Comic Book Review: Mighty Marvel Masterworks: The Incredible Hulk Vol. 4–Let There Be Battle written by Stan Lee, pencils by Marie Severin, various inkers
This volume collects the tail end of the Hulk’s run in Tales to Astonish, the first issue of his solo continuing series, and a couple of stories from Not Brand Echh. At this point, the creative team was Stan Lee and veteran artist Marie Severin, plus rotating inkers. The stories were written using the Marvel Method, where Stan would describe the plot he wanted in more or less detail, the art team would create the story visually, and Stan would then come in to write all the dialogue. This meant that Ms. Severin should probably also be credited as co-writer, but that’s not the way Marvel Comics worked back then.
We pick up the story in Tales to Astonish #92. The Hulk has been missing for a month since his last battle with the Abomination. The news story is introduced by Walter Cronkheit. A reporter asks General “Thunderbolt” Ross for a comment, which the Hulk’s oldest enemy declines. And the missile base where the general commands is off-limits to civilians. Then a special message from LBJ, urging citizens to report any sightings of the Hulk, but under no circumstances to try interacting with old Jade-Jaws themselves. The president admits that the Hulk aided humanity the last time he was active, but he’s too dangerous and unpredictable to allow to move freely.
Betty Ross, General Ross’ daughter and Dr. Bruce Banner’s love interest, is devastated. She knows that Bruce and the Hulk are more sinned against than sinning. Major Glenn Talbot, who himself is in love with Betty, tries to persuade her that Bruce/Hulk is a lost cause.
Rick Jones, Bruce Banner’s and the Hulk’s one steady friend, reaches out to the Teen Brigade network of ham radio operatives, but no one’s seen any sign of the green goliath or his puny alter ego.
After all that, we finally head to a rundown section of New York City and an obviously disguised man returning to his slum apartment. It is of course Bruce Banner, who’s managed to stay in his human form all this time. He’s been building a device to focus the cosmic gamma radiation from the stars above into his body in hopes of finally burning out his transformation.
The experiment is a failure, and in his frustration, Dr. Banner once again becomes the Hulk. The noise has attracted an angry neighbor, and Hulk smashes the device and leaps through the wall to get away. Now that he’s out in open, multiple people spot the Hulk and soon the city is at full alert.
The Hulk stares at the searchlights over the skyline, and the stars above them, and wishes to go away to some planet where he could be free and unhunted. He suddenly realizes one of the pinpoints of light is moving in a way that no human device could so it must be alien! He leaps up only to be repelled, tries again and manages to briefly grab a part of the object before being struck a mighty blow that sends him crashing to Earth.
Then the light lands. It’s the Silver Surfer! This powerful alien used to be the herald for the planet-eating creature known as Galactus before turning on his master in defense of Earth. As punishment, Galactus has made it impossible for the Surfer to leave Earth’s ionosphere, so Norrin Radd (his birth name) is stuck wandering the planet full of people who really make him wonder why he bothered saving them.
The Surfer and Hulk battle briefly before the humans hunting the Hulk show up to try to corral him. The Surfer realizes that the Green Goliath is a hunted creature who is somewhat justified in his rage, and helps him out. Silver Surfer considers curing Bruce Banner of the Hulk, but the Hulk can’t bring himself to trust the Surfer, so that opportunity is lost.
Not too long after, Hulk is still pining for the stars. He’s captured by hunters with unusually advanced weapons technology and stuffed aboard a spaceship. These hunters turn out to be working for the High Evolutionary.
Herbert Wyndham was a British biologist who had a…unique…approach to the study of evolution, believing that it was possible to accelerate the process of individual specimens “up the evolutionary ladder”, turning them from normal animals into intelligent humanoids he called “New Men.” (Evolution does not work like that. Roll with it.) He’d created many such New Men in his stronghold of Mount Wundagore, but was convinced by Thor to move his operations to another planet for safety from intruders (and to protect the Earth humans from the New Men), so he is now on the planet renamed New Wundagore.
Unfortunately, most of the New Men have now begun regressing towards a more bestial, aggressive state of mind, rebelling against the High Evolutionary with an eventual goal of returning to Earth to rule over the inferior Homo Sapiens.
The High Evolutionary’s original plan in requesting the delivery of the Hulk to him was to use Jade Jaws to defend himself against the rebels long enough to come a way to fix the regression problem. Unfortunately, the pilot of the ship dies before he can explain to the Hulk what’s going on, and then Hulk turns back into Bruce Banner (who is equally mystified due to his not retaining most of the Hulk’s memories.)
The High Evolutionary then decides to try exposing Bruce Banner to his accelerated evolution device to make him what a human might be a million years hence. He hasn’t tried that experiment before, and it probably won’t make things worse. For Herbert, that is.
But then the New Men break into the High Evolutionary’s lab and start attacking. Herbert releases Bruce from the tube and asks him to turn back into the Hulk to help him. Dr. Banner explains that it’s not a voluntary transformation, so the High Evolutionary has to battle the New Men on his own.
By the time the danger forces Bruce to turn into the Hulk, and begin stomping the rampaging New Men, the High Evolutionary has already been critically wounded. He decides to try the million year acceleration on–himself! This causes him to transform into a god-like energy being who now understands “everything.” Including that interfering with the natural course of evolution is wrong.
The former Evolutionary turns the New Men back into animals. The Hulk protests that he doesn’t want to be stuck on an empty planet with nothing but animals. With the last bit of human concern the Highest Evolutionary can muster, it sends the Hulk back to Earth, where the lonely man-monster can only stare up at the stars and wonder if he will ever find peace.
The High Evolutionary would quickly return to his physical form, and the Hulk’s next encounter with the Knights of Wundagore would be more friendly, if not more happily ended.
Some time later, the Hulk is leaping around in the mountains when he accidentally collides with a low-flying jet. He’s not particularly injured, but the jet crashes. It’s not a military plane, and the Hulk doesn’t want to be responsible for the death of an innocent, so he goes to check. The pilot is alive, but badly injured, including a broken leg, which the Hulk splints (apparently being in one of his more gifted phases.)
While waiting for the pilot to wake up, the Hulk starts negative ideation about how all humans hate and fear him, and the pilot’s first reaction is shock. But hearing the Hulk speak and listening to his bitterness, the pilot realizes that the Emerald Giant has legitimate gripes that don’t sound too different from those of his organization.
The wounded pilot asks the Hulk to accompany him back to the secret base of the Legion of Living Lightning. The initial encounter goes badly, but the pilot manages to tell his cunning plan to his leader, the Lord of the Living Lightning. By shamming friendship with the Hulk, and telling him a heavily edited version of the goals of the Legion, they can bring this powerful monster onto their side.
Meanwhile, Rick Jones and the Teen Brigade are still having no luck finding clues to the whereabouts of the Hulk.
And at the missile base, Major Talbot is shocked when General Ross pulls him off the search for the Hulk to investigate the mysterious terrorist organization known as the Legion of Living Lightning. Orders are orders, but Glenn still wants to kill the Hulk so that Betty Ross will finally love him instead of Bruce Banner.
The Lightning Lord treats the Hulk well, and feeds him a line that the Legion wants to eliminate all war and strife from the world. Which is technically true. What the Lord doesn’t tell him is that this will be done by making the Lord of Living Lightning absolute dictator and eliminating human freedom.
Major Talbot quickly finds the approximate location of the Legion base, but being a yutz is immediately captured before he can send work back. And then Glenn helps out the Lightning Lord by assuming that the Hulk is already willingly helping them destroy America and antagonizing the big guy. Hulk is now only too willing to smash the missile base to help out his new friends!
What the Lord doesn’t tell the Hulk is that he’s going to soften up the base so that the Legion can take it over and use the missiles to extort the U.S. Government. Plus, it turns out that General Ross’ troops have a new gas to knock the Hulk out with.
The Legion succeeds in taking over the base, and demands General Ross’ public surrender. And just in case the general has any second thoughts, they’ve thrown Betty into the cell containing the unconscious Hulk.
This is a tactical mistake, as Betty is one of the few people the Hulk thinks of as a friend on a regular basis, and threatening her makes him angry. After some more back-and-forth, the Hulk destroys the secret base of the Legion, and buries himself under the mountain it was in.
The Legion of Living Lightning would not return for decades, when they became the origin for a new superhero, also called the Living Lightning.
So we come to Tales to Astonish #100 and the story “Let There Be Battle!” The Hulk had been sharing space with Namor the Sub-Mariner in the magazine, and for this milestone issue, they cross over in a full-length story. The Puppet Master, long-time foe of the Fantastic Four among many other heroes, who has the ability to control the actions of anyone he’s carved a puppet of, is angry at Namor, and summons Hulk from under that mountain to fight the Prince of Atlantis.
Many pages of fighting, mostly around the city of Miami, ensue. Namor wins, but Puppet Master decides this was because the Hulk was fighting the mind control, wasting the extra strength needed to kill the aquatic antihero. A tidal wave created by the fight wipes out the Puppet Master’s base, but he would turn out to be fine.
The final issue of Tales to Astonish set up the Sub-Mariner and Hulk to spin off into their own series, though The Incredible Hulk would inherit Tales to Astonish‘s issue numbering. This was a postal regulations dodge.
The Hulk’s story sees him transported to Asgard, home of the Norse gods. Loki, god of trickery and evil, needs Odin to be distracted from whatever mischief Loki is inflicting on Thor in Midgard. A rampaging Hulk will make a great distraction!
At first, things are going well for Loki as the Hulk stomps Heimdall, guardian of the Rainbow Bridge, and enters Asgard proper. But the green guy’s next encounter is the Warriors Three, Thor’s best drinking buddies in Asgard. Fandral the Dashing, Hogun the Grim and Volstagg the Voluminous also enjoy themselves a good scrap, but quickly realize that the Hulk is not ill-intended, just cranky and lost.
They call a truce, and although Loki tries to stir up trouble again, the Warriors aren’t fooled this time. They decide to take Hulk to the oracle Oldar. But as the green goliath leaps over the chasm between sections of Asgard, Loki turns him into Bruce Banner mid-jump, causing him to fall into the chasm!
The Incredible Hulk #102 picks up where the last issue left off. Bruce Banner is falling into what appears to be a bottomless chasm. We’re informed, however, by a person on a ledge within the chasm, that the bottom opens out into the dimension of Earth. That bystander is Skurge the Executioner, frequent foe of Thor, and he’s there with Amora the Enchantress, his partner in crime.
On a whim, Amora uses her magic to pull Bruce to the ledge, on the grounds that this Midgardian might have news of her beloved Hercules. (Amora gets crushes and discards them a lot.) Skurge grumbles that this is a pointless distraction and will delay their planned invasion of Asgard. (Which has nothing to do with whatever Loki’s up to this week. E&E are usually independent of him.)
Back at the top of the chasm, none of the Three Warriors can fly, and they understandably assume the Hulk is dead. They decide to continue on to the oracle in hopes of learning at least what name to put on the tombstone.
Oldar proves to be an elderly-looking woman who speaks in rhyme. Her other gimmick is that when she summons her oracular powers, Oldar becomes youngar, turning into a hot young lady. She recaps the Hulk’s origin story. As she ages again and fades from view, she reveals that the Hulk still lives, and Asgard is about to come under attack.
Back at the chasm, the captive Bruce Banner tries to explain that the population of Earth is several billion, and he has no acquaintance with anyone named Hercules. Bored now, the Enchantress tells the Executioner he can go ahead and kill Bruce. This triggers the Hulk transformation, and the Executioner has met the Hulk before and bears a grudge.
After the fight is taking too long, Amora sics some of her troll legions on the Hulk, collapses the exit behind her, and she and Skurge take the rest of the troll legions (not including any of the named trolls we’ve seen before) on an invasion of Asgard.
The Hulk winds up aiding the forces of Asgard against the troll invasion. Odin briefly considers rewarding him, but Hulk is rude to Odin, so only gets sent back to Earth.
Not Brand Echh was Marvel’s humor comic at the time, mostly parodying its own comics. Marie Severin was a good match for this series, as she’d worked at EC back in the 1950s and could do a fair approximation of their Mad superhero parodies.
#3 brought us “The Origin of Brucie Banter…and Friend” which reimagines our hero as a scientist working for the sanitation department who’s developed an experimental bomb to remove air pollution. Exposure to it turns him into the Inedible Bulk.
There’s a reference to Noman of Agents of T.H.U.N.D.E.R. and an actual appearance by Dr. Sivana of SHAZAM! fame. Real name and everything! (At the time, while DC technically owned the character, they weren’t enforcing the trademark. They wouldn’t get around to actually using the Fawcett characters for nearly a decade yet.)
#4 has “Bet There’ll Be Battle”, which is a parody of the “Let There Be Battle” story we saw earlier in this volume. The Puppet Mister (Howdy Doody) sets up a fight between the Bulk and the Sunk-Mariner. NBE has its own continuity, and in a previous issue Prince Nomore had gotten a job as Mr. Spook on “Star Trick” so that’s a running gag in this story.
I find these stories to still be somewhat amusing and chuckleworthy, but then I am old enough to get all the references.
At the time, Stan Lee was still “writing” almost the entire Marvel Comics line, and we can see some of the effects here. While the stories are thrill-packed action in the mighty Marvel manner, there’s not the same creativity as in previous Hulk stories. It’s almost all use of established characters to set up big fight scenes, with no room for character growth.
The Hulk’s hair-trigger temper and understandable suspicion of nearly everyone leads to a lot of unnecessary conflict. But General Ross and Major Talbot are no help on that front, going “I knew the Hulk couldn’t be trusted!” at the drop of a hat. And as we see in the Living Lightning story, the moment Hulk drops his guard and starts trusting someone, he’s almost immediately betrayed.
Hulk’s intelligence level fluctuates as the story demands, in this set going from “not very bright” to “challenged” to “small child” as needed. This would eventually become a plot point or three.
Betty and Rick are sidelined in this set of stories, just checking in to mope about Bruce Banner or be threatened.
Still, if you like big dumb fight scene stories, this is a pretty good set of those, and rare reprints of the parody comics, so still recommended to Hulk fans.
