A Hulkologist’s Lament
The cover of The Incredible Hulk number 1 (May, 1962) by Stan Lee/Jack Kirby famously puts forth the question: “Is he man or monster or … is he both?”
Rich Johnson’s slapdash ramshackle of a
book The Incredible Hulk: Worldbreaker, Hero, Icon (2022) prompts a
different query: “Is it a cynical marketing ploy, a poorly-written/edited rush
job … or is it both?”
Johnson is a former DC Comics VP, writer
for The Beat and founder of the manga imprint Yen Press. Unfortunately,
those industry insider credentials don’t translate into a very informative,
incisive or fresh take on the Hulk. The heavy, 225-page tome (which retails at
$50) is certainly handsome. It has good production values, quality paper, crisp
images and vibrant colors for its copious reproductions of comics pages, panels
and covers. The endpapers function as Hulk wallpaper in a color scheme
suggestive of our hero’s pants. Cute. But again, good presentation only gets
you so far.
The opening pages greet you with full
page art by Frank Cho (Red Hulk), Tim Sale (Gray Hulk) and Bill Sienkiewicz
(old-fashioned green Hulk). It turns out that these choices signal what to
expect in the book as a whole: an almost complete neglect of ¾ of the Hulk’s
actual history and especially of the artists most associated with the foundational
phases of the character — Kirby, Steve Ditko, Gil Kane, Marie Severin, Herb
Trimpe, Sal Buscema, Todd McFarlane, Dale Keown — in favor of very recent
(like, mostly 21st-century) creators. With all due respect, that’s
really skewed.
How skewed? Well, let’s see: Kirby gets
six pages, mostly from the origin story. Ditko gets one. Meanwhile, Al Ewing’s
horror-fied run on the character, The Immortal Hulk (mostly with artist
Joe Bennett, from 2018 to 2021), clocks in at 31 pages.
So, yeah, skewed to the point of doing a
disservice to both the earlier creators and the character. It’s particularly
galling, since a full appreciation of Ewing’s nostalgia-heavy run demands
a familiarity with the long sweep of Hulk history, i.e. the works of said
Silver and Bronze-age creators (including writers Len Wein, Bill Mantlo and
Peter David).
I realize it’s pointless to argue with
this book’s selections of what to cover (most likely Johnson had to bend to the
will of his bottom-line Marvel corporate overlords anyway), but it must be
said: the Hulk has over 60 years of continuity, and while some of those
thousands of stories resonate more than others, it’s hard to credit a history
that leaves out or gives exceedingly short shrift to the Hulk as a founding
member of the Avengers and as a founding member of the Defenders. We
don’t even see a single panel from those stories.
But that’s just for starters. There’s no serious attention paid to the crucial matter of the Hulk’s psychological divide and how it originated (under Mantlo and David in the 1970s/80s) and how it relates to Banner’s abuse as a child by his father. There’s also virtually nothing on the character’s gray “Joe Fixit” persona, a fruitful era under David and (at first) Jeff Purves. But what the hey, at least we do get several pages devoted to Hulk & Thing: Hard Knocks (2004), a less distinguished and pretty much forgotten effort by writer Bruce Jones and artist Jae Lee.
Oh well, at least Johnson’s writing is
penetrating, edifying and fresh. Just kidding, it’s a hack job! It’s all plot
synopses, platitudes like “Being a superhero is never easy” and pat takes such
as “Maybe the reason the Hulk has been so popular for so long is that he
reminds us of the strength we all have inside us.” Actually, I think something
like the opposite is true: the Hulk as conceived represented the monster inside
all of us, threatening to burst out. Shelley’s Frankenstein and
Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde were primary
influences. Lee/Kirby’s genius lay in how (like Shelley) they humanized the
monster, evoking sympathy, even compassion.
That feels like another big missed
opportunity: if only Johnson had interviewed some of the creators and editors
involved, or heck, even if he’d just quoted from Lee’s Origins of Marvel
Comics, we might have had some genuine insights into the Jade Giant, what
makes him tick.
Instead, we get the most cursory factoids
from Hulk’s early stories, like he was originally gray and changed to green
with the second issue, or that at first Bruce Banner would undergo his
transformations only when night fell, sort of like a werewolf. “Can’t we all
relate to the struggle for control?” Johnson muses.
More disappointment: the book treats
things like the character’s catch-phrase “Hulk smash!” as givens, in place of illuminating
the reader as to how the phrase emerged, when it was first uttered. Banner’s “You
wouldn’t like me when I’m angry” also gets a shout-out — but why not then tell
the reader that it came not from the comics but from the 1970s TV show with Bill Bixby and Lou Ferigno? At times this book seems afraid to hit the reader
with that sort of multi-media complexity. It doesn’t shy from talking about the
movies, though. But again, in a weirdly selective way: no mention at all of Ang
Lee’s flawed but interesting 2003 film, with Eric Bana. If all you had was this
book to go on, you’d think the first cinematic Hulk was Ed Norton in 2008.
Yes, yes, I know, they didn’t make this
for Hulkologists, but for a mainstream public unfamiliar with the history of
the character. But then why leave out so much of that history and lean into
those aspects of the Jade Giant with which mainstream readers (presumably those
who’ve only watched the movies/TV shows) are already familiar? Why not
challenge their view of the Hulk a bit? Johnson takes the opposite tack:
devoting short chapters which synopsize the Hulk storylines which most resemble
the movies, mostly from recent action-heavy comics which aesthetically resemble
movies: World War Hulk, Totally Awesome Hulk, Future Imperfect, Red Hulk, Ultimate
Wolverine vs. Hulk, Indestructible Hulk, the aforementioned Immortal
Hulk.
Jade Jaws is so much richer than that. Like,
decades richer.
One other disconcerting facet of The
Incredible Hulk: Worldbreaker, Hero, Icon deserves mention. This book is
pretty but sloppy. It arranges material out of chronological order for no good
reason. We are introduced to John Byrne’s obnoxious fourth-wall-breaking Sensational
She-Hulk long before the original version of that character by Lee and John
Buscema. The only justification I can think of is that Byrne’s version is the
more famous, and the one that became a Marvel TV show about the time of the
book’s release.
In discussing the love of Hulk’s life,
Jarella (Betty Ross is Banner’s), we see covers and panels from issues that
present the high points: Hulk’s journey to her microscopic home world, K’ai,
the profound grief our hero experiences after she’s killed, his eventual return
of her body to her people. But the text (more plot synopsis) doesn’t line up
with the illustrations. The text in fact doesn’t make it past the first part of
the storyline; it discusses neither the death of Jarella in #205 (November,
1976), nor the return of her body in #248 (June, 1980) — as if Johnson simply ran out of room, or
some editor butchered his chapter to free up space for more pictures.
When I say sloppy, I mean sloppy.
They twice (on 29 and 105) rerun the
same page of our heroine and the Toad Men from Sensational She-Hulk #2 (June,
1989), itself a parody of Hulk #2 (July, 1962). Not that they tell you
that.
Johnson’s text ends suddenly on 219 in
the middle of a discussion/plot synopsis of the 2007 World War Hulk
storyline by Greg Pak and John Romita, Jr. It stops cold. The book’s last words
are “… will he be able to have the control to stand down and end the war?” No
clumsy conclusion, no silly outro or quippy “Go out and smash, folks!” Nothing.
Again, you get the feeling that they met their quota and just said, “Okay, cut
it here.”
Reader, they couldn’t even get the name
of the book straight. The cover, with a portrait of Jade Jaws by Adi Granov,
gives Hulk: Worldbreaker, Hero, Icon, but the title page throws in the
article and adjective.
Things like that show you the book was poorly
edited and hastily put together by a right hand that didn’t know what the left
hand was doing — in short by folks who don’t seem to know or care much about
the subject.
Do I have anything nice to say besides
the production values? Well, after mostly ignoring the creators of all these
stories, the book does provide credits for them at the very end. And here and
there, you get some worthwhile discussion of how the comics inspired/influenced
the TVs/movies. It’s thin gruel, however.
In sum: I was expecting little, and that’s just what I got.
8/11/2024: updated with copy edits at the request of the author.
No comments:
Post a Comment