whole lot can be accessed at comicsnexus.insidepulse.com

Here goes...



Posted By Floyd Kermode on 03.22.2006

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Related Topics: Archives

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Okay, the easy bit first. My name is Floyd Kermode and I'm a 43 year old comics lover from Australia. I read assorted humorous English comics as a kid, Marvel comics as a teenager and a few cool things in my twenties (Cerebus, Love&Rockets, that kind of thing). I then moved to Japan which turned me into a 2000AD addict. I am still an addict, although back in Australia I've discovered the delights of public libraries, which have comic books, or graphic novels if you prefer, so my range has broadened a bit. I write a lot of letters to 2000AD and post a lot on their message board. A kind soul there asked me if I'd write a column for The Nexus and here we are.

The above has been drastically nutshelled, as Kinky Friedman would say. There's much more about me and my comics in my previous columns. I've been away for a while, with life, employment, marriage and Australia's Kafkaesque telephone company coming between me and my goal of yammering away in a column each week. But I'm back henceforth.

Also back is The Hulk. I guess he never really went away but for me there was a long gap between his Cold War leapings about and the very retro 'Hulk: Gray' which I read the other day.

Does anyone not know the Hulk's story? I'm fascinated as to why it's lasted so long and have come up with some alternative explanations.

In the language that film pitches are supposed to use, The Hulk is Jekyll and Hyde goes nuclear. Bruce Banner leaps out to save a kid from the fall out from a 'gamma ray' bomb and gets gamma-radiated himself. Consequently, whenever anyone makes him angry (like by taunting him for his alliterative name), Banner turns into a huge green monster who can jump from one end of the country to the other, is completely indestructible and, strangest of all, whose trousers are always purple and never fall off. His only weaknesses are that he can't conjugate personal pronouns or verbs and that he loves Betsy Ross. Bruce Banner loves Betsy too. Betsy loves Bruce but her father doesn't approve because he's a fire-breathing militarist and Banner is a wimpy peacenik scientist (albeit one who helps the military make Gamma bombs, so he's not that much of a peacenik. However his heart isn't really in it.

At one level the Hulk's appeal is obvious. He jumps around and smashes things. Which sub-teenage boy wouldn't like to be like that? No wonder all my six-year old son's mates like the Hulk.

For me Superman's great flaw has always been that he's indestructible but the Marvel people wisely gave the Hulk the vulnerability of turning into puny Bruce Banner at unpredictable moments. Just as he's about to kick the tripe out of some bad guy ten pages too early, he catches sight of Betty looking a bit sooky and he's all vulnerable and capturable again. Since BB looked as if I could finish him off, let alone Things from Outer Space, this was plenty of suspense. Besides Betsy was there to provide added vulnerability to getting kidnapped, being put under Modok's evil mind control or just being wiped out by falling walls which the Hulk had accidentally elbowed past on his way the Big Green Men's room.

Besides appealing to my inner teenager, the Hulk offered Marvel the chance to vent their anti-authoritarian lefty instincts. It was kind of a thrill to watch the yankee war machine being mashed up on a monthly basis. Interestingly, General 'thunderbolt' Ross has reverted to his warmonger self in 'Gray', despite having had about about forty years of chasing the Hulk around the country in which to have been humanised and nicefied. For me there's a big gap between Hulk stories, but I bet Ross has been mellowed more than once. The biggest surprise is that he's still a General after screwing up on his one mission in life. Then again, it may be implausible that one Green monster could evade the worlds' best-equipped army, but the Vietnamese managed it.

Not that I'd want to forestall any irate 'we were robbed' type letters explaining to me how the Vietcong cheated, but a flipside of the Hulk vs Military-Industrial Complex plotline was that the weapons the army used were pretty cool. Tanks, bigger tanks, really huge tanks, giant robots, you name it, they had it.

My favourite Hulk story was a cold war one, which couldn't happen now. Brezhnev was pursuing détente with Richard Nixon, which meant the occasional high-level meeting and both sides keeping all their bombs and doing the killing through intermediaries in third world countries. However the evil Gremlin, like a lot of good Russian/commie villains, didn't believe in détente. He was a repulsive pink kid, whose father had died at the Hulk's hands in about 1963. It's pathetic but I remember the Gremlin's Dad. He was a Russian scientist who'd absorbed some of the Hulk's radiation and gained powers of his own. Scientists are always trying this and it usually ends in tears. The Gremlin's old man turned into a green version of Mandrake the Magician, but with a stretched head to indicate genius and without the top hat or bald African manservant. Gremlin senior died after a change of heart, cursing communism, but his kid was made of tougher stuff and after finishing Communist villain school, lured the Hulk to a snowy fortress in (where else?) Siberia. There blokes in armoured suits beat the Hulk up and General Ross was cast into an old fashioned cell. He was rescued by Nick Fury, who showed how James Bondish he was by producing a cigar for the general from his thumbnail in mid-dashing rescue. The other thumbnail had a cool radio transmitter in it.

As a kid I envied the ability of the Americans to produce instant-cigar technology, whilst deploring the amount of money it cost. Very much my attitude to the American technology I did know about.

My other memory of the Hulk is an almost-rape scene in which the evil Modok prepares to zap the sleeping Betty Ross with the Hulk's radiation just to see what happens. As she lies there, her hair neatly covers her naughty bits, which was pretty cool. Modok had a good look as would I.

I'd be fascinated to see what Alan Moore would do with the Hulk. Moore would see the futility of the set-up. The Hulk is always unhappy, Banner is miserable and the USA can't survive having a city wrecked by Banner's alter ego every other week. However if any of these factors is fixed, the story is over and they can't sell my son Hulk rucksacks any more. They can throw a few bad guys between the Hulk and decent people. They can send him out to space for a bit. They could make him join a super-group, but it wouldn't last due to the Hulk's need to be a misunderstood monster. This is a difficult pose to maintain if he's got his Avengers credit card so eventually it's back to the same old chasing. So nothing can really change. That's certainly the case in Gray. Bad military, tortured Bruce, unhappy Hulk, militaristic General Ross. Give or take a few X-Files touches, things are as they were back in 1964.

To sum up my reasons for the Hulk's appeal:
- be big and smash stuff
- defeat yankee war machine
- admire yankee war machine
- Betty Ross looking alright in later comics (she was pretty matronly to begin with)
- Oh I forgot - feel bad about possibility of nuclear annihilation
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This last was a big one when the Hulk was invented, and stayed significant for a long time. I remember people in the Eighties refusing to give up smoking, "because they could drop the bomb any time". My mother watched the Cuban Missile Crisis whilst nursing me and wondered if she'd done the right thing having me. So the Bomb was a big part of it. The world had gone from 'atomic' bombs to hydrogen bombs and was soon to flirt with bombs that destroyed people but not buildings (I bet those ones are still around).

These days we don't have that background worry, although we have plenty of other things to worry about and the bombs are still all there. And so is the Hulk.

I enjoyed 'Gray' and liked 'Return of the Monster' another collection I read, even though it featured the annoying long haired Doc Sampson (another 'I'll absorb the Hulk's energy and see what happens type. It turned him into an irritating ponce with long green hair who was always about to race off with Betty). However, I don't get the urge to catch up on the twenty years I've missed. I know what I'll find.