Following the success of Fantastic Four, Marvel was primed for a second feature title to reinforce their presence at the newsstands. Marvel mostly dealt in anthology books such as Journey into Mystery and Tales of Suspense due to a restrictive publishing deal that only allowed a handful of separate titles to be published each month, and anthologies allowed for some flexibility of story content.
Selecting a character or team to lead their own feature was therefore a big commitment, one that many characters – famously including Spider-Man – didn’t qualify for without a trial run in one of the anthologies. The Hulk, however, had enough faith from the powers that be for a dedicated title right off the bat.
We now know that the series was canceled after six issues, which corresponds to about one year. Something about the character and the story that was expected to be worth the publication slot didn’t resonate like it needed to. We know this wasn’t a symptom of the industry at large just from the fact that Spider-Man, initially introduced as a one-shot in the send-off issue of an anthology, became its own successful series in the time when the Hulk was being published. The reason is in the pages of the Incredible Hulk, but not necessarily in the raw quality of the stories or illustrations themselves.
The Incredible Hulk #1:
"The Hulk"
- Writers: Stan Lee
- Artists: Jack Kirby & Paul Reinman
- Editor: Stan Lee
- Publication Date: March 1, 1962
- Cover Date: May 1962
The Hulk was conceived by writer Stan Lee and artist Jack Kirby as a take on the Frankenstein monster and the story of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (among other similar spooky story influences), and even without the visual resemblance to the former or the transformation motif borrowed from the latter, this would be relatively easy to discern just from the tonal identity of the first issue. The story plays with the themes of loss of control and the externalisation of unsavory impulses, albeit with a storytelling style that’s still appropriate for younger audiences.
Most of the plot and narrative of the first issue is actually very good, and one reading it with the goal of understanding the series’ cancellation might be confused – aside from a few lines of dialogue that feel a little out of place and an ending that handles a movie’s worth of setup and plot twist in a matter of two pages, there’s nothing particularly wrong here. In fact, the first half or so of the book is amazingly solid, even in comparison with some stories from the latter half of the Silver Age.
Protagonist Bruce Banner and the premise of the book are introduced with unusual efficiency, using natural dialogue instead of expository declarations that were common at the time. We get a sense of who Banner is most of all from his selfless act of rescuing Rick Jones from a likely deadly gamma blast, at the expense of his own safety. In this same sequence, we’re taught of Igor as a villain in an unintrusive secondary layer of narrative (his name no doubt a reference to the Frankenstein movie).
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| Art by Jack Kirby and Paul Reinman. © Marvel Comics. |
Rick Jones is a clever device for delivering the story – he doesn’t do much yet in this issue, but he’s there for Banner to have someone to talk to, which in turn is just an excuse to deliver his thoughts to the reader without relying on static scenes of him just thinking. We also have General Ross and his daughter Betty representing different voices reacting to the events of the story – General Ross as the hard-liner advocating complete authority and cold logic in dealing with the issue of the Hulk, and Betty as the human element, sympathetic to Banner and afraid of the Hulk. Whether or not Stan or Jack consciously intended it, this was wonderfully nuanced and mechanically sound storytelling, on a level that was far from a given throughout the era.
The Hulk himself has vast thematic potential, a lot of which surely wasn’t even recognized by Stan and Jack at the time of this issue being written. The monstrous alter-ego is the consequence of a selfless act, a vicious punishment for doing the right thing. Contrary to characters like Doctor Strange or even Spider-Man, whose backstories revolve around their personal failings, Bruce Banner is established as a good man cursed with the fallout of saving Rick Jones’s life.
The Hulk of this story is, as most comics enthusiasts know, significantly different from the angry green monster we now know and fear. The strongest influence here was quite obviously the aforementioned Mr. Hyde – distinctly human-like, but unsympathetic, indifferent, and perpetually out of place.
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| Art by Jack Kirby and Paul Reinman. © Marvel Comics. |
When he first appears at nightfall, the Hulk breaks out of the room he and Rick are being held in, and finds himself drawn to Banner’s home by a deep-buried impulse. It’s a convenient trick to get him to go where the plot needs him, but it does feel believable that Banner would have been preoccupied with retrieving his notes about the gamma bomb, so much so that the urge would linger even after his transformation.
Igor, the Russian spy subtly introduced in the opening scene, is in Banner’s home looking for those same notes. This is a good beat, because it was also implicitly set up in the first scene - Banner is established to be the only one who understands the gamma technology, and it makes sense that failing to pull the information out of the man himself, Igor would look in his home. There are some elements of questionable ethics and lack of professionalism in Banner’s refusal to share the information, but we end up not judging him too hard seeing how Igor is a traitor anyway, and only Banner's stubbornness kept the technology from ending up in the hands of the Soviets.
Startled, Igor fires at the Hulk with a handgun, only to find out that he cares little for such puny human weaponry. The monster (who’s barely bigger than Igor in this scene, which is a quaint little detail remembering the 12-foot behemoth he’s often portrayed as nowadays) tosses Igor’s salad, and accidentally discovers Banner’s notes in the process, which is sort of pointless because he soon turns back into Banner and would have remembered where they are in any case.
The military police arrest Igor, and in a bit of dialogue that I particularly enjoy, they express suspicion that the Hulk creature was likely in league with the spy. This is in line with the Mr. Hyde angle, and produces an admirable degree of tension when Banner is now essentially forced to hide in plain sight, despite not having done anything wrong in a conventional sense. This is the root of the "fugitive Banner" staple that’s often inseparable from the character.
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| Art by Jack Kirby and Paul Reinman. © Marvel Comics. |
Around this time is when the story unfortunately takes a turn for the mediocre – the last couple of chapters become a Cold War espionage caper with a shaky plot, melodramatic or nonsensical character behavior, and a conclusion that feels too convenient and hasty to be satisfying, all packaged in a narrative that all but ignores the Hulk as a character entirely. Had we had an interesting exploration of the Hulk’s mind or powers here in the latter part as well, a lot of the weaker writing might have been excused.
Locked away in a cell, Igor transmits a message to a villain called the Gargoyle using a transmitter embedded in his fingernail, which is honestly kind of a nifty idea. The Gargoyle is a Soviet leader, described as super-intelligent, and shown to suffer from significant physical deformities. His introductory scene is a sequence of various Soviet officers playing a game of hot-potato in order to have someone else deliver a message about the Hulk to the frightening Gargoyle – it’s a funny gag, but it’s tonally jarring after the bleak and somber first half.
There’s a moment of particularly clunky writing in the character’s introduction monologue, where he declares to himself that the Hulk is reported to be nearly equal in power to himself. Now, this in itself is pretty standard fare for Silver Age boasting, but so far the Hulk has broken a wall and thrown Igor on a table – that’s hardly the kind of “power” you’d expect international espionage to lose their marbles over. When you add that the Gargoyle’s “power” is a high intellect, a gun that enslaves people and an enlarged cranium, the whole sentiment becomes sort of comical. You can ignore it as a poorly thought-out line from Stan, but it also signposts a dip in quality for the rest of the issue.
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| Art by Jack Kirby and Paul Reinman. © Marvel Comics. |
The Gargoyle travels to the US and then back with a mentally enslaved Banner and Rick Jones in tow, both directions of the trip being handled with questionably convenient logistical solutions. While in Russia, he figures out Banner (who returned to his human form en route) is the same person as the Hulk, and proceeds to open up about his inner pain from being physically deformed. Banner announces that he knows how to cure him with radiation, but only at the expense of his intelligence. The Gargoyle considers this a fair price, and cursing the Soviet leadership that collected the fruits of his intellectual work so far, undergoes a procedure to become just an ordinary human. He then sends Banner and Rick back to the US, and destroys the military complex he operated from, seemingly while still inside himself.
This last part is an odd filler chapter in an otherwise strong origin tale of the Hulk, that seems like it was re-purposed from a more generic anthology yarn; nothing about the events really requires the presence of the Hulk specifically, as long as the captured character is a scientist, particularly considering that Banner’s ability to heal someone using radiation isn’t exactly established ahead of time. He does get credited as a radiation specialist, but only in the context of weaponry or similar technologies, and he’s even referred to as a missile expert at one point. There’s a missing narrative beat here that would make the resolution make any sense, and even if it was there, the story would be unsatisfying with how pointless it would feel.
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| Art by Jack Kirby and Paul Reinman. © Marvel Comics. |
I can appreciate the attempted irony of the Gargoyle’s story acting as a mirror image to that of the Hulk: one character, a decent man, is deformed by radiation and becomes a monster, while a villain deformed to start with is healed by that man also using radiation. But that doesn’t justify abruptly treating radiation as if it’s Bruce Banner’s special superpower – this feels like Daredevil healing a blind man’s sight because he’s an expert on blindness. There’s nothing about Banner’s story so far linking him to any kind of medical science, so the logic here doesn’t come together.
Regardless of the issue stumbling on its own feet at the finish line, The Incredible Hulk #1 is a reasonably strong book that sets up a lot of potential to be utilized later. Even with its weaknesses, the reason for the series’ eventual cancellation isn’t clearly visible here. The causes of the shaky sales that would prompt Marvel to cut the magazine would only become apparent when looking at the series as a whole, and we have five more issues to go before we’ve covered it in its entirety.
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