Strange Tales: Here's the Thing ...

WITH STAN LEE taking a much more active hand in Marvel's anthology titles during 1964, following his first revamp of Strange Tales, Journey into Mystery, Tales to Astonish and Tales of Suspense in the last couple months of 1963, it became apparent as 1964 wore on that Stan wasn't quite happy with the B-team titles quite yet. Starting with Strange Tales, he would further evolve those mags with more radical changes, the first of which was introducing the "split-cover" idea.

Doctor Strange had been appearing in Strange Tales beginning with a couple of appearances in issues 110 & 111, then returning as a permanent back-up in 114 (Nov 1963), the first to see Stan scripting the main Human Torch feature. But the magician was nowhere to be seen on the following Strange Tales covers - aside from a cameo on issue 118 - until June 1964's Strange Tales 121. 

Strange Tales 121 sported Marvel's first regular "split cover" format - the idea wouldn't be rolled out to the other anthology titles until the end of 1964.

That issue brought back The Plant Man as an adversary for The Torch - not the strongest of villains - and had him spraying The Torch with acorns for the "jeopardy cover". The story relied on some of the more familiar cliches from earlier stories - The Torch getting doused with water so he can't Flame On and a scene with Johnny telling the Fantastic Four not to interfere as he has to do this on his own. When Johnny does defeat The Plant Man, he does it with the help of The Thing, who trashes the plants holding Torch's girlfriend Doris Evans captive, opening the way for the villain's capture. It's all a bit by-the-numbers and not up to Stan's usual standards.

Behind the second split cover, the three former Doctor Doom henchmen embark on a scheme to defeat the FF one-by-one and use asbestos ropes and sheets to douse The Torch's flame and imprison him. But once Johnny escapes and dries off using his handy all-body dryer, he gives them a darn good hiding.

Strange Tales 122 (Jul 1964) saw the return of Doctor Doom's henchmen, Yogi Dakor, Bull Brogin and Handsome Harry (I don't think they had a team name at this point) from Fantastic Four 23 (Feb 1964), though Stan references FF22 in error all the way through the Torch tale. In that Fantastic Four story, Doom uses the three underlings to distract the FF and when their mission is done, he banishes them to a handy parallel dimension. At the beginning of Strange Tales 122, Stan tells us that the three were transported back to earth when Doom drifted away into the stratosphere and lost his hold over them. 

In FF 23, Doctor Doom recruits three common crooks and enhances their natural abilities to make them the nemeses of each member of the FF. Bull Brogin is the Thing equivalent, Handsome Harry's hearing is heightened so he can track The Invisible Girl and Yogi Dakor is made impervious to flames. They're a kind of precursor to the The Frightful Four.

Inexplicably, the three villains are still loyal to Doom and resolve to defeat the Fantastic Four, this time one at a time, so that Doom will be proud of them ( I'm guessing they don't realise Doctor Doom doesn't do gratitude). Not surprisingly, they decide to tackle The Human Torch first. Using asbestos props, they capture the Torch - a little too easily, in my opinion - lock him in a handy caravan, then set off to capture Johnny's sister, Sue. While they're away, Johnny's unable to burn through the asbestos ropes that bind him, so he just generates billowing smoke. The fire brigade are called and they free the trussed-up Torch.

The Torch quickly catches up with the villains, who are waiting for Sue Storm at Johnny's house. He makes pretty short work of the baddies and, once they're under wraps, it only remains for Johnny to get told off by Sue for making a mess of the house and for The Torch to plug Fantastic Four 28 ("on sale now") before bringing the last solo Human Torch adventure to a close.

ENTER ... THE THING

I couldn't have been the only one who though these Human Torch tales were a bit ... well, lacklustre ... because, starting with the very next Strange Tales, Stan added The Torch's team-mate The Thing as a regular guest star, though the announcement on the cover was quite low-key.

The lead story in Strange Tales 123 introduced new characters and concepts ... and a new artist. The lead story added The Thing as a regular team-up partner for The Torch, it also introduced a new villain The Beetle, who would go on to menace other Marvel heroes - notably Spider-Man. And the "new artist" was Carl Burgos, who had created and drawn the original Human Torch in the 1930s and 1940s.

It must have been a "Why didn't I think of this sooner" moment for Stan. It was pretty evident from the Fantastic Four character-dynamic that the constant bickering between The Torch and The Thing was one of the key attractions of that book. That kind of "friendly enemy" characterisation could be traced back to the good-natured rivalry between Ham and Monk in the Doc Savage novels of the 1930s, though I wouldn't be surprised if someone could name earlier examples.

Though Doc's companions, Ham and Monk, were always at each other's throats, they'd often find themselves in tight spots together ... and woe betide anyone who picked on one of them while the other was present. (Click to enlarge, if you want to read the text.)

Strange Tales 123 (Aug 1964) also introduced a new super-villain, The Beetle, whose arrival coincided with the first appearance of Carl Burgos as artist on the Silver Age Human Torch. Of course, Burgos had created, written and drawn the original Human Torch, cover-featured on the very first issue of Marvel Comics, who had gone on to star on the covers and in the interiors of almost the entire run of Marvel Mystery Comics, from 1939 to 1949.

Though the Marvel Mystery covers were almost all drawn by Alex Schomberg, Burgos continued to write and draw the Human Torch stories until he was drafted in 1942. After the war, Burgos got into advertising and only returned to comics with the 1950s Atlas superhero revival.

I hadn't realised it until I dug out my copy of Strange Tales 123, but it's likely that the oddball appearance of The Beetle is all down to the design sensibilities of Carl Burgos. There isn't another Marvel villain that looks quite so ... well, odd. I wasn't mad on Burgos' version of The Thing. He'd drawn Ben a bit like a gorilla with orange hide ... far from the chiselled look of the character in the concurrent Fantastic Four 29.

In FF 29, Ben Grimm looked quite different, drawn by the dream team of Jack Kirby and Chic Stone, the stone-like look of The Thing already well established.

The Beetle would go on to become a Spider-Man villain, appearing in Amazing Spider-Man 23 & 94, as well as battling Daredevil in issues 33 & 34 later in the 1960s.

After his ill-advised goofy clown costume in his first couple of appearances, Paste-Pot Pete was given a sleeker costume in Strange Tales 124, though it would be a few months before he'd change his name to The Trapster.

With Strange Tales 124 (Sep 1964), Ben Grimm became an official co-star with The Torch, and the pair were up against future Frightful Four member Paste-Pot Pete once more. However, Stan and Dick Ayers gave the villain a makeover, with a more serious-looking costume and a more menacing colour scheme. After his appearance in Avengers 6 (Jul 1964), helping free New York from Baron Zemo's deadly super-adhesive, Pete was parolled. But instead of doing something useful, he tries to scheme his way through a battle with Torch and The Thing, inevitably coming off second best.

Stan's dialogue is entertaining as always, as he opens the story with a fun argument between the two pals, but I'm still not convinced by Dick Ayers' take on The Thing.

The Torch and The Thing are more interested in scrapping than in being interviewed by two Life magazine reporters (who look a lot like Larry Leiber and Jack Kirby) - until they hear that the Sub-Mariner is heading for Manhattan, and decide to fight him instead of each other.

Strange Tales 125 (Oct 1964) sported a Jack Kirby cover and an A-list supervillain foe. It also had The Torch and The Thing make a complete mess of the situation, something that's become very familiar in comic stories these days, but at the time was quite unusual.

When The Torch and The Thing's feuding is interrupted by a couple of reporters from Life magazine looking for an interview with Reed and Sue, Ben and Johnny are ticked off that they're not the interview subjects and throw the reporters out. Then, seeing on TV that The Sub-Mariner is approaching Manhattan, the two stop fighting and decide to show Reed and Sue who the real stars of the team are by battling Prince Namor themselves.

What the pair of nincompoops don't realise is that Namor is on his way to New York to attend peace talks, brokered by Reed Richards, and the duo's bombastic battling of the Sub-Mariner simply ensures that Namor will never trust the surface people again.

At the time, we comic readers could never imagine such a thing would happen in DC's world. Flash and Green Lantern never made mistakes like that, and the only way Superman would ever mess up that way is if he was under the influence of Red Kryptonite, or it was an elaborate hoax to dissuade Lois Lane he wasn't Clark Kent after all.

Weirdly, this issue also contains part one of "The Message", one of the obligatory text stories that were appearing in most of the Marvel Comics of this period. But though the footnote promised part two would appear in the next issue of Strange Tales, it never did, and this was the last time a text story - or more properly, half a text story - would appear in the title.

Over in the other anthology comics, the last text story in Tales to Astonish was in issue 57 (Jul 1964). In Tales of Suspense, it was issue 58 (Oct 1964). And in Journey into Mystery, it was issue 108 (Aug 1964). All four titles gained letters pages after the text stories stopped, except for Astonish, where readers had to wait until issue 61 (Nov 1964) to see their letters printed.

In this version of a familiar plot, The Thing escapes the Puppet Master's control when he reverts to his human form, "due to the unbearable tension", of fighting the mind control. Elsewhere in the issue, Marvel advertise four tantalisingly out-of-reach (for UK readers) issues, then on-sale.

Strange Tales 126 (Nov 1964) was essentially just a re-hash of the Torch story from issue 116. The Puppet Master takes control of The Thing and turns him against his own best friend. This version threw in The Mad Thinker for a bit of variety, as the two had teamed up previously to battle the FF in Fantastic Four 28 (Jul 1964).

And though my own copy of ST126 has the familiar Thorpe & Porter "9d" stamp on the cover, this issue was one of those that suffered from the spotty to non-existent distribution caused by the great T&P price hike snafu of 1964, that I've written about here before. So this issue's house ad - "4 More Marvel Masterpieces" - featured four Marvel Comics that were nigh-on impossible to find in the UK at the time, though I have seen copies of Astonish 61 with T&P price stamps, so some copies did make it over here.

On the plus side, there's the first letter column, "Strange Mails", which includes a letter from Paul Brackley of Hornsey, London, right here in the UK, who rates Strange Tales as his fourth favourite Marvel comic, and tells us he's moving to Australia. I wonder if he kept reading Marvels ...

This trio of covers established Chic Stone as the regular inker over Kirby pencils - though Strange Tales 128's cover was inked by Sol Brodsky, in a rare (for this period of Marvel) art contribution.

For the remaining three issues of Dick Ayers' run on the Human Torch stories, the artist is credited - at least at the Grand Comics Database - as having co-plotted the stories. Strange Tales 127 (Dec 1964) had a slightly off-beat story where The Torch and The Thing are behaving like spoilt six-year-olds, telling Reed Richards that they can manage fine without him. So Reed tells them they're free to take on some cases on their own. The very first thing that turns up in an invitation to a race - which itself is a bit odd - that turns out to be a trap set by a mystery villain. Though the plot seems a bit contrived, I think I was more bothered by Reed's out of character reaction to Johnny and Ben's bad behaviour.

I like the story in Strange Tales 128 (Jan 1965) better, if only because it featured two of my favourite characters at the time - Quicksilver and The Scarlet Witch. And The Thing's status as a co-star is further cemented by his addition to the cover's Marvel Comics corner box.

And Strange Tales 129 (Feb 1965) featured the return of the criminal team no one cares about, now named the Terrible Trio. The former henchmen of Doctor Doom - Yogi Dakor, Handsome Harry Phillips and Bull Brogin - break out of jail and cook up another doomed scheme to trap Torch and The Thing.

After three issues, Stan must have realised that this material wasn't firing on all cylinders, at least not creatively. Yet in 1964, of all the Marvel anthology titles, Strange Tales was outsold only by Journey into Mystery, which was a de facto Thor comic anyway. So I think Stan wanted to give it one more try before he re-thought the title.

Stan wisely emphasised Dr Strange on this Strange Tales cover, as the Torch-Thing team-up story inside is daft, to say the least. Interesting to see a Kirby-Stone take on the Master of the Mystic arts, though.

With Strange Tales 130 (Mar 1965), Stan replaced Ayers as artist on the Torch and Thing stories with Bob Powell, who was also taking over as Giant-Man artist in Tales to Astonish the same month. Powell was, in my opinion, a better storyteller than Ayers and I looked at the reasons for that in my Giant-Man postings last year. But his approach to the Torch and Thing stories seems to be more of a cartoony, comedy style ... at least for this story. Perhaps this has something to do with the "funny incident" nature of the tale, where Johnny and Ben take their dates to a Beatles concert and end up foiling a box-office robbery, but in truth, the style wasn't toned down much for the next adventure.

With this issue, Bob Powell supplies the cover art as well ... the result is that the cover image is much more effective than the story it's selling. The only way I think this could have been marginally improved is if the inset of Dr Strange had been left out.

Strange Tales 131 (Apr 1965) featured the return of The Mad Thinker. The villain was never one of my favourites, and even from his first appearance in Fantastic Four 15 (Jun 1963), I thought he was more annoying than menacing. I can see where the idea had come from - computers were just entering the public zeitgeist and were seen as almost magical machines that could extrapolate uncanny predictions from available data - but beyond that, the character had no, well, character.

The story in Strange Tales 132 was a little muddled, probably the result of a last-minute scripting job by Warren writer-artist Larry Ivie. It's never really clear what the rogue scientist, Professor Jack, is up to. But the highlight is The Thing being given the undercover name of "Josiah Verpoorten" ... though John Verpoorten wouldn't officially work for Marvel until 1967, he must've been known, at least to Ivie, in 1965, as it's too much of a coincidence to have The Thing named for the six foot six, 290 pound inker-turned-production manager.

The Torch and Thing story in Strange Tales 132 (May 1965) sported a new writer, Larry Ivie. Even though Stan had been plainly unsatisfied with his previous attempt to farm out the scripting chores on some of the secondary Marvel titles to seasoned pros, here he was getting a Marvel outsider to pitch in with scripting.

My suspicion is that this was more of a scheduling crunch than a serious attempt to palm the Strange Tales writing off onto someone else. And Stan makes mention of my chief criticism on the story in the letters page at the back of the book, when he asks the readers, "can you figure out exactly what our Torch and Thing story was all about? We have to admit it had us pretty confused! We read it over and over again and never could quite understand what the villain was really after." That must have stung Ivie, who was after all just helping Stan out of a deadline jam, and was a seasoned pro in the comics biz, contributing writing and art to Castle of Frankenstein, publishing his own mag Monsters and Heroes and providing script and art to the Warren titles Creepy and Eerie. Sometimes Stan could be a little careless of other people's feelings ... 

Johnny and Ben can be forgiven for not recognising The Puppet Master in this story, but isn't it odd that Alicia wouldn't recognise the sound of her own step-father's voice?

Strange Tales 133 (Jun 1965) trotted out another villain that, by that time, I'd grown a little bored with. When Johnny and Ben are dragged - by Doris Evans and Alicia Masters - to an art exhibit featuring incredibly lifelike mannequins, they fail to recognise the "artist", who has altered his appearance so he no longer resembles a ventriloquist's dummy. 

Can anyone explain why Stan and/or Jack thought it was a good idea to depict the Puppet Master as a puppet, rather than as a puppet master? It's bugged me for decades ...

I could never understand the rationale behind Kirby's depiction of The Puppet Master, back in Fantastic Four 8 (Nov 1962) ... did Jack just have a thing for comedy villains (Paste-Pot Pete, I'm looking at you)? Or did Stan have something to do with it?

I guess we'll never know the real reason for Stan's decision to give up on The Human Torch series in Strange Tales. The sales on the title were strong and growing from 1964 to 1965. But the stories weren't inspired. By definition, the plots had to be a kind of Fantastic Four "lite", with none of the epic sweep that Stan and Jack were putting into the parent title. Then there was the issue of continuity. Stan had already removed the big hitters from the Avengers comic because of the difficulties of having Thor battle Zemo in The Avengers, yet be undergoing the Trial of the Gods for three months in his own comic. In fact, while Johnny and Ben had lost their superpowers in Fantastic Four 39-40 (Jun-Jul 1965), they were merrily battling The Puppet Master and Kang, fully powered-up, in Strange Tales 133-134.

This final tale was pencilled by Bob Powell and inked by Wally Wood. Over in the Daredevil title, Wood was getting help from Powell with his artwork, so there looked to be a strong synergy between the two artists.

So it was that Strange Tales 134 (Jul 1965) marked the end of the Human Torch series - and ironically, it ends on a bit of a high-note, with a tale that felt much more like an FF story than the majority of the Torch run. And it had the additional bonus of being inked by Wally Wood, who always brought a degree of finesse to any artwork he was involved in. The plot has The Watcher task The Torch and The Thing with travelling back in time to prevent future villain Kang from defeating Merlin the Magician, taking control of Camelot and altering the course of history. As with all time travel stories, there are plot holes you could drive a truck through, but the overall impression is that this a big story to end the run on.

In the issue's letter page, Stan is taken to task by reader Richard Willis for allowing the lead strip to descend into a mixture of comedy and foul-up, then Stan uses the opportunity to announce big changes for the coming issue, which would remain for the moment a surprise.

The August issue of Strange Tales would see Johnny and Ben replaced by another Marvel character who was usually busy elsewhere. But this version of Nicholas Fury would be a C.I.A. colonel who's offered the role of running a mega-intelligence organisation, S.H.I.E.L.D. answerable only to the United Nations.

The same month, Giant-Man's position in Tales to Astonish would be usurped by Prince Namor, The Sub-Mariner. Interestingly, Daredevil 7 (Apr 1965) was designed as a dry run to see how Wally Wood would handle the character, as Stan wanted him to draw Namor's series in Astonish. But Wood reportedly hated the Marvel method of working and wanted full story credits for his work, something that Stan was reluctant to give. In another example of Marvel irony, not two years after that, Stan allowed artist Jim Steranko full writing credits on Nick Fury Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. when he took over with Strange Tales 155 (Apr 1967).

Funny old world, isn't it?

Next: Shhh ... it's a secret!

More Strange Torch Tales

IN THE EARLY DAYS of Marvel, Stan Lee hadn't been quite so protective of the characters as he would later become. I believe, even in 1962 and 1963, he saw Marvel as no different to Atlas. It was just comic books, not the great American novel. But by the end of 1963, that was beginning to change. In the last entry in this blog, I included a table showing how Stan had farmed out the script-writing of the early (B-team) Marvel stories to diverse hands, including his brother Larry Lieber, Ernie Hart, Robert Bernstein and the great Jerry Siegel - but was less than satisfied with the results.

I say "B-team" here, but it's worth noting that Stan didn't assign the Western and Millie scripting to anyone else. I can only guess, but I'd suggest that the super-hero revival was very much in its early days, and Stan didn't want to entrust proven money-makers to writers unfamiliar with the established Marvel house style. Also, Stan had been burned a couple of times in the past, commissioning work from freelancers only to have to "fire" them on publisher Martin Goodman's orders shortly afterward.

So it was that in November 1963, Stan took back the scripting chores on Thor, Iron Man, (Gi)ant-Man and The Human Torch. It's also interesting that Stan also took the opportunity to give each of these features a bit of a shakeup.

November 1963 brought across-the-board transformation of the secondary Marvel titles, with new approaches, new costumes and new powers. It was the first recognisable step in Stan Lee's evolving plan to bring all the Marvel tales together into one giant tapestry.

The Thor strips in Journey into Mystery had been a bit directionless. The first eight issues had the benefit of Jack Kirby art, but while Larry Lieber's scripting was professional and workmanlike, it didn't have Stan's sparkle. Lee was probably relying too heavily on Kirby to prop the title up ... and when Kirby was assigned to other jobs, with Journey into Mystery 89 (Feb 1963), it all started to go a bit wrong. With JiM 97 (Oct 1963), Stan stepped in, establishing emotional conflict by having Odin forbid Thor's love affair with Jane Foster, and introducing Tales of Asgard as a back-up strip, firmly establishing Thor as the God of Thunder, not just some doctor who found a magic stick.

Similarly, with the Iron Man feature in Tales of Suspense, Lee took over scripting from Robert Bernstein, replaced Don Heck temporarily with Steve Ditko and paved the way for the complete redesign of Iron Man's Armour in Suspense 48 (Dec 1963).

The biggest change - literally - was over in Tales to Astonish. With Lee's taking over the scripting came the startling transformation of Ant-Man into Giant-Man in Astonish 49 (Nov 1963).

And in Strange Tales, Stan marked his return to writing the Human Torch stories by re-introducing the greatest of Marvel's heroes, Captain America - well, kind of. It was an old villain, the Acrobat from Strange Tales 106 (Mar 1963), pretending to be Captain America. 

Captain America and The Human Torch had appeared together on the earliest All Winners covers, as well as on All Select covers, and had both even cameoed in the first issue of Young Allies (Sum 1941), but All Winners 19 (Fall 1946) was the first time I could find where they'd actually appeared in the same story together.

So where better than a Human Torch story than to bring back Marvel's top hero of the 1940s? Even though the original Human Torch and Captain America had appeared rarely together during the Golden Age of comics, there was a natural resonance between the characters, given their history.

Because, even in 1963, Stan must've seen Strange Tales 114 as some kind of a milestone, he assigned Jack Kirby to draw the Human Torch story. The most noticeable effect here was that the super-stunts The Torch pulls in this episode are much more imaginative than how he'd been using his flame power in the previous instalments. This was almost certainly due to the influence of Kirby.

"The Human Torch Meets Captain America" does read like Jack Kirby had input into the plotting of the issue, as the Torch's flaming deeds have a bit more pizzazz about them than in the previous, Dick Ayers-drawn stories.

The tale opens with The Human Torch honing his flame powers by flying through an intricate maze, similar to the kind of obstacle course that The Angel was using over in sister comic The X-Men. Then, hearing that legendary superhero Captain America is billed to appear at a local motor show, Johnny and his pals arrive to find themselves in the middle of a heist, as two crooks steal a "priceless antique racing car". Johnny gives chase and stops the getaway by melting the road ahead. But Captain America turns up and tries to take over the capture of the crooks himself. 

There does seem to be a small disconnect between Stan's plot and Jack's execution here - The Torch has melted the road so, logically, the grey gloop the car's sinking in would be molten tarmac. Yet Stan's dialogue balloons have The Torch referring to it as "mud".

Later in the story, the same two crooks escape jail and make a run for it in another stolen sports car. But this time, The Torch slices the tyres from the wheels with a flaming scythe, which should save the authorities the expense of having to re-surface another local highway.

All-in-all, it's a fun story ... and an important one in the development of Marvel, given the five extra pages the tale is allowed. Kirby's input is valuable, as he brings a more imaginative interpretation of Stan's story and demonstrates with ease that he's a notch above competent and workmanlike artists like Dick Ayers when it comes to telling an interesting story.

Pitting The Human Torch against Spider-Man villain lays the foundations for the introduction of The Frightful Four, over in Fantastic Four 36, just 15 months later, when two other Torch villains - The Wizard and Paste Pot Pete - join forces with the mysterious Madame Medusa.

The next issue of Strange Tales, 115 (Dec 1963) pits The Human Torch against a villain originally associated with Spider-Man, but who would become a deadly foe of the Fantastic Four. With Jack Kirby's attention on Tales to Astonish 50, Fantastic Four 21 and X-Men 3 at the time, Dick Ayers was back pencilling and inking - Grand Comicbook Database gives Ayers a co-plotting credit as well. There's a couple of nice touches in the story. At first Sandman's not interested in fighting Johnny. He's waiting for a better opponent - Spider-Man - to come along. So Johnny disguises himself as Spidey and waits for Sandman to come to him.

I'm not completely convinced by the way The Torch defeats Sandman. I can't recall another occasion when Johnny has super-strength right after his flame is doused, but it's the only way to explain how a skinny dude like The Torch can heave the much heavier and tougher Flint Marko above his head ... perhaps a case of Dick Ayers drawing it and Stan having to explain it in the dialogue balloon.

A few months after this issue came out, Marvel would line up new co-stars for the Tales to Astonish and Tales of Suspense titles by having the incoming characters - The Hulk and Captain America - battle the incumbent stars - Giant Man and Iron Man. No such intention here though, as The Human Torch fights The Thing after a bit of deft mind control from The Puppet Master.

Strange Tales 116 (Jan 1964) was the first story to feature The Thing in a major way. Ben Grimm had appeared in earlier Strange Tales Torch stories, but mostly in cameos, not actually taking part in the main plots. OK, you could argue that The Thing had a featured role in Strange Tales 106, where Johnny first meets The Acrobat, but that was more as a member of the Fantastic Four than as a solo starring appearance.

"In the Clutches of the Puppet Master" features the return of you-know-who, who's plotting revenge against his old foes The Fantastic Four by mind-controlling Johnny to hit on Alicia and so start a fight with Ben Grimm. Essentially, it's just a device to engineer a battle between these two friends ... and though The Torch and the Thing would later become regular co-stars in Strange Tales, it doesn't seem like the idea had occurred to Stan yet, as immediately after, Ben Grimm goes back to the occasional cameo in the title.

In the Dick Ayers-inked issues of Fantastic Four (the panel on the left is from FF18), The Thing was drawn like his skin was reptilian, "Dinosaur-hide" if you like. This look persisted until George Roussos took over the inking, with FF 21 (Dec 1963), at which point his hide took on the "blocky" look that would come to define the character (centre panel). The way The Thing was drawn in Strange Tales 116 looks as though Roussos was trying to alter the Ayers dinosaur-hide version to bring it into line with how Grimm was being portrayed over in Fantastic Four.

What is most interesting about this issue is the way that The Thing is portrayed on the cover, pencilled by Jack Kirby and inked by George Roussos (working as "Geo. Bell"). The result is much more in keeping with the later, blocky version of The Thing. On the inside of the comic, it looks quite a lot like Ayers was pencilling the "dinosaur-hide" Thing and that Roussos was trying - not too successfully - to ink Ayers pencils to look like the version of The Thing that was appearing over in Fantastic Four.

The cover to Fantastic Four 18 (Sep 1963) is the earliest depiction of The Thing as having angular blocky skin that I could find. And the above Kirby pencil art for a rejected Fantastic Four cover shows The Thing in all his blocky glory.

Even more interesting, for a comic geek like me anyhow, is that this didn't just suddenly happen with the change of inker. If you take a look at the cover of Fantastic Four 18 - pencilled by Kirby and inked by Paul Reinman, you'll see the blocky version of The Thing on the cover, yet the dinosaur-hide version inside the comic. This shows that Kirby was drawing the blocky version of The Thing and Dick Ayers was inking the pencils to conform to the earlier reptilian Thing. And if there's still any doubt, take a look at the uninked pencils for a rejected cover for Fantastic Four 20, above. Was this all just due to the way Dick Ayers inked it, or was Stan asking Ayers to throttle back on the blockiness for continuity's sake? We'll probably never know ...

Aside from the creepy villain, The Eel, Strange Tales 117 didn't have a whole lot to recommend it. The Eel would pretty much disappear after this, surfacing only for a final appearance in X-Men 22-23.

Strange Tales 117 (Feb 1964) was another issue I remember reading not long after it originally came out, around the spring or summer of '64. I wouldn't have be very familiar with the Marvel Comics at this time, and I recall thinking that The Eel was an especially creepy villain. Over in the DC Comics I'd been used to up until this point, they'd never have put a villain in a full-face mask like this. And eels are pretty unpleasant to look at, aren't they? 

Granted, this picture was taken a long time before I used to stand outside Manze's, but it gives an idea of how big the shop window was - and the staff were able to open it from inside as it was configured as a sash window.

Not far from where I was brought up in Woolwich, South East London, there was a Pie & Eel shop, Manze's, long-gone now. But whenever I'd go past, I'd stop and watch in fascinated horror as the eel-man would deftly prepare the live eels for a customer by first cutting off their heads, then slitting them along the belly to gut them, then cutting them up into bite site chunks. Of course they were alive when the process started, wrapping their bodies around the eel-man's arm as he severed their heads.

All the Eel really had going for him was a trick one-man helicopter. It's quite surprising that Johnny took 14 pages (one page more than the normal 13 pages allotted to these Torch tales) to despatch him - which he does by dumping him in a large tank of electric eels. Talk about irony.

In retrospect, I'm not crazy about the idea of having Reed and Ben rescue The Human Torch and his sister. I think it would have made for a more effective tale if Johnny had figured his way out of the trap himself. However, an interesting point for detail nerds is that the miniature anti-grav device pictured here is identical to those The Wizard used again the FF as leader of the Frightful Four, more than a year later.

Strange Tales 118 (Mar 1964) featured the return of the Wizard, who breaks out of jail with his tricky anti-gravity devices. He dupes Johnny into demonstrating his flame till it runs out, then imprisons him. Then once again impersonating The Torch, the Wizard tricks Sue Storm and traps her too. Once he's captured Johnny and Sue, he almost convinces Reed and Ben that the siblings are taking a holiday, but Mr Fantastic and The Thing free The Torch so he can set off after The Wizard. It all goes horribly wrong for the villain when he loses control of his anti-grav device and floats on up to the stratosphere.

Not a bad issue but The Wizard's still quite a long way from the version of the character who would defeat the Fantastic Four as the leader of the Frightful Four in Fantastic Four 38, some 14 months later ...

The Human Torch vs The Rabble Rouser has all the earmarks of a filler issue. The rushed artwork and recycled plot make me think that there was some kind of emergency in the Bullpen and Stan and Dick had to pull off some kind of miracle to make deadline. But I guess we'll never know for sure.

Strange Tales 119 (Apr 1964) appeared to be a bit of a filler issue. It's like there was a deadline problem and Stan and Dick had to come up with a story in a hurry. The villain here, Vitold Niyazov, aka The Rabble Rouser, is quite similar in abilities and intention to Jason Cragg, who battled The Ant-Man a year earlier in Tales to Astonish 42. Cragg had used his mesmerising voice to turn the public against Ant-Man, while Niyazov uses a small hand-held device to achieve the same ends.

Also, the artwork looks very hurried and not up to Dick Ayers' usual reliable standards, leading me to think that it may well have been rushed into production as a replacement for a rejected story or perhaps some lost artwork. Look at the two close ups of The Rabble Rouser in the scan of page 10 above. Does that look rushed to you? One theory I've heard is that this story may have been intended as a sequel to The Hate Monger tale in FF21 - both stories feature the same rocket-powered burrowing device - so this might account for the Rabble Rouser closeups looking rushed, as the story may have started off featuring a revived Hate Monger.

Look at these Marvel key issues, advertised in Strange Tales 119. FF25 is one of my all-time fave Marvel Comics, along with Avengers 4 ... but then there's X-Men 4 as well. You'd have to be a very lucky Marvel fan to own all of those issues today ...

And for some reason there was no text story in this issue. Goodman insisted on two page text stories in his comics so that they would qualify as "magazines" and thus be eligible for printed matter postage rates. This would save a cent or two on each subscription copy Marvel mailed out. The non-story pages are filled with an unprecedented four house ads ... though I always enjoyed seeing what other comics were on sale that month. You have to admit, it was a pretty impressive line-up in April 1964.

With Jack Kirby providing the pencil art for this story, Strange Tales 120 stood head and shoulders above the issues on either side. Even though the baddie, The Barracuda, was a little lame, Stan and Jack crafted a compelling and exciting tale, full of twists and turns.

However, after a disappointing issue or two, Stan bounced back with a classic tale pitting Fire against Ice in "The Torch Meets Iceman" in Strange Tales 120 (May 1964), which I already looked at way back near the beginning of this blog. Admittedly, the Jack Kirby art didn't hurt, either. Was Stan just trying to boost sales on the X-Men comic by featuring Bobby Drake? It doesn't really matter, as the story is the most enjoyable Human Torch tale we'd seen in quite some time, despite the inclusion of a weak villain, the pirate Barracuda.

There's many thrills, traps and escapes packed into the story's meagre 14 pages, but Stan and Jack work together like a well-oiled machine and you can see how much better the pair are together than they are separately right here in this tale.

After this, the title would settle down into a well-worn groove for a couple of issues until Stan livened things up by including a certain, bashful, blue-eyed Mr Grimm as a regular co-star.

Next: The Thing joins the party

Hulk not smash yet ...

BACK WHEN I first started reading Marvel Comics, in the mid-1960s, I was aware of The Hulk as a co-star in the Tales to Astonish series. To be honest, I liked the Giant-Man stories a bit better, but as I became more familiar with the Marvel titles, I began to pick up hints that The Hulk had enjoyed a life before Tales to Astonish.

I found tantalising references to the nature of these earlier Hulk adventures when the stories started showing up in the reprint books Marvel were putting out in the mid-1960s. The Marvel Tales Annual for 1965 had a reprint of the Ringmaster segment from The Incredible Hulk 3 (Sep 1962). I knew that because Stan had thoughtfully added a caption at the foot of the first page that told me so.

The cancelled Incredible Hulk series was reprinted in Marvel Collectors' Item Classics during the 1960s ... this was the first time I became aware of these comics.

I can't now recall when I did finally manage to find an issue from the original run of The Incredible Hulk, but I'm fairly certain it would have been around 1968, when I began haunting Bonus Books in Woolwich, south-east London. It would take me a year or two, but I did finally manage to track down all six issues, in various conditions (mostly quite tatty), at 6d (2.5p) a throw, amongst the piles of second-hand comics in that tawdry emporium on Woolwich New Road.

When you read the six issues in sequence, it's quickly apparent that The Incredible Hulk was a terrific idea in search of a clear plot treatment. And in many ways, it mirrors the ramshackle development style of Jack Kirby's later Fourth World projects for DC, in that the ideas tumble out of the comics in a disorganised and contradictory fashion, leaving the reader a little confused as to exactly who The Hulk is supposed to be. For that reason, I feel it's quite likely that Kirby actually was the driving force behind the series with Stan trying to make sense of Jack's ideas ... which changed from issue to issue.

Many times over the years, Stan Lee has explained how the idea of The Hulk came about. For instance, from as early as 1974's Origins of Marvel Comics, Stan has always described the beginnings of The Hulk in more or less the same way: "It was patently apparent that The Thing was the most popular character in the Fantastic Four. ... For a long time I'd been aware of the fact that people were more likely to favor someone who was less than perfect. ... It's a safe bet that you remember Quasimodo, but how easily can you name any of the heroic, handsomer, more glamorous characters in The Hunchback of Notre Dame? And then there's Frankenstein ... I've always had a soft spot in my heart for the Frankenstein monster. No one could ever convince me that he was the bad guy. ... He never wanted to hurt anyone; he merely groped his torturous way through a second life trying to defend himself, trying to come to terms with those who sought to destroy him. ... I decided I might as well borrow from Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde as well — our protagonist would constantly change from his normal identity to his superhuman alter ego and back again."

Later, in his autobiography Excelsior, Stan would describe how the name came about. "I needed a name for this monstrous, potentially murderous, hulking brute, who ... whoa! 'Hulking brute' is the exact description, and instantly I knew 'hulking' was the adjective. Well, it wasn't much of a stretch to go from 'hulking' to 'hulk', which sounded like the perfect noun."

As a counterpoint, here's how Jack Kirby described how he came up with the idea for The Hulk, during an interview with The Comics Journal 134 in 1990: "The Hulk I created when I saw a woman lift a car. Her baby was caught under the running board of this car. The little child was playing in the gutter and he was crawling from the gutter onto the sidewalk under the running board of this car — he was playing in the gutter. His mother was horrified. She looked from the rear window of the car, and this woman in desperation lifted the rear end of the car. It suddenly came to me that in desperation we can all do that — we can knock down walls, we can go berserk, which we do. You know what happens when we’re in a rage — you can tear a house down. I created a character who did all that and called him The Hulk. I inserted him in a lot of the stories I was doing. Whatever the Hulk was at the beginning I got from that incident."

THE INCREDIBLE HULK 1

The Hulk appeared straight off in his own title. That might seem a little unusual, at first glance, but the notion of Marvel debuting characters in the old mystery titles like Tales of Suspense didn't actually come along until later. Fantastic Four 1 (Nov 1961) had gone on sale at the beginning of August 1961. The Incredible Hulk 1 (May 1962) went on sale in February 1962 (Marvels were published about three months ahead of their cover dates), at the same time as Fantastic Four 4 (May 1962). We can be pretty sure of this because the interior pages of FF4 carried hand-lettered lines of text like, "You've never seen anyone like The Hulk!"

Fantastic Four 4 (May 1962) had these mysterious hand-lettered messages in the margins of many of the story pages. They do look like they were a last minute after-thought.

Given this timing, it wouldn't have been the Fantastic Four sales figures that prompted Stan and Jack to come up with another super-character comic. If a comic has to go to press six to eight weeks ahead of its on-sale date, then Jack would have been drawing the art in December 1961. So any creative discussions about the concept of The Hulk - if they happened the way Stan describes - would likely have happened in November 1961 at the very latest. At that point, there was no way Martin Goodman would have had any inkling of how the FF book was selling.

Stan has often said that The Thing was his favourite member of the FF, so it seems more likely to me that Stan wanted a Thing-like character that he could explore further in book-length adventures. And this is borne out by the way that Stan made the Hulk's personality a bit like a second-hand version of The Thing's in those early issues of The Incredible Hulk.

Right there at the top of page 5, there's Dr Banner coming over all funny and in the background, through the window, we see the full moon.

Everyone reading this will be more than familiar with the origin of the The Hulk ... of how Dr Bruce Banner, supervising the test of his Gamma Bomb, rushed to pull reckless Rick Jones to safety and was exposed to a massive dose of gamma radiation. But it's easy to forget that the whole rage thing came much later. In the earliest stories, Banner's transformation into The Incredible Hulk was triggered by the rising of the moon so, as well as Jekyll and Hyde, and the Frankenstein monster, there was a bit of The Wolf Man in there as well. And as newly-transformed Hulk brushes Rick roughly aside and stalks off into the twilight, he doesn't sound angry ... just confused and impatient. And his speech patterns, if not especially intelligent, are at least grammatically sound.

In the first story, The Hulk was depicted as grey-skinned ... Stan has always claimed that the printers had trouble consistently rendering the colour from page to page, but the evidence doesn't really support that. The Hulk appears green on page 18 (more as a lighting effect than as a colouring mistake) and I'm betting Stan thought it looked better.

Another important aspect of this first Hulk story is that the character wasn't green. He was grey, probably another Stan allusion to The Frankenstein Monster, who was portrayed as grey in the old black and white films to denote his deadness. Like The Hulk, old Frankie didn't become green until later ... Stan has always told the story of The Hulk's change of colour like this: "In our first issue the printer had trouble keeping the shade of grey consistent from page to page. On some pages his skin was light grey, on others it was dark grey, and on some it looked black. So for the next issue I changed his skin colour to green, a colour the printer had less trouble with."

But to me, that doesn't sound plausible. For a start, if colourist Stan Goldberg specified that The Hulk's skin tone was 25% black to the engravers, then that's what the colour would be. The only way the skin colour would change is if the colourist or the engravers messed up and set The Hulk's skin tone as 25% black on some pages and 50% black on others (the only available tones for this kind of primitive letterpress printing were 0%, 25%, 50% and 100%). That would have resulted in wildly varying skin colours. However, when you look at the actual original comic, The Hulk's skin-tone is pretty consistent throughout, only looking a little darker in the night-time scenes on pages 18 and 19, as might be expected.

The other aspect of Stan's explanation that doesn't work for me is that if indeed the artwork for a comic had to leave the office around two months before the on sale date, it's unlikely that Stan would have seen finished copies of The Incredible Hulk 1 before issue 2 was due to press. And even if he did manage to get his hands on an advance copy, it would likely be way too late to change the colouring of the whole of issue 2.

All pure speculation on my part, but it just seems more believable to me that after issue 1 went to press, Stan was sitting in his office thinking, "Gee, I wish we'd coloured The Hulk green instead of grey!"

THE INCREDIBLE HULK 2

Issue 2 went on sale at the beginning of May 1962, cover-dated July. It's a little odd that The Incredible Hulk was on sale two months ahead of its cover date and Fantastic Four was on sale three months ahead. Maybe there's a reason for that, but it's doubtful we'll ever know.

The issue marked Steve Ditko's first work on the character, as he was inking Kirby's pencils here, not something Ditko did very often. In fact some pages look like Kirby had little to do with them, so I'm wondering if this wasn't more of a case of Kirby layouts and Ditko finished art.

There are touches of Kirby here and there, but for the most part, The Hulk looks very Ditko-ish in most panels of The Incredible Hulk 2.

Again, here The (now-green, no explanation given in the comic) Hulk changes from his Banner form with the onset of night, is quite eloquent ("Now you taste the sting of your weapon!"), and remains relatively calm. Yet, Banner realises that the transformations are dangerous and looks for a way to restrain The Hulk. He hits upon a cave where he can set up a Hulk-proof cell so that Rick can lock him up at night. And right in the middle of this scene, the Toad Men show up. The cave prison would also show up in later issues, as would Ditko, but this still isn't the Hulk as we would later come to know him.

The Hulk here demonstrates quite a level of empathy, recognising, quite consciously, that Man has been hounding him for no good reason ... which is why he hates all humans.

In fact, there's not a great deal to separate this story from any of the tales Lee and Kirby were spinning in any of the other fantasy titles they were publishing. The Hulk is no more than a slightly tamer version of his more menacing cousins - Groot (Tales to Astonish 13), Taboo (Strange Tales 77) and ... The Hulk (Journey into Mystery 62, all Nov 1960). 

So ... Stan's brain-wracking to come up with a name for his newest super-character would have been so much easier if only he'd scanned back over a few issues of Journey into Mystery and re-used the name of one of his old monsters ...

Also, interesting, there's a house ad for Fantastic Four 5, which would have been on sale a little bit before The Incredible Hulk 2 ... but, tacked on the bottom of the ad page is a very interesting "message from the Editors".

Click on the image to expand it, so you can read the Important Announcement text ...

In it, Stan explains that they've had "an avalanche of mail" from readers, but no time to read more than a few, so the announced Hulk letters page won't appear until the following issue. Again, this seems to confirm that the artwork for the comic needed to go off to the printers around two months before the on-sale date.

THE INCREDIBLE HULK 3

The cover of the third issue of The Incredible Hulk (Sept 1962) does have kind of frenetic feel about it, proclaiming, "Nothing can stop him now ... he can fly!" while Rick yells, "I can't control him any more!", even though his control over The Hulk had previously only even amounted to a few words of persuasion, which The Hulk hadn't always listened to, anyway.

In the first story, Stan and Jack alter the premise of The Hulk slightly and have him only respond to direct commands from Rick Jones. It does get us away from the more sentient Hulk of issues 1 and 2. The additional development of having The Hulk leap such great distances that it seems as though he's flying is a more logical result of his great strength.

The first of these changes comes about when The Hulk is tricked by Rick into a space capsule then zapped by cosmic rays. When he returns to Earth, The Hulk is pretty ticked off with his teenage sidekick and chases him up a mountain. There, Rick cringes and yells, "Stay back ... please, stop!" and The Hulk stops. Now fully under Rick's control, The Hulk is like a robot, responding only to voice commands. A little while later comes the second change. Rick and The Hulk are cornered by hostile state troopers. When Rick yells, "Get out of here, fast!" The Hulk gathers him up a leaps away, flying for miles before he touches down to earth again ...

At this point, Dr Banner is still transforming to his monstrous alter-ego with the setting of the sun (or the rising of the moon, it varies), so Rick locks him back in his cell until he can figure out what to do.

After a three page recap of the Hulk's origin, Stan and Jack pit The Hulk against his first super-villain, sort of. The Ringmaster is based on an old Marvel foe from the 1940s. Jack Kirby and his then-collaborator Joe Simon were responsible for creating and authoring the first ten issues of Captain America Comics. In issue 5, Captain America comes up against an Nazi agent called The Ringmaster of Crime, who looked essentially the same as the character in this Hulk story.

Jack Kirby had used the idea of an evil Ringmaster as far back as Captain America Comics 5 (Aug 1941). In this wartime story, the villain is a nazi agent, assassinating high-ranking army officials using his wheel of death, though there's no hypnotising.

With The Hulk fully under control of Rick Jones, the teenager feels it's safe to leave the Hulk unattended while he gets some food. In a nearby town he comes across a circus and joins the audience. But this is a the circus of The Ringmaster, a criminal who hypnotises his paying customers and then robs them. Just as Rick is falling under the master hypnotist's spell he sends out a mental distress call to The Hulk. But by the time The Hulk arrives, Rick has succumbed and the Hulk, without orders from Rick, falls motionless and is captured.

The 1960s version of The Ringmaster used his hypnotic powers to render his victims comatose while he robbed them. The character would go on to appear as a regular villain in Amazing Spider-Man, with the concept developed and enhanced by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko.

The Ringmaster and his cohorts then take their captive and move on to the next town, leaving their audience to recover as best they can. Just as the Ringmaster is about to hypnotise a new audience, Rick shows up with the FBI to arrest the criminals. The sound of Rick's voice revives The Hulk, who proceeds to make mincemeat of the baddies, finally escaping with Rick just as the army shows up.

With its three-page origin recap, The Incredible Hulk 3 does seem like a re-launch issue of sorts. I'm fairly sure the initial sales figures didn't look good, so Stan exerted a little more authority over the title, making the character less similar to The Thing, by toning down The Hulk's conversational abilities and introducing the flight-like leaps, an idea used in the earliest Superman stories. But there are yet more changes ahead in the very next issue.

THE INCREDIBLE HULK 4

The fourth issue of The Incredible Hulk (Nov 1962) was another two-story issue. The first story deals with the further changing relationship between Dr Banner, The Hulk and Rick Jones. As the tale starts out, The Hulk is still under the mental control of his teenage sidekick. Here, the device of The Hulk being "out of range" allows the monster to take some independent action, when he prevents a stalled schoolbus being trashed by an oncoming locomotive. Then, moments later, Rick is able to recall the green goliath with the power of thought, despite The Hulk being too far away. It's the sort of contradiction that contributes to these early Hulk stories seeming jumbled and inconsistent.

The Incredible Hulk 4 features one of Marvel's earliest split covers. In the first of the two stories, The Hulk is still under the control of Rick Jones, though Stan isn't sure whether that control is limited by distance or not. Once not under Rick's direct influence, the Hulk seems capable of some rudimentary reasoning.

The second part of the first story has Dr Banner and Rick use a Big Gamma Machine to control the transformations into the Hulk, but retain Banner's mind. The experiment appears to be successful, but Rick quickly becomes aware that the gamma rays have made the transformed Banner more brutish, as though The Hulk's earlier persona and Banner's have been combined.

Later on in the same story, Rick is able to use a handy gamma-ray machine to transform the Hulk back to his Bruce Banner identity. From here on, the machine-controlled switches leave The Hulk with some degree of Banner's intelligence.

And once again, The Hulk is talking like The Thing, with dialogue like, "Save a man's family and they shoot at ya! Come on, Rick - we're takin' off!"

The second story offers another variation on Banner's change into The Hulk. When an alien called Mongu arrives on Earth and issues a challenge, Bruce Banner uses his Big Gamma Machine, now controlled via a floor-mounted panel, to change to The Hulk, but still retaining his own mind ... sort of. While he seems as intelligent as Banner, this Hulk affects the coarse speech patterns of one of Stan Lee's stock thug characters, like the later Sandman or Crusher Creel. In a way it's a bit of a throwback to the earlier characterisation of The Hulk we saw in issues 1 and 2. The same characterisation that I'm pretty sure resulted in those early disappointing sales.

In the second story of the issue, The Hulk talks like an angry version of The Fantastic Four's Ben Grimm. He's capable of cunning and is able to expose the deception of Mongu almost immediately.

And it wouldn't change much with the following issue, as the Hulk takes on Tyrannus and the oriental communist General Fang.

THE INCREDIBLE HULK 5

Issue 5 of The Incredible Hulk went on sale at the beginning of November 1962, cover-dated January 1963. Other Marvels on sale that month were Fantastic Four 11 (still being published a month ahead of the other titles), Journey into Mystery 88, Strange Tales 104 and Tales to Astonish 39. Stan was already beginning to build quite a line-up of costumed heroes.

Even at this early stage, the Marvel line was beginning to take shape, most of the lead stories pencilled - and perhaps co-plotted - by Jack Kirby.

Like the preceding two issues, this one was also a two-story book. The first tale was cover-featured and pits The Hulk against a subterranean menace called Tyrannus in "The Beauty and the Beast" and the second story trotted out Stan's favourite villains of the period, the communists.

It's not too clear in the first story exactly what Stan's title is referring to ... Is Betty the "Beauty", or is it the foppishly handsome Tyrannus? Is the "Beast" the Hulk, or the evil Tyrannus? And are the villain's subterranean hench-things the same subterraneans that follow The Mole Man , as seen in Fantastic Four 1 (Nov 1961)? In the opening scenes, Tyrannus explains to his little yellow followers that he was banished to the centre of the Earth by Merlin many centuries ago. Is this the same Merlin that would try to take over the world just a few months later in Journey into Mystery 96? It's all a bit confusing.

The plot of the Tyrannus story revolves around Betty to some degree, but she really is treated like a mere plot device here, rather than as a character. Tyrannus is depicted watching her via his viewscreen (though it functions more like a crystal ball) right at the start. Then at the conclusion of the tale, Rick's dialogue tells us that Betty has developed (convenient) amnesia and won't remember anything that happened.

All too quickly, Tyrannus has made friends with Betty Ross and spirited her away to his underground kingdom. When a curious Banner and Rick Jones try to follow, they find their way blocked by a huge boulder. Only one creature has the strength to move such a weight, and the pair rush back to Banner's lab to effect a familiar change.

But when Banner returns as The Hulk, the boulder barrier has vanished. Maybe Jack had forgotten to draw it and Stan was just writing round the discrepancy, but whoever was responsible, it feels like careless storytelling. The Hulk follows Tyrannus to his underground kingdom, but is almost immediately rendered unconscious by a volcanic gas weapon and captured. With Betty Ross as a hostage against his obedience, there's a couple of scenes with The Hulk as first a gladiator then a slave. Fortunately, Rick manages to release Betty and The Hulk is free to battle Tyrannus and his underlings head-on.

In this story, The Hulk retains enough of Banner's personality to care about Tyrannus' threat to Betty, and keeps his aggression in check, something the later Hulk would find impossible - even if he could remember who Betty is.

"The Hordes of General Fang" is one of those by-the-numbers commie tales that were used so often at this period in Marvel's development. The first three pages show The Hulk, out taking his exercise (!), then attacked by General Ross' men with an ice missile. The Hulk escapes and returns to Banner's lab where he becomes human once again using the Big Gamma Machine. 

Hearing radio reports of an asian warlord, General Fang (great name), invading a peaceful eastern principality Banner decides to take a hand as The Hulk. After reviewing a book about eastern legends (!), The Hulk takes off, on a commercial airliner, for Taiwan. Once there he must first battle his way through communist Chinese forces to reach his intended foe. Fang's soldiers are depicted in communist uniforms, though they're never identified as such. Perhaps Kirby's intention was that Fang and his forces were communist deserters, but Stan deemed it too complicated. Then the point of The Hulk's research is revealed. He dresses up in a furry costume and attacks Fan's army as ... The Abominable Snowman.

That's right ... your eyes aren't deceiving you. That's The Hulk dressed up in a furry onesy, pretending to be The Abominable Snowman. Not really sure why the deception is needed, when he can just trash General Fan's army with his enormous strength.

The General Fang story is probably the daftest of these early Hulk tales ... but the title was about to take a dramatic turn with perhaps the most pivotal change of this early run.

THE INCREDIBLE HULK 6

"The Hulk vs The Metal Master" is a book-length tale that differs considerably from what had come before. The most obvious difference was that Kirby was no longer penciller (or plotter). Stan's other heavyweight artist Steve Ditko had come on board as penciller and inker. Whether this was to have been a fill-in issue or a permanent change is hard to say.

Looking at the evidence, the timing of The Incredible Hulk 6 (Mar 1963) could indicate that Stan was clearing Kirby's schedule to accommodate the impending Fantastic Four Annual 1 (Jul 1963) and his imminent takeover of the Thor strip, starting with Journey into Mystery 93 (Jun 1963). However, the replacement for The Hulk's book was to be Sgt Fury and his Howling Commandos 1 (May 1963), also drawn by Kirby, which would make it look less like a scheduling conflict.

At this point, Ditko was only drawing The Amazing Spider-Man - issue 1 cover-dated the same month as The Incredible Hulk 6 though it was on the stands almost a month earlier - so it does seem more plausible that the Hulk title had been promised to Ditko to fill in the gap months between Spider-Man issues. Which indicates that Stan felt The Incredible Hulk was floundering and needed a shot in the arm to get it back on track. And supporting this idea is the fact that when the Hulk was cancelled after just one Ditko issue, Stan was more than prepared to accept a pitch for a new character Dr Strange, which has been well-documented elsewhere.

In the Metal Master story, The Hulk is still talking like a bar-room Ben Grimm, and still transforming via his Big Gamma Machine. But when the Metal Master arrives to threaten Earth with his metal-controlling powers (powers not so vastly different from Magneto, who would be menacing the fledging X-Men just six months later), Banner transforms into The Hulk. All except his face, that is.

From the look of the art here, Steve Ditko is putting everything he has into this issue of The Incredible Hulk. The artwork actually looks more polished than the work he was doing at the same time on The Amazing Spider-Man. And that cinematic row of panels across the centre of page 8 ... perfectly conveys the true power of The Hulk.

No problem. The Hulk can just use one of these casts "Banner made of his head and mine, in order to study 'em!" as a mask. Whoa, wait, how's that again? Banner made a cast of The Hulk's head? And the Hulk sat still for that, did he? No, wait ... aren't Banner and The Hulk the same person? Now I'm confused again ... OK, it's dumb plotting, but you have to admit, those panels where the soldier pulls the Hulk mask off the unconscious Hulk, only to find The Hulk's real face underneath ... that's a pretty cool scene, right? And pure Ditko. I don't think Stan would ever have come up with that weird an idea.

Right after that, there's a scene where the captured Hulk rages at Rick Jones, paranoid that the teenager has betrayed him. It's the first glimmer we get that The Hulk has anger management issues, fuelled by his feelings of persecution. There was no sense of this in the Kirby-drawn stories, but here it is, emerging in the very first Ditko version of the character.

Here, more than ever, The Hulk's behaviour seems to be similar to that of schizophrenia ... his feelings of persecutions lead to an uncontrollable anger and he makes unfounded accusations at the people closest to him. Once he becomes Banner, he is once again rational.

Then, upset by The Hulk's rejection, Rick asks General Ross about joining the army, but at 16 he's too young. So he turns this into a positive and with his pals forms the Teen Brigade, a national network of kids with radios who share information to help the authorities whenever needed. And of course, they're needed pretty much right away. Banner has an idea that will defeat the Metal Master and the Teen Brigade gathers the necessary equipment.

With the supplies, The Hulk (not Banner) builds a big cannon he intends to use on the Metal Master. I won't say how The Hulk is able to use such a weapon against a creature who controls all metal, as it's a clever twist and you may not have read the issue yet. But Banner's plan works and the menace is defeated.

When The Hulk tries to use the Big Gamma Machine to revert to Dr Banner, the device mysteriously doesn't work. It's the Hulk's fury at his plight and the way the authorities have treated him that triggers the transformation.

But here's the best bit ... once The Hulk has finished with The Metal Master, he leaps away, back towards his lab. But when he tries to revert to Banner using his Big Gamma Machine, the process doesn't work, and Banner appears to be stuck in Hulk form. The final straw is when he hears that The Hulk has been pardoned in return for saving Earth from the Metal Master and he gets angry. He gets so angry that it triggers the transformation back to Bruce Banner. Now, granted, that's the exact reverse of later Hulk stories - where anger triggers the transformation to The Hulk and calmness causes the change back to Banner - but the germ of the idea is there. Is it Ditko's idea or Stan's? It's not possible to say now. From what I've read, at this point in Marvel history, with a limited number to titles to get to press every month, Stan was still plotting at least the non-Kirby comics. Certainly, the story is tighter, more structured and more consistent here than it ever was while Kirby was on the title.

And Kirby's story about seeing an enraged mother lifting a car off her child? Sorry, Jack, but I just don't believe that's true. The mother-lifting-the-car tale was a common urban legend at the time, one my own mother recounted to me when I was a kid. The science is shaky, and most sources agree that adrenaline wouldn't give the muscles such a surge of strength, let alone be delivered fast enough to permit such a feat. And more importantly, The Hulk wasn't a big green rage monster while Jack was drawing him. That wouldn't come until the later Tales to Astonish stories, drawn by Ditko. Whoever came up with the whole "don't make me angry" schtick ... it sure wasn't Jack.

Despite some of my criticisms here, I still truly love this run of The Incredible Hulk. Yes, they're corny, contradictory and in some spots just plain dumb ... but they're also incredibly endearing. And back in my early teens these six books were the absolute holy grail of Marvel issues for me - I was obsessed with owning them.

In examining them again, I can see that this version of the Hulk might possibly have been Jack Kirby's brainchild, but the enduring Hulk that would go on to massive publishing, television and movie success wasn't this Hulk at all ... it was Stan Lee and Steve's take on the character that would prove the successful one.

The Hulk would also appear in Fantastic Four 12, cover dated the same month, but on sale three weeks earlier, then not again until The Avengers 1 (Sep 1963), six months later and would regularly appear in that title until issue 5 (May 1964), all drawn by Jack Kirby. In all of these appearances, whenever the transformation between Banner and The Hulk is shown, it's always using the Big Gamma Machine, except at the end of Avengers 3, where the change back to Banner is caused by "the excitement ... the stress" and in Avengers 5, where Banner's transformation to The Hulk is entirely spontaneous. Then, Fantastic Four 25 and 26 (Apr & May 1964) show the Hulk being changed back to Banner via a "gamma pill" Rick Jones pops into his mouth, though he's still talking like a slightly ticked-off version of Ben Grimm.

Just five months later, Hulk would first appear in Tales to Astonish 59 (Sep 1964) as a foe for Giant Man, where his transformation to the Hulk is for the first time directly attributed to anger, scripted by Stan Lee and drawn by Dick Ayers. Then the following month, the character kicks off in his own series, written by Stan and once more drawn by Steve Ditko. It's here that the familiar version of the Hulk - the one that changes when his heartrate rises or falls and utters catchphrases like "Hulk smash" - really comes into his own.

NEXT: THE HULK ON TV