The Hulk on TV (and Jack vs Stan, again)

THE INCREDIBLE HULK was one of the first Marvel characters to make it to the small screen. Back in 1966, with the quite terrible Batman tv show inexplicably topping the ratings, others were looking around for comic book properties to option. A company called Grantray-Lawrence approached Marvel with a proposal for a syndicated cartoon tv show collectively called The Marvel Superheroes. 

Though the ads called the show "Marvel Super-heroes", the actual on-screen title was "The Marvel Superheroes". The featured characters were the stars of Journey into Mystery, Tales of Suspense and Tales to Astonish.

The show would be very cheaply produced and use artwork from the comics with very limited animation. Marvel publisher Martin Goodman probably looked at the massive sales boost DC's Batman titles had gained from the Adam West show and figured that with his characters on tv, he too would get a big increase in circulation.

I won't dwell long here on how well or badly the cartoon producers adapted the Hulk comic stories for tv. I covered that process pretty extensively when I wrote about the Captain America cartoons a couple of blogs back. I have to say, though, that the theme tune for The Hulk is way more annoying than the Captain America one ... here's the lyrics:

Doc Bruce Banner,
Belted by gamma rays,
Turned into the Hulk.

Ain’t he unglamor-ous!

Wreckin’ the town
With the power of a bull,

Ain’t no monster clown
Who is as lovable

As ever-lovin’ Hulk! HULK! HULK!

The animators reached back into the vaults and used the story and art from the entire run of the original 1962 run of Incredible Hulk comics, with varying degrees of success.

The DVD of The Incredible Hulk that I have includes a booklet with an episode guide and a breakdown of which comics the cartoons are adapted from.

The remaining cartoons adapted Tales to Astonish 60-62 (Episode 6), 63-65 (Episode 3) 65-68 (Episode 4), 68-71 (Episode 5), 73-74 (Episode 7), 75-77 (Episode 12), 81-83 (Episode 13) and Avengers 2 (Episode 8).

The first episode used the artwork from The Incredible Hulk 1 largely unchanged, though The Hulk is coloured green throughout rather than the grey of the original comic.

The first episode is a pretty straightforward adaptation of Incredible Hulk 1 (May 1962), though for some reason, the communist villain The Gargoyle appears here as "The Gorgon".

The second episode uses the startling Ditko-inked artwork from The Incredible Hulk 2 (Jul 1962). As noted last month, I thought this art looked like there was more Ditko in there than Kirby, and I've always liked this interpretation, though I could see how Stan might think it a bit too fearsome for his then-intended audience of ten-year olds.

Steve Ditko's version of The Hulk, despite working over Kirby pencils, was much more monsterish than seen in the issues on either side.

There was then a smattering of stories from Tales to Astonish before viewers would see an adaptation of one of my all-time favourite Steve Ditko art jobs, The Incredible Hulk 6 (Mar 1963).

The ninth episode of the Hulk cartoon adapts The Incredible Hulk 6, albeit in truncated form, to fit the 13 minute running time.

It's an okay adaptation, but there's the occasional shot where they've dropped in a Kirby Hulk face, then in the very next shot, it's back to the Ditko version again. It must have been a little disconcerting, especially for non-Marvel fans, seeing The Hulk changing in appearance from scene to scene.

The other really weird thing the animators did was to colour the old, clunky Iron Man armour from Avengers 2 (Nov 1963) in the style the newer red-and-yellow Iron Man Armour ... wouldn't it just have been easier to frame the whole episode as a flashback and leave the armour yellow?

The old style Iron Man coloured up to match the newer colour scheme. Is it me, or is that just plain wrong?

But as I don't want to spend an entire blog entry dwelling on the peculiarities of each cartoon, here's a scan of Ditko's original artwork for the for the story's splash page (not owned by me, unfortunately) from that classic Hulk issue ... and then we can move on to something I've been thinking a lot about since last time.

The incredible splash page from The Incredible Hulk 6, as pencilled and inked by Steve Ditko who would go on to revitalise the character during his Tales to Astonish run.

JACK KIRBY - A SLIGHT RETURN

If you're regular reader of this blog, you'll recall I mentioned I had doubts that Jack Kirby could fairly be called the sole creator of The Hulk, as he has claimed in interviews. My main area of concern was that many of the main "distinguishing characteristics" of The Hulk couldn't really be attributed to Jack Kirby, as they hadn't been present during old Greenskin's first appearances in the original run of The Incredible Hulk (1962). Just so we're clear, I think these are:

• Banner changing to The Hulk while under stress (which is related to)
• The angrier the Hulk gets, the stronger he gets
• Hulk always talking about himself in the third person ("Hulk smash!")
• The Hulk's distinctive green skin

Granted the last one is a little debatable, as Jack Kirby rarely was responsible for a character's colours. I only include it here because Hulk's green-ness is a major part of his Unique Selling Point.

Thinking about it over the last few weeks, I realised that what my assertion boils down to is that Jack Kirby's Hulk wasn't the successful one, and it took major intervention by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko to turn the character round from cancellation to a cornerstone of the Marvel Universe.

An angry - and very long - interview with Jack and Roz Kirby was published in this issue of The Comics Journal at the beginning of 1990. I still have my original copy somewhere.

A cursory search of the Internet will turn up many differences of opinion around who actually created the Marvel Universe. Mostly, those with a view line up either in the Stan Lee camp or with team Jack Kirby. What is surprising is just how polarised opinions are. And I think Stan Lee has come in for a lot of criticism that isn't actually deserved, based mostly on the assertions that Jack made in his now-notorious interview in The Comics Journal 134 (Feb 1990).

In it, Jack says that Stan made no contribution to the Marvel lineup and that Jack created just about all the Marvel characters alone and that he also wrote all the stories he drew. I found the anger and mean-spiritedness of the interview quite upsetting at the time, as I had always admired both Stan Lee - I'd met him a few times while I worked at Marvel UK during the 1980s - and Jack Kirby, whose work I had actively collected during the 1970s, including all those terrible Archie titles and the pre-hero Marvels.

Jack Kirby, pictured in 1970, and Stan Lee some time in the mid to late 1970s.

How could Jack said such terrible things about Stan Lee, who had always been so generous in giving credit to Jack in both the Bullpen Bulletins and Origins of Marvel Comics for doing most of the creating? Especially given that Jack Kirby had the reputation for being one of the kindest people in the business. For a long time I wondered if Journal editor Gary Groth was taking advantage of Kirby and egging him on to the level of bitterness we see in the interview. But I don't now think that's the case, either.

I do think that from Jack's point of view he actually did create much of the material during the early days of Marvel, but equally, I don't accept that Stan did nothing and just hogged all the glory. I think the issue is that Jack and Stan had very different ideas about what constitutes "creating" a character ... and as a writer and editor myself, I naturally have a little more sympathy for Stan's viewpoint.

BACK TO BASICS

Obviously, when we're talking about things that happened in 1961 and the couple of years that followed, you have to bear in mind that memories get hazy, and all us have a tendency to re-write history with ourselves as the hero. Just look at Future Shock: The 2000AD Story for an example of that. But what is certain is that Stan Lee was the editor at the fledgling Marvel Comics and a story or an idea would not have gone in the comics if Stan hadn't approved. Yes, publisher Martin Goodman had the power of veto, and decided whether titles lived or died, but while a series was running, Stan got to say what saw print and what didn't.

For that alone, even if you don't want to give Stan credit for anything else, you have to admit he had at least the good taste to publish Jack Kirby's (and Steve Ditko's) work. Just what the exact nature of that work was, I will try to ascertain in the paragraphs that follow.

The problem with being ("just") an editor is that when things go wrong, you get all the blame and when things are going swimmingly, you get none of the credit. I learned that hard lesson in the period immediately after my short tenure as editor of 2000AD. My friend Philip de Sausmarez calls it "having all of the accountability and none of the authority". It's also characterised by the phrase, "Success has a thousand fathers but failure is an orphan". And that's a phenomenon you'll see in just about any business that has a P&L sheet.

Superman was the first "superhero", as you might infer from his name. Immediately he appeared, others scrambled to put out their own versions. Wonder Man was created by Will Eisner and was quickly sued out of business. Captain Marvel on the other hand managed to survive for fifteen years before DC lawyers were finally able to close him down.

To begin to understand how the argument over "creatorship" brewed in the first place, you first have to consider how comics were made and consumed back at the dawn of the industry and how that changed once Marvel Comics evolved new audiences for illustrated storytelling. It's related to the old show business anecdote of the Whistling Dog, the idea behind it being that booking agents were so enthusiastic about the idea of a dog that could whistle that none of them stopped to ask whether the dog was any good at whistling. It was the same with comics. When Superman first appeared in 1938, there was such a scramble among publishers to get their hands on superhero characters that they didn't stop to consider whether the material they were buying was any good or not.

During 1973 and 1974, DC Comics published a number of 100-page editions of their comics. Most of these had just the regular twenty or so pages of new material and padded out the rest with reprints from the Golden Age.

This helps me to understand why it was that I didn't care much for Golden Age comics, while people whose opinions I respected - Roy Thomas and my friend, uber-collector Mike Hill - thought there was nothing better than a Golden Age comic and variously built their careers riffing off those old books or spent hundreds and thousands acquiring the original comics. When DC started publishing their 100-Page Super-Spectacular comics in the early 1970s I grabbed as many as I could to read the wealth of Golden Age material they reprinted. The sad fact was that I found most of those old tales pretty much unreadable. Badly written and crudely drawn, they just didn't have the entertainment value I could find in any Stan Lee comic I cared to pick up.

In the years since, I've thought on-and-off about why that might be. Was it a generational thing? No, because I love movies of the 1930s and 1940s. Okay, is it just that writers were just better thirty years later? Again, no ... movies produced inside the studio system both pre- and post-WWII were always at least competent - some positively shone, when they used writers of the calibre of Billy Wilder & Charles Brackett, Ben Hecht and William Faulkner. These days it doesn't take too much effort to uncover a contemporary movie stinker - just take a gander at SyFy or The Horror Channel ...

Though both Fighting Yank and The Red Bee were reasonably successful comics during the 1940s, hardly anyone remembers them today.

And when you look at the comics that surrounded Marvel on the newsstands during Marvel's formative and glory years, including the DC Comics, you could see that they were still being produced under the same mindset that gave us such long-forgotten characters as Fighting Yank and The Red Bee. And that mindset took the view that The Idea was enough.

In the mad scramble to publish long-underwear characters that vaguely resembled Superman, the publishers and editors didn't much care whether their characters were competently written and drawn, they were just looking to publish something that looked a bit like Superman. Then once the furore died down (and once National got done with suing those who sailed a little too close to the Man of Steel), more skilled creators like Will Eisner and, of course, Simon and Kirby were able to pitch new ideas to editors for characters that were more than just Superman clones.

Though the cover of Jumbo Comics 15 was drawn by Sheena-creator Will Eisner, the interior story was by Bob Powell. The cover and interior art for the Blackhawk story was by Chuck Cuidera, with Eisner supplying only the script.

But again, because this stuff was all so new, packagers like Eisner were able to create concepts, then turn them over to lesser talented journeymen and be confident that the concept was strong enough to carry the books forward, even without the original creator's input. So Eisner (and his partner Jerry Iger) created franchises like Sheena Queen of the Jungle and Blackhawk, and turned them over to competent craftsmen like Mort Meskin, Bob Powell and Chuck Cuidera to do the actual heavy lifting. And through the 1940s, that was enough.

Young Romance, created by Simon and Kirby in 1947, was the first of a boom in "love comics". A few years later, Bill Gaines and Al Feldstein started a deluge of horror comics with Crypt of Terror (later Tales from the Crypt).

As the Atomic Age rolled around, readers began to tire of superheroes and sales began to dip. Publishers panicked and began replacing the costumed characters with different ideas. Simon and Kirby invented the romance comic and everyone scrambled to get aboard the love boat. In 1950, Bill Gaines and Al Feldstein created the first ongoing horror comics and set off another gold rush. But all were still convinced that it was the concept that sold their books. And as far as their existing target audiences were concerned, they were more or less right.

Right at the beginning of the first entry in this blog, I quoted the famous saying, "the Golden Age of science fiction is twelve", which can easily be paraphrased as, "the Golden Age of comics is ten". The point is that the median age of comic readers was traditionally always ten. That held true on both sides of the Atlantic. And ten-year olds are not the most sophisticated of consumers. So while comics were catering to that age demographic, there was no pressure on the publishers to do any more than keep coming up with new concepts. If a book was well-written or drawn, that was all well and good, and would probably contribute to a title's longevity, but the quality of the delivered material was never a deal-breaker. 

I'll admit to reading the occasional Charton comic back in the 1960s. The strips drawn by Steve Ditko, like Gorgo and Captain Atom weren't too bad, but the rest of the company's output was for the most part below average.

Look at Charlton Comics ... the occasional Ditko story notwithstanding, most of their output was pretty terrible and regularly sold 100,000-plus copies per month per title. Heck, Martin Goodman's Atlas comics were routinely a couple of notches below adequate and they too were selling similar numbers. Not even DC (formerly National Periodicals) paid much heed to quality of the material they were publishing. The much-feared and reviled DC editor Mort Weisinger was famously quoted in Steranko's History of Comics as saying of Superman, "He's invulnerable, he's immortal; even bad scripts can't hurt him."

Much as I enjoyed the Julius Schwarz edited DC comics when I was eight, looking back now it's easy to see they had no real humanity about them. No one ever got angry or irritated or sad in a Schwarz book ...

And it was into that exact environment that Stan Lee thought he could launch his own take on superheroes, a view that tried to present super-heroes as real people and have them react to their situations as you or I (or Stan) might react. Now, of course, we take that approach for granted, but back in 1961, no one had thought of that before. Over at DC, Weisinger, and his colleague, editor Julius Schwarz, were still ploughing the furrows that had been marked out during the 1940s, using many of the same writers and artists. Yes, Schwartz's retoolings of The Flash and Green Lantern had a modernistic patina to them, courtesy of the sleek pencils of Carmine Infantino and Gil Kane - and, arguably more important, the glossy inking styles of Joe Giella and Murphy Anderson - but the editors were using the same old writers they'd always used. Gardner Fox and John Broome were still churning out the same old-school, plot-driven stories they had during the 1940s.

PLOT-DRIVEN vs CHARACTER-DRIVEN

It took me years to understand the difference between plot-driven and character-driven stories, though I'll happily admit I can be a bit slow on the uptake. Even though I worked extensively with gifted writers like Alan Moore, Grant Morrison and, most notably, Steve Parkhouse, I didn't think too closely about the mechanics of creating a story. I first heard the phrase "character-driven" uttered by Steve Parkhouse. And I had no idea what he meant. But after a while of trying - and for the most part, failing - to create workable fiction, it began to dawn on me that the best stories don't have characters manipulated like puppets to serve the necessities of the plot. You have to have the characters decide the plot turns, based on what the character would do in a given situation.

If you are ever reading a story or watching a tv show or movie and you think to yourself, "Why on earth would he do that?" ... that's an example of a plot-driven story. It means that the character is acting out-of-character in order to help the writer get where he wants to story to get to.

That's what those old Silver Age DC comics were doing, month after month after month. And that works just fine when you're in a marketplace where the customers are young and unsophisticated and are more interested in the novelty of the concepts than they are in the quality of the storytelling. To be fair, it worked just fine for DC pretty much from 1938 right through to about 1965. And as my old Fleetway publisher Jon Davidge was very fond of saying, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it."

Comics was just about the only area of creative writing where you could get away with that stuff. Okay, there's a special place reserved in Poor Storytelling hell for writers of 1960s and 1970s tv shows ... and now I come to think of it, 1940s radio shows were pretty awful, too. But in the 1940s and 50s, the comic was the nadir of storytelling.

But the problem was that the comic book marketplace was changing thanks, in no small part, to the efforts of Stan Lee. Pretty soon, the old way of creating comics was not going to work. Audiences were becoming smarter, not necessarily good news for the comics industry. Perhaps Stan actually recognised that or perhaps his different approach to how characters were written was just a lucky coincidence. Either way, it lead to an elevation in the average age of Marvel Comics readers and ultimately, to the average age of all comic readers. And that wasn't necessarily good news for the comic industry, either.

WHAT JACK DID

So what exactly was Jack Kirby's contribution to the Marvel Universe and why did he say those terrible things about Stan Lee in that notorious interview in The Comics Journal 134?

After parting company with Martin Goodman over arguments about Captain America royalty payments, Joe Simon and Jack Kirby went over to National where they produced Manhunter and Sandman for Adventure Comics, Newsboy Legion for Star Spangled and Boy Commandos for Detective Comics.

The old school guys, who had come up through the 1940s, really did believe that the Concept was enough. So Simon and Kirby were able to produce Captain America and The Vision for Timely, then move over to National where they first revamped Sandman, then pumped out Boy Commandos and Newsboy Legion, while Captain America Comics continued as one of Timely's best-selling titles.

After the war, Simon and Kirby struck out on their own and published their own comics in partnership with established publishers, starting with Young Romance, Black Magic with Prize and Boys' Ranch with Harvey.

Even as late as the 1950s, Simon and Kirby were coming up with hit concepts, like Boys Ranch, Black Magic and Young Romance, and were well-respected in the industry for it. Towards the end of the 1950s, Kirby took over Green Arrow in 1958 for National after creating Challengers of the Unknown in 1956, neither of which would resemble the Marvel characters that would emerge just a couple of years later.

This was the strip that effectively finished Jack Kirby's relationship with National Comics. Challengers editor Jack Schiff claimed royalties from Jack and the Wood brothers for not very much work (it seems) and the creators fought him in court, resulting in Kirby being blacklisted at National.

Even though he claims not to remember the reasons for his departure from National at the end of 1958 in the Comics Journal Interview, the fact is that Jack Kirby got into a legal battle with National editor Jack Schiff over whether Schiff was entitled to a payment for his minimal involvement with Dick & Dave Wood and Jack Kirby's syndicated newspaper strip, "Sky Masters of the Space Force". And even though Kirby eventually lost and Schiff got his money, National closed ranks and by the beginning of 1959 Jack Kirby had no one else to sell his pencil to but Atlas.

At Atlas, Kirby was content to coast along on the monster books for almost three years before he or anyone else thought about doing superhero characters. It's fairly well-documented that Martin Goodman wanted something that would cash-in on the rising success of National's Justice League of America comic and instructed Stan to produce a team-up book with Captain America, Human Torch and Sub-Mariner. What happened next would change the course of Martin Goodman's, Stan Lee's and Jack Kirby's lives.

And this is where accounts vary.

Jack Kirby has always maintained that he and he alone came up with the concepts for The Fantastic Four. And let's allow for a moment that that's true. But if, as Jack claims, Stan did nothing, why is it that everything Kirby did both before and after Marvel doesn't read like his Marvel stuff?

I think it was because in Jack Kirby's mind, The Concept was all that mattered. He didn't understand character-driven stories, and so provided concepts (and plots) along with his art, but didn't bother with stuff like motivation and characterisation.

The perfect example of why it matters how a comic is written is The X-Men. When the title began in the early 1960s, it sold well enough and after running for two years, was finally stable enough to go monthly. First Kirby stepped back, then Stan handed the reins to Roy Thomas ... and then the title began to founder. Three years later, it was cancelled. If the title was succeeding on the strength of its concept alone, it should have lasted longer. The problem was that it was a great idea, just not very well done - and by the mid-1960s, you just couldn't get away with that any more.

By the late 1960s, The X-Men was selling the lowest number of copies of all the Marvel super-hero titles. Even Sgt Fury was selling better than X-Men. The new X-Men revamp of the mid-1970s was a whole different story, though.

When The X-Men was revived in 1975, it was pretty much re-tooled from the ground up to be very much character-driven, with new X-Men members who were written much more in a Stan Lee than in a Jack Kirby style. And we all know how the title performed after that.

WHAT STAN DID

When Stan worked with Jack on those early comics, Stan brought something to the table that didn't appear in the mags of other publishers at that time - emotions. For the most part, Superman, Batman, Flash and Green Lantern were deadpan and emotionless in every adventure. If Superman experienced any emotion, it was because of Red Kryptonite. Certainly Kirby's Green Arrow or Challengers never expressed annoyance or fear. Jealously was something that only Lois Lane displayed.

These two DCs are cover-dated the same month as Fantastic Four 1 (Nov 1961). Seems that Superman's toughest day is because his robot's melting fingers might give away that Clark Kent is Superman. I'm not sure how Lois would get from A to B with that one, but never mind. Over in Lois's own title, her big problem is she's inexplicably acting like a ... umm ... hussy.

The Fantastic Four, however, were a big bundle of unrepressed emotions. The Torch was playful and irritating, and The Thing was irritated, morose and short-tempered. Mr Fantastic was boring, pompous and over-protective of Sue, and Invisible Girl was solicitous, caring and yes, even occasionally, jealous.

Not only that, but those elements of emotion appeared all the way through the Marvel line, whether Jack was drawing the comics or not.

And, most importantly, the effect was that it attracted readers older than that traditional ten-year-old demographic. So readers stayed with Marvel Comics past the age when boys normally gave up comics and got interested in sport or girls. And that's what shaped the comics industry right up until the present day.

HOW MARVEL CHANGED THE COMICS INDUSTRY

Today, the audience for comics is largely a nostalgic one. Very few young readers are coming in at the bottom end of the age-range. There have been many discussions about why that should be, though few have been able to offer a solid explanation. My own view is that it's a collision of several factors. 

The tv versions of Sheena, Superman and Flash Gordon. Comic sales began their long, slow decline in the late 1950s. Many kids of comic reading age were able to get their comics fix (and other similarly themed entertainment) on television ... for free.

Television was certainly a big one. In the late 1950s, kids could watch the dramatised adventures of Superman, Flash Gordon and Sheena Queen of the Jungle right there in their own living rooms. For free. And tv made audiences lazy. Why go to the bother of reading when you can lie on the floor and have the actors talk out of the television to you?

As the Sixties rolled into the Seventies, kids' toys got more sophisticated, then computer games came along, and by the end of the 1970s newstand comic sales had tanked. So the industry came up with a new plan ... and serviced the aging fans via comic shops and the direct market.

And all that time, with Marvel offering stories aimed at older readers, and DC trying to follow that trend, and with continuity becoming ever-more involved, it's no wonder that new readers in that 7-8 age range weren't getting into comics to replace the readers lost at the top of the age range.

So for the last forty odd years comics have come to rely more on retaining the readers they already had, catering to them past the teenage years and well into adulthood. 

... AND BACK TO THE MAIN POINT

All the time that the comic industry was changing, because of what Stan was doing with the stories in Marvel Comics, Jack Kirby seemed oblivious. He didn't realise that the audience demographic was changing and that the readers were buying Stan's stories because of the emotional connection they felt with the characters and their situations.

Much of the time, Kirby didn't even look at the finished comics, so maybe he was assuming that the stilted dialogue he was scribbling in the page margins of his pencils was being faithfully lettered by Sam Rosen. And even if he had read Stan's dialogue, I doubt he would have understood how Stan had made it better.

Of course, sometimes, Stan wanted the story to be slightly different to how Kirby, or Ditko, had drawn it, and would get other artists to make changes, so the art would conform to Stan's dialogue. But that's what most editors do. Some are more considerate about it than others, but essentially, editors regularly change stuff before it goes to print. Even book editors who are dealing with sole authors and actual copyright holders. I don't think that could have been a surprise to Kirby.

Here's an extract from the New York Herald-Tribune article by Ned Freedland. The full article was reprinted in The Collected Jack Kirby Collector 4.

I think Jack Kirby's bitterness towards Marvel, and especially Stan, in the late Sixties was a combination of Jack simply not understanding that the audience for comics had moved on since the 1940s and 1950s and a Big Idea was no longer enough, plus Jack not appreciating the enormous contribution Stan's humanistic dialogue was making to the finished product. What finally tipped Jack over the edge was that 1966 article in the New York Herald-Tribune by Ned Freedland that made Stan out to be the driving force behind Marvel and Jack to be like the "assistant foreman in a girdle factory". Jack - somewhat unreasonably - blamed Stan for the tone of the article and their relationship was never the same again.

WHAT A SHAME

It's a real pity that Jack Kirby reached the end of his life believing that Stan Lee screwed him over. Because when you look at the evidence and listen to what others, who were there at the time, say ... well, that just doesn't hold water.

Stan pretty much invented credits on comic books. At the time, no one else did it. Occasionally, artists would sign their work - and more often than not the production department would white the signatures out - but it wasn't common. If Stan really was the egotistical maniac Kirby made him out to be, Lee would have credited just himself or left the artist's name off. In fact, Stan went all out to create a star system at Marvel and freely talked about how the Marvel Method worked in his Bullpen Bulletins.

John Romita told the Comic Book Artist, "I had heard all of the inside stuff, like from the Herald-Tribune article that insulted Jack, that he thought Stan was a part of. Stan could not convince him of that, and certainly could not convince Roz that Stan hadn’t encouraged the writer to make fun of Jack. I know for a fact that Stan would rather bite his tongue than say such a thing, because Jack’s success would've been his success. There’s no reason to run Jack down. Stan had the position; he didn’t have to fight Jack for it. I don’t think Jack ever wanted the editorial position; if he wanted credit, he deserved credit. Stan used to give him credit all the time; he used to say most of these ideas are more than half Jack's."

If anyone screwed Jack, it was Martin Goodman. But even then, Marty was just following industry practice. Original artwork was never returned. In fact, the companies went as far as supplying pre-printed art boards to the artists so the pencillers couldn't claim they owned the physical bristol boards. And Marty thought credits were a courtesy, one he'd never have extended without Stan's urging.

Should Marvel have paid Kirby and his family when the characters made millions in other media? Well, yes ... it would have been the decent thing to do. But when have you ever heard of a big company paying anyone unless it absolutely has to? And Stan had asked Jack many times to join the Marvel staff as Art Director, but he always refused. Perhaps if Jack had taken the company shilling, he too might have end up with a million-dollar pension for doing the occasional promotional appearance.

But it wasn't to be, and Jack Kirby went to his grave believing that Stan Lee had betrayed him, which doesn't seem to be the case at all. And that is the real tragedy here.

Next: Some Astonishing Tales

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