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

Captain America: Live Action Star of the Small Screen

IT'S PROBABLY hard for younger fans to understand just how slim the pickings were for those of us who followed comic book superheroes back in the 1960s. As early as 1966, Marvel publisher Martin Goodman had licensed the rights to his Marvel characters to television.

The Marvel Superheroes cartoon show was made in colour, though no one had colour televisions back in 1966. And, yes, we really did sit that close to the tv set back then. The screens were so small you couldn't see anything unless you were no more than three feet away. Pretty sure all those cathode rays fried my brain ...

Even Goodman didn't realise what he had, and seemed content to let the producers of the Marvel Superheroes cartoon show do pretty much what they wanted in return for almost no money. The big return would come, reasoned Marty, when the cartoons propelled the sales of his comic books into the stratosphere, just the way the Batman tv show had done for DC's Batman and Detective Comics. But it didn't work out that way ...

In comic books, there is a point to sound effects. However, in an animated cartoon, you have a sound track. The viewers can hear the sound effects. So why in the world would you draw them onto the animation art as well? Unless, of course, you were copying the Batman television show ...

The cartoons, produced by Grantray-Lawrence were pretty poor, even by 1966 standards. Essentially, the production company took stats of the comic book artwork, then enlarged panels, to which they'd add limited - very limited - animation. Viewers would see Captain America standing rigidly still (even during fight scenes) while his animated mouth delivered lengthy monologues.

But that's not to say these cartoon don't retain a certain nostalgic charm ... not much, but some. And the latter half of the thirteen episode series did use more contemporary Marvel Comics as their source material.

The Enchantress' original modus operandi was to beguile and charm others into doing her bidding. This works pretty well for her in the case of Erik Josten, who she seduces (off-camera) and then easily persuades to undergo the Power Man treatment in order to battle The Avengers.

Episode 9 took the plot and art of Avengers 21 and 22 as its starting point, in which The Enchantress finds a human stooge, Erik Josten, and uses Baron Zemo's "Power Man" machine (from Avengers 9) to turn him into ... Power Man.

The Commissar first appeared in Avengers 18, luring the team to south east asia so he can defeat them before the world to demonstrate how communism is superior to "the freedom-loving western democracies". You'd think there's be an easier way ...

The tenth episode jumped back a few issues and presented the Avengers tale from issue 18, where the quartet of Cap, Hawkeye, Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch take on an evil commie foe, The Commissar, in a propaganda version of the Cold War. One by one they're beaten until Wanda is the last Avenger standing ...

This one has Captain America battle the Red Skull's doomsday machines, The Sleepers. It's a pretty good yarn and has the first instance on the current Marvel continuity of Cap jumping out of a plane without a parachute.

Episode 11 takes us back to Captain America solo stories from Tales of Suspense, adapting the Sleeper saga that ran across ToS 72-74. This story acted as a bridge between the World War II exploits of Cap and his contemporary adventures set in the 1960s. Within the context of the comic books it made sense, but here, out of sequence, the viewer is left uncertain as to when this story is taking place.

Okay, this is where it all gets a bit weird. You see, Cap's in love with a feisty World War II resistance fighter called Peggy Carter, aka Agent 13. Then, twenty years later, he runs into her younger sister, Sharon, also designated Agent 13. And falls in love with her. Marvel later tried to make it less creepy by ret-conning Sharon to be Peggy's niece but that, if anything, was worse ...

Episode 12 retells the story from Tales of Suspense 75-77, where Cap battles the ridiculously accented Batroc ("Zee Leapair") master of le Savate. He also runs into a new Agent 13, Sharon Carter, who turns out to be the younger sister of the original Agent 13, Peggy (currently enjoying a pretty good tv series of her own).

The Red Skull gets hold of The Cosmic Cube, a device that can convert his every thought into a reality. Not the sort of ability you want to see conferred on the most evil character in history. There's no way Cap can win this one, is there?

The final episode the the Captain America cartoon series adapts one of my favourite stories from the original Suspense run, in which the Red Skull turns out to be still alive in 1966 and manages to wrest possession of The Cosmic Cube from the hands of A.I.M. It doesn't really capture the doom-laden atmosphere of the original tale, but then the cartoon production people would probably have thought that aspect of the tale a bit dark for younger viewers. Shame, really ... I remember being quite unsettled by the original comic tale when I first read in back in 1966.

Admittedly, viewed today, these cartoons do seem a bit ... well, dire. But if I had seen them at the time, in 1966, I think I would have preferred them to the Batman tv show, my opinions of which can be found elsewhere on this blog. As bad as the animation was, at least the producers treated the characters with respect. The only real lapse - a kind of sop to the "camp" brigade - was the odd hand-lettered sound effects superimposed on top of the picture. And the actual sound effects were a bit over-comical, appearing to have been lifted from old episodes of Huckleberry Hound. Maybe cartoon studios all just used the same sound effects record.

What was more unforgivable was the contempt with which publisher Marty Goodman treated his own intellectual properties. OK, I know there is quite a legal and moral dispute around whether Goodman actually did own Captain America and the other more modern properties, but my point is he at least believed he owned them at this point. And for him to allow others free rein to do a less-than-brilliant job of exploiting the characters in another medium is definitely what I'd categorise as contempt.

But sadly, things would get worse before they got better. Eleven years later, Captain America would return to tv screens in live-action form.

JUST WHO IS REB BROWN?

So, The Incredible Hulk tv series (1977) had been a big success for Universal-MCA. By 1978, Hulk fever was everywhere. Marvel in the US responded with a magazine-size comic, Rampaging Hulk, which tried to set the dial back to the early Lee-Kirby style of the early Sixties' Incredible Hulk comics. Marvel UK tackled the other end of the readership demographic and released a weekly title, Hulk Comic (1979) aimed at the younger reader.

Marvel launched two titles to capitalise on the success of the Incredible Hulk tv series - a black and white mag for the US market and a weekly kids' comic for the UK.

Universal, who'd bought a package of characters from Marvel, also made a feature-length pilot for a Dr Strange tv series, which cast Peter Hooten in the lead role. It wasn't bad, by any means, but as it was originally aired against Roots in the US, it didn't get the viewing figures it needed, so the planned tv series went nowhere.

Peter Hooten looked every bit the part as Marvel's Dr Strange (1978). Anne-Marie Martin made a fetching Clea, though in this she wasn't from an alien dimension.

I'm pretty sure I read somewhere that Universal had also licensed the rights to The Sub-Mariner at the same time, though I don't believe any attempt was made to produce a pilot. That Universal claims to this day to be the rights holder to Prince Namor seems to bear this out.

Reb Brown as Captain America. There were a couple of small changes to the uniform between Captain America and Captain America: Death Too Soon.

They gave it a third (and final, as it turned out) roll of the dice with Captain America, which featured Reb Brown as a heavily reconceptualised Steve Rogers.

The first of the two pilots, Captain America (1978), was all over the place. Reb Brown was criminally miscast as Steve Rogers, a slab-of-meat surfer type who's just got out of the army and wants to be an artist. He is on his way to see an old friend of his father's when he's invited to a meeting with a covert government agency, led by Dr Simon Mills (Len Birman). Mills wants him to help with a line of experiments to enhance human capabilities that Rogers' father had been working on. Though attracted to Mills assistant, Dr Wendy Day (Heather Menzies), Rogers doesn't want to be following orders any time soon, and turns down the offer. From there he's embroiled in a plot to detonate a neutron bomb on American soil and is severely wounded by the henchmen of the plotter, industrialist Lou Brackett (Steve Forrest). In a desperate bid to save Rogers' life, Dr Mills injects him with the FLAG serum Dr Rogers had developed, enhancing Steve's strength and senses to about ten times normal human levels. Dr Mills gives Steve Rogers a flash motor cycle and a uniform, and Captain America takes on the baddies and foils the nuclear threat.

The film seems very slow moving ... the sequence with Steve Rogers trying out his new motorcycle, and the subsequent scenes of him trying to outrun a helicopter seems impossibly extended, at over seven minutes. Just pruning this section might have made the film seem less flabby.

Its other liabilities include really bad acting from the lead, a rather flimsy-looking plastic shield and the fact that Captain America isn't shown in uniform until over an hour into the movie. Oddly, the first film also sets up Dr Wendy as a love interest for Steve Rogers (contrary to other reports, the two do share a kiss on the beach), at a time when tv heroes didn't have regular girlfriends. And the tv origin doesn't start with a puny Steve Rogers ... though, in all fairness, this would have been very difficult to pull off with 1978 special effects technology.

It certainly looks from this that the producers intended for Steve Rogers and Dr Wendy Day to be an item. And in the extended motorcycle chase sequence, Rogers (not Captain America at this point in the movie) leaps from a motorcycle to a helicopter.

The second attempt at a pilot seemed marginally better. It's ten minutes shorter, which really helps ... and it seems to veer more towards Incredible Hulk territory, with a wandering Steve Rogers, still working for Dr Simon Mills' clandestine government agency, but out interacting with real people in a small community in danger from the plot of a dangerous international terrorist.

In the second pilot, Dr Wendy is now played by Connie Sellecca, and is no longer romantically tied to Steve Rogers. Just as well, as Rogers gets entangled with a young widow whose town he's trying to save. The terrorist Miguel is played in typical humorless style by Christopher Lee and has the villain running a nearby prison as his base of operations by posing as the warden. The plot has Miguel in possession of an ageing chemical with which he's dosed a couple of nearby towns. Unless Captain America can defeat the baddies and acquire the antidote, hundred of thousands of US citizens will age 38 days every hour.

Christopher Lee makes another bad choice of roles, here as European terrorist Miguel. And Dr Wendy Day has now changed from blonde Heather Menzies to brunette Connie Sellecca and is no longer romantically interested in Steve Rogers.

Both films use the old Six Million Dollar Man trick of slow motion for the super-power scenes, accompanied by that all-too-familiar "zziinnggg!" sound effect. And I think that's indicative of its in-built problems. The producers couldn't make up their minds whether they were trying to follow The Incredible Hulk or the Six Million Dollar Man. Giving Captain America super-strength just seemed wrong. I'd have thought the character would have been far more credible to a tv audience if he was simply a normal human boosted to the absolute peak of physical perfection, as in the comic book. All the twenty foot leaps and bending prison bars with his bare hands just seemed ridiculous on television.

So, unsurprisingly, the almost unprecedented two feature-length pilots didn't lead to a full tv series and Captain America slipped back into the comic book ghetto from whence he'd come. And I think if it had, I wouldn't have watched it. Once again, Hollywood producers seemed completely indifferent to the concepts that had led a comic character to endure for almost forty years and had dispensed with the very Unique Selling Point that had made Captain America great.

Next time I want to get back to silver age comics and look at the original run of six issues to feature The Hulk, back in the early 1960s.

Next: Hulk not smash yet

Captain America: Cartoon Star of the Small Screen

BACK WHEN I was a kid, very few television or movie producers would have dreamed of looking to comic books for source material. Certainly, the old poverty row studios, poor in ideas and budgets, might have occasionally turned to comic book and comic strip characters, but that was about it.

For obvious reasons, comic strip characters made it onto the screen first. Original comic book characters didn't really kick off in a big way until Superman showed just how viable heroes created specifically for comic books could be.

The earliest live-action comic strip movie I have is Tarzan the Ape Man (1932). I know Tarzan wasn't originally a comic strip character, but I'd argue that the success of the Hal Foster daily comic strip running in hundreds of newspapers in the USA from January 1929 was almost certainly what caught the attention of the the great MGM Studios.

Tarzan the Ape Man (1932) was a major movie from a Hollywood's biggest and most successful studio MGM. Olympic swimmer Johnny Weissmuller was cast in the lead and the production revelled in presenting the star's perfect physique. Hal Foster's art on the newspaper strip was every bit as beautiful as the production values of the movie version.

Other strip characters would soon follow, notably Palooka (1934), an adaptation of Ham Fisher's boxing strip Joe Palooka, and Blondie (1938) based on the Chic Young comedy strip. But it was in the weekly movie serials where comic characters would really come into their own.

In rapid succession, comic strip characters paraded across the screen in low-budget serial chapterplays: Flash Gordon (1936), Dick Tracy (1937), Jungle Jim (1937), Secret Agent X-9 (1937), Buck Rogers (1939), Mandrake the Magician (1939), Terry and the Pirates (1940) and The Phantom (1943).

DC Comics were a bit prima donna-ish about allowing Hollywood to film their star character Superman, so many other companies' superheroes appeared on screen first, like Fawcett Comics' Captain Midnight (1942).

Pretty soon, they were joined by bona-fide comic book characters: Adventures of Captain Marvel (1941), Captain Midnight (1942), Spy Smasher (1942), Batman (1943), Vigilante (1947), Superman (1948), Congo Bill (1948), Blackhawk (1952) and Captain America (1944).

Even back in the 1940s, movie studios seemed to have nothing but contempt for the characters they licensed from the comic book companies. How many errors can you spot here in the appearance of the serial Captain America compared to the comic book version?

Sadly, Republic's serial version of Captain America bore very little resemblance to the dynamic artwork of Joe Simon and Jack Kirby that appeared in Timely's Captain America Comics. I think once the character was licensed to the movie studio, then the producers would just do whatever they wanted. Much as I enjoyed seeing the Captain America serial at Saturday morning pictures all those decades ago it was evident, even to my ten year old sensibilities, that the character on the screen didn't have much to do with the Lee and Kirby Marvel Comics I was reading.

For a start, this Captain America didn't have a shield. That's right, serial producer William O'Sullivan decided to ignore the character's unique selling point. Then he changed Cap's civilian identity from Steve Rogers to Grant Gardner, District Attorney. Finally, to pile insult on top of injury, he gave Cap a gun with which to shoot the bad guys. I hardly even noticed the missing wings on the sides of Cap's mask ...

That said, I still think this is still one of the great serials. The action is non-stop and the stunt players put everything they have into the many, many fight scenes. I won't dwell on it further here, but I wrote a review of this serial a while back for IMDB. So follow the link if you want see what I said.

After that, Captain America wouldn't appear on screen for another 22 years, and when he did, it wasn't a great deal better.

"MARVEL SUPERHEROES ON TV!"

Towards the end of 1966, Stan Lee started running teasers at the foot of random pages in the various Marvel titles promising that Marvel Heroes were going to be on television.

These little banners started showing up in assorted Marvel titles towards the end of 1966.

Then the following month, full-page ads started appearing. It seemed that Marvel had licensed some of their top characters for tv cartoons. Even as an ever-optimistic twelve year old, I had no illusions that we'd ever see these shows on UK television. I was still reeling from the outrage that was 20th Century-Fox's abominable Batman tv show.

Pretty quickly, full page ads started showing up revealing the line-up of the Marvel Super-Heroes cartoon show. Front and centre was Captain America.

It didn't occur to me at the time, but it was apparent that Marvel had sold the rights to the heroes appearing in their anthology titles to tv. Thor was the star of Journey into Mystery. The Sub-Mariner and The Hulk were sharing Tales to Astonish and Captain America and Iron Man were appearing in Tales of Suspense. For whatever reason, the television people didn't seem interested in S.H.I.E.L.D. and Dr Strange from Strange Tales. And my guess is that Marvel publisher Marty Goodman was holding back his big guns - Spider-Man and Fantastic Four - until he saw how the cartoon folks handled the B-team characters.

As it turns out, I wouldn't see any of these cartoons until many years later. Fifty years later to be precise - when I finally got round to buying DVDs of the Marvel Super-Heroes cartoon shows last year. 

The title card of the very first Captain America cartoon, a fairly literal transcription of the origin story from Tales of Suspense 63.

The first cartoon in the Captain America series was a panel-by-panel adaptation of the WWII-set Lee/Kirby story from Tales of Suspense 63, "The Origin of Captain America". 

Produced using very limited animation by Grantray-Lawrence the cartoons relied very heavily on artworks from the actual Marvel comics. In fact, so similar are the cartoon frames to the comic book art that I'd say that it's perfectly possible that the animators worked with stats of the original art.

Here's a comparison of the art from the key transformation scene, showing how close to the original artwork the cartoon is. There's some degradation in the detail, suggesting that the animators worked from stats or tracings of the original art.

But still, despite the tale being pretty dramatic, the animators seemed incapable of treating it that way, and dubbed in a glut of comedy sound effects that might be more appropriate in a Three Stooges short. Even stranger, the producers also thought it'd be a great idea to have on-screen lettered sound effects as well, probably believing that that was reason for the success of the Batman tv show. Add in the over-the-top delivery by the show's voice actors and it makes for an odd mixture. Judge for yourself ... you can see some of the cartoons here.

The storyline from Tales of Suspense 64 forms the mid-section of Episode One.

Episode One marches briskly through the remainder of the origin story, including the foiling of the Nazi saboteurs and the destruction of the German submarine, though the producers change the enemy from Nazis to some unnamed military foe. 

This is an inexplicable decision on the part of the show's producers. Why would anyone think that it would be a problem to depict Nazis as the bad guys in a kids' cartoon? Especially given that Cap was created solely for the purpose of fighting the Nazi ideology. Did the producers think that somehow it was a bad idea to show Nazism in a bad light to 1960s children? I guess we'll never know what the agenda was here, but it's a decision I find more than a little weird.

The second half then takes in the Sando and Omar plotline from Tales of Suspense 64, where they too were originally Nazis, then segues into the Red Skull story from ToS65.

Episode Two reveals the origin of The Red Skull from ToS 66, along with the stories from ToS 67 and 68.

Episode Two mixes up the next few Captain America stories from the comics. It kicks off with "The Sentinel and the Spy" (ToS68), then into "The Fantastic Origin of the Red Skull" (ToS66) and "Lest Tyranny Triumph" (ToS67), though in the last part, the Skull's sponsor and benefactor Adolph Hitler is replaced with an unnamed high-ranking military commander.

Episode Three adapts the three-part story from ToS 69 to 71.

Episode Three adapts the "Greymore Castle" three-parter from Tales of Suspense 69-71, which as I explained in an earlier blog entry, was never one of my favourite Captain America stories. Again the Nazis of the original comic book story have been replaced by some generic brutal military types, simply referred to as "The Enemy", though we're given no sense of who they are.

Episode Four takes the Captain America scenes from Avengers 7 and 16 and melds them into a single story that reveals that Bucky's dead, then has Zemo die by his own hand.

Episode Four of the Captain America cartoon then flashes forward in time to the comic stories set in the present day and recounts the Captain America scenes from Avengers 7, with Cap's workout with the wrestlers, then into the plotline where Cap trails Zemo to his South American jungle hideout. Then weirdly, the story jumps forward to resolution of the Zemo storyline from Avengers 15 and finishes with Zemo buried beneath a rockfall because of his own villainy.

The fifth episode of the Captain America cartoon adapts the story from Avengers 4, telling of the revival of the WWII hero and the introduction of the Teen Brigade.

Confusingly, Episode Five then jumps back in the Marvel timeline to Avengers 4 and tells the story of how the Avengers find the frozen form of Captain America floating in the ocean off Newfoundland. Then the episode segues into the Captain America story from Tales of Suspense 59, where Cap, relaxing at the Avengers mansion, thwarts an attack by a bunch of gangsters.

Guest villains The Melter, The Black Knight and the Radioactive Man ally themselves with the mysteriously revived Zemo to tackle The Avengers and Captain America.

The confusion continues when Episode Six has Zemo and his Masters of Evil battling Captain America and the Avengers (from the story in Avengers 6) ... even though Zemo dies in Episode Four. That said, it would have been quite cool if I'd seen this cartoon back in 1966, with the two super-teams fighting in the streets of New York. And the producers also manage to fix a plot glitch from Avengers 6, where Zemo's ship is downed, he is supposedly arrested by the police only to turn up back in his South America jungle lair in Avengers 7. Here, his fleeing ship is sent who-knows-where by Thor's hammer-generated space warp. Not a massive improvement, but at least not a plot hole.

Just like in the comics, The Adaptoid absorbs the abilities of the Avengers - Giant Man, The Wasp, and Hawkeye - to defeat Captain America.

The seventh episode of the cartoon features the Adaptoid, a super-android created by AIM, in a re-telling of the story from Tales of Suspense 82, and features a different lineup of the Avengers, again with no explanation of who the new Giant Man and Hawkeye are. Halfway through the cartoon, the Adaptoid morphs into the Super-Adaptoid, and the story then begins to recount the events of Tales of Suspense 84.

This episode of the Captain America cartoon is a straightforward re-telling of the origin of Hawkeye and how his mentor Swordsman cheats his way into The Avengers.

Episode Eight moves back in the Marvel timeline and adapts Avengers 19 and 20, telling the story of how The Swordsman tries to join the Avengers and how the character was responsible for teaching Hawkeye his archery skills. It's interesting to see how the cartoon style changes from being drawn in the style of Jack Kirby to looking like Don Heck artwork. Hardly surprising given that Heck had taken over the art on The Avengers starting with issue 17.

Next time I'll cover the remaining episodes of the Marvel Super-Heroes Captain America show and look at the three Captain America tv movies in the 1970s and 1990s.

Next: Captain America goes live-action