I continue to be surprised by the inroads that superheroes have made into popular culture. Recently I caught part of a cable telecast of a 1980 TV movie, More Wild Wild West, reuniting the lead actors of the classic 1960s television series. The villain of the piece employed two musclemen in shorts whose skin was colored green; they were referred to in the dialogue and in the cast credits as “the Hulks.” I sat before my television set wondering: how did they get away with this? (The TV movie, by the way, was a disappointing mess, turning what had been a witty fusion of the Western and the Bondian spy thriller into a dopey and unfunny comedy. And still it was better than the later theatrical film version. The incapability of various Hollywood people to comprehend what makes the concept for a movie or TV show – or comics series – work can be stunning.)
My guess is that Wild Wild West‘s Hulks were not directly based on the Hulk comics but on the Incredible Hulk live action television series of the 1970s. Recently I took the opportunity to watch a representative example of this show on the big screen.
As readers of this column’s last two installments know, I spent a recent Saturday afternoon attending screenings at New York City’s Museum of Television and Radio, which has been holding a retrospective, “Look! Up at the Screen! It’s Superheroes on Television!” When I left off last week I had finished watching the first episode of The Adventures of Superman, from 1953, in a screening “package” titled “Comic-Book Classics,” in the Museum’s main theater.
The next show in the “package” was made over a quarter of a century later: a 1979 episode of The Incredible Hulk live action series. Stan Lee and Jack Kirby had created the Hulk in 1962, a mere nine years after the start of the Superman television series, and yet the characters seem – and are – the product of different ages. Created in 1938, at the start of the Golden Age of Comics, Superman was at first a mysterious, even somewhat ruthless vigilante. But he rapidly evolved into the figure presented in the 1950s television series: the noble but humble all-American hero, benefactor of humanity. Beneath the facade of mild-mannered Clark Kent was a man who represented moral and physical perfection. Lee’s Marvel revolution of the 1960s established that superhuman powers could be a curse as well as a blessing, and portrayed protagonists with character flaws ranging from Spider-Man’s neuroses to the Hulk’s destructive rage.
One could regard the Hulk as a nightmarish variation on Superman. Beneath his everyday identity, mild-mannered Clark Kent is a superhumanly strong hero, the perfect man. Beneath his own everyday identity, mild-mannered Bruce Banner is a rampaging, superhumanly strong monster, the dark side of humanity taken physical form. Lee was inspired by Dr. Jekyll in co-creating Bruce Banner, another doctor: Superman has the high-minded personality Jekyll hoped to gain through his experiments; the Hulk is like what Jekyll actually became, Mr. Hyde.
The Superman and Clark sides of Kent’s personality co-exist in a healthy balance, with both selves under his conscious control, and in the 1950s TV series there is little real difference between them. Banner, in contrast, suffers from a self shattered into fragments, none of which is healthy: the “normal” Banner represses his inner anger and traumatic psychological pain, while the Hulk incarnates that pain and rage without restraint.
So, while Superman represents a sunny optimism about humanity’s higher potential, the Hulk represents a darker, pessimistic view of the nature and fate of humanity. We’ve gone from the superhero as member of a happy family/conformist society in The Adventures of Superman to the superhero as angst-ridden outcast in TV’s Incredible Hulk, as if the optimism of the 1960s has deteriorated into despair in the 1970s.
The episode of The Adventures of Superman that the Museum screened was clearly and unapologetically a superhero show. One thing that struck me about watching this episode of The Incredible Hulk. is that it is an object lesson in doing a superhero show while minimizing the superhero elements. The Hulk’s appearances are few and brief. There aren’t any super-villains, and the Hulk basically operates in a realistic world, in which he is the principal fantasy element.
The Incredible Hulk television series instead puts its emphasis on Bruce Banner, whom the show renamed David Banner. (Why the name change? Perhaps it was to avoid the alliteration of Bruce Banner’s name, which may have been thought to make it sound too much like a name out of comic books. Or perhaps it was because decades ago “Bruce” was somehow considered to be a stereotypical homosexual name, before macho figures like Bruce Springsteen and Bruce Willis became famous. Or perhaps it was just a sign of Hollywood’s disdain for comics as source material: the TV show people may have simply liked the name “David” better and saw no reason to be faithful to the comic.)
Recently I listened to director Ang Lee’s commentary track for the Hulk movie DVD. It’s striking to note the disparity between some of the Ang Lee’s intentions and how the movie actually turned out. More than once, Lee speaks on the track about how he sought to give the film “B-movie energy” (and he says this about scenes in which the Hulk doesn’t appear!) and how he conceived of the Hulk movie as “operatic.” Meanwhile, I watched the movie and, when the Hulk wasn’t onscreen, was reminded of how quiet, subdued, slow, talky and mundane most of the movie’s scenes are. Let me put it this way: it may have been a mistake watching this late at night; one would not expect that staying fully awake during a movie about the Hulk might be a problem. At one point I stopped the Hulk movie to see what was being telecast. Lo and behold, I came in on the middle of one of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings movies on cable, which genuinely did have that “B-movie energy” of a genre action-adventure movie, put in the service of an A-movie, and really did have an “operatic” scale. It was if I had taken a quantum leap upwards from the level of the Hulk movie I’d been watching. Once again, I found myself wondering what the heck Ang Lee was talking about. (He also keeps saying that he finds Nick Nolte’s performance as Bruce Banner’s father funny. At one point Lee acknowledges that perhaps he’s the only one who does. I expect that may be true.)
At another point on the commentary track, Ang Lee declares that nobody really cares about Bruce Banner, whom he dismisses as a “wimp” and a “loser.” This is a prime example of what I think of as the Everybody Syndrome, in which a person assumes that everyone shares his own opinions on a subject. Stan Lee, Peter David, Roy Thomas, Jeph Loeb, and John Byrne, among others, have done interesting work with the tormented personality of Bruce Banner in the comics. Ang Lee seems to me to be projecting his own opinion of Bruce Banner onto everyone else. Yes, the movie, drawing ultimately from Bill Mantlo’s comics work with the Hulk, gives the character of Banner a horrific childhood trauma. But the adult Banner behaves in such an understated, introverted manner that it’s hard to empathize with him. He doesn’t seem like the scientific genius of the comics, deeply committed to his research. He doesn’t seem deeply emotionally repressed, either in terms of anger or sexuality. He doesn’t seem a tragic, suffering figure. The personality of this movie Banner is virtually a blank.
In contrast, the Hulk TV series’s Bruce Banner comes to much more vivid dramatic life. Watching this episode, I was pleased watching the late Bill Bixby’s performance of Banner as a good man figuratively weighed down by a heavy burden, repeatedly trying to conceal his dark secret, feeling distanced from other people, forever a homeless migrant, suffused by continual melancholy. Bixby’s Banner is palpably a tragic figure. He, not the Hulk, is the emotional center of the show.
The Hulk TV show transplants a lead character from the superhero genre into a different sort of story model. The Museum of Television and Radio’s brochure for its superhero retrospective rightly calls the Hulk “a nuclear age Jean Valjean.” Valjean is the protagonist of Victor Hugo’s novel Les Miserables and hence of the celebrated musical of the same name. Imprisoned for a minor crime, stealing bread to relieve his hunger, Valjean escapes and is pursued for decades by the implacable policeman Javert. Over that time Valjean creates new identities for himself to conceal his guilt.
More likely, though, the Hulk TV show was more directly inspired by another television series, The Fugitive, which was an earlier variant on Les Miserables, and is familiar to a new generation through the later successful film adaptation. In The Fugitive Richard Kimble, who like Banner has the title of a doctor, is unjustly accused of murdering his wife, is convicted, escapes, and is pursued by another policeman, Lieutenant Gerard. Kimble wandered through the United States, adopting false identities, encountering different people and situations and then inevitably moving on. If Valjean was guilty of a minor crime, Kimble was entirely innocent. In fact, Kimble was searching for the real killer.
Following the pattern set by The Fugitive, the TV show Banner leads a nomadic existence, becoming involved with new people in a different place in each episode. Banner flees not the police but an investigative reporter, who is tracking down the Hulk. A reporter isn’t as serious a threat as the police, but represents a different kind of menace in an age of mass media: the public exposure of one’s personal secrets. Like Kimble and Valjean, the TV Banner hides behind false names. Banner has even faked the death of his Bruce Banner identity; ironically, the Hulk is wanted by the law, which blames him for murdering Banner.
But in fact Banner bears the burden of his own dark, monstrous side: he is indeed “guilty.” Kimble can rightly pin the blame for the crime he is accused of on a scapegoat, the notorious one-armed man. But Banner cannot separate himself from the “guilty” party: he is inextricably linked with the Hulk.
The opening of this Hulk episode recaps the TV series’ version of his origin. In this version there’s no “gamma bomb.” In Lee and Kirby’s origin, Banner is a nuclear physicist who has created this powerful new weapon, which has no purpose other than inflicting death on an enormous scale, and he appears to have no moral qualms about this. The bomb can be seen as an expression of the destructive rage within Banner’s repressed personality. The explosion of the gamma bomb is like the bite of the irradiated spider was to Peter Parker: in being transformed by gamma radiation into the Hulk, Banner has become the bomb in humanoid form. As I’ve noted in a previous column (way back in Comics in Context #2), Banner is a modern version of Faust, who symbolically makes a deal with the devil in the pursuit of knowledge, and pays the price.
The TV Banner is more of a noble innocent in his origin. Like Dr. Jekyll, he was experimenting on himself in an attempt to unleash man’s higher potential, not to inflict death. Banner and Jekyll were trying to tap their Jungian “shadow” self, which they saw as buried potential for good; they inadvertently released the destructive side of the “shadow” self instead. Like Spider-Man forever paying for inadvertently causing his uncle’s death, the comics’ Bruce Banner has paid for years for inventing the gamma bomb. The TV Banner is instead the innocent victim of an experiment gone wrong.
In Ang Lee’s movie, the blame for Banner’s transformation is displaced even further, onto a separate person: Banner’s father, who conducted genetic experiments that mutated his child. This genetic engineering combined with the effects of Bruce Banner’s exposure to gamma radiation (not from a bomb) and Bruce’s experiments in nanotechnology. These latter experiments are morally ambiguous. They are intended to enable soldiers’ bodies to repair injuries rapidly. So in a sense the nanotechnology will serve the purposes of war. But it does so through healing, so one could argue that Bruce Banner is conducting experiments to save lives, not take them. It is Banner’s father who is a killer, and whose experiments have evil intent. Significantly, the moviemakers name Banner’s father “David” (in the comics he is “Brian”), presumably as a nod to the TV series. That may also suggest that David is an aspect of Bruce. But it is an aspect he can rid himself of. Towards the movie’s end the Hulk/Bruce destroys David, who has turned himself into a monster. Like the one-armed man in The Fugitive, the movie’s David Banner becomes a scapegoat, who can be blamed and punished for evil and eliminated instead of the protagonist.
By coincidence or not, the episode of The Incredible Hulk that the Museum chose to screen featured its own version of Banner’s father. This predated the first appearance of Banner’s father in the comics, but provides an intriguing parallel.
In Bill Mantlo’s landmark story about Banner’s childhood (In The Incredible Hulk #312, October 1985 – now nearly twenty years ago!), Dr. Brian Banner was a physically abusive father and husband, a rage-aholic, who outright killed Bruce’s mother, Rebecca. Peter David, in the comics, picked up on this; later Ang Lee and screenwriter James Schamus had Bruce’s father murder the boy’s mother in the movie. This was presented by Mantlo and Lee and Schamus as the prime cause of the traumatic rage that became physically incarnate as the Hulk.
In the television series, we see in flashbacks that Banner’s mother was seriously ill, and that young David urged his father, here named D. W. Banner, to take her to the hospital. Inexplicably, D. W. refused, and so the mother died. Dreaming about this, Banner awakes with his eyes turned green, a sign he is about to “hulk out.” Hence, the anger manifested by the Hulk connects with Banner’s anger towards his father over his mother’s death.
Hence, this is a milder precursor of Mantlo’s and Schamus’s later scenes of Bruce’s father directly murdering his mother. I wonder if Mantlo knew this Hulk episode. In all three versions, the Hulk becomes the physical embodiment of Banner’s unresolved Freudian rage from childhood, his Oedipal resentment towards the father for depriving him of the mother.
Now, maybe in the TV version, Banner’s father simply distrusted doctors, or, like a Christian Scientist, was opposed in principle to medical care, or even did not realize just how seriously ill his wife was. Since he did not directly kill her, and presumably did not intend her death, it is easier for David to forgive his father, as he does in the course of the episode.
In fact, before David and D. W.’s actual reconciliation, D. W. comes face to face with the Hulk. One might think that if David still blamed D. W. for his mother’s death, the Hulk would attack him, but the Hulk just stares at him and then runs off. Apparently David’s love for his father outweighs his resentment of him.
The TV episode also gives David Banner a sister. Hugging David and worrying about him, the sister comes off as a protective, maternal figure. She has no visible boyfriend or husband; apart from David, the man she is most closely connected with is their father. In the comics and the movie, Banner, General Ross and Betty form a Freudian triangle; David Banner, his dad and his sister form a similar but different Freudian grouping in the TV show.
In the episode Banner’s sister and father each witness his transformation into the Hulk, yet neither of them is frightened of him. Well, why should they be? The TV Hulk looks like a bodybuilder in green body paint, which, of course, is what he’s played by. Before the creation of the technology used to create the movie’s computer-generated Hulk, this was the best they could do. The TV version doesn’t seem like a massive Hulk or like a monster at all. When he leaves the scene, he doesn’t take those gargantuan leaps from the comics, but just seems to jog away. That’s hardly very intimidating.
It’s interesting that at one point in this episode, David Banner claims to have a radiation disease. So, by extension, becoming the Hulk is a kind of disease. That’s certainly faithful to the traditional Marvel concept that Bruce Banner’s transformations are like a curse.
Maybe that even helps make sense out of the reactions of the TV Banner’s father and sister to seeing the Hulk. They don’t see him as a fearsome monster, a kind of green King Kong, but as a distorted version of a human being.
Watching this episode, I also thought that though Stan Lee says that the Hulk was inspired by Mr. Hyde and Frankenstein’s Monster, the character has another forebear in classic horror. The Hulk is also like a werewolf, the man who transforms into a beast, an incarnation of his dark side; indeed, originally in the comics, Bruce Banner turned into the Hulk at sunset and back again at dawn. Bixby’s portrayal of the Hulk reminds me of treatments of werewolves in movies and television, so often as good people who cannot help turning into monsters, and must continually wander from town to town lest their secret be exposed.
Interesting as its variants on the Hulk mythos may be, this episode was not particularly good. It had the usual dramatic slackness of much of 1970s television, meandering in pace, insufficiently developing supporting characters and dramatic relationships, and visually undistinguished. Here’s a measure of the dullness of the plot: it turns on Banner’s development of a method to speed up the life cycle of bugs so they won’t destroy local crops! Then there was the standard issue corporate villain, dressed in expensive 1970s clothing, that now looks quite repellent, who wants Banner killed before he tampers with the bugs.
Considering how uninspired most of the episode was, its high point displayed unexpected imagination as well as a bigger budget that had earlier been in evidence: Banner transforms into the Hulk while hanging onto a small airplane in flight. Still, the Hulk’s reactions seem surprisingly subdued, and it seems improbable that he would have behaved so intelligently in not upsetting the plane.
There lies a major problem with the TV show as well as the movie: the Hulk is so underdeveloped as a character. In the comics, Bruce Banner is not necessarily dull as Ang Lee contends, but he is of secondary importance to the Hulk. In large part that is because the comics’ Hulk can talk, enabling his writers to explore and develop his personality, and to have the Hulk articulate his emotions and desires. As comics readers know, the Hulk can even manifest different personalities. The most familiar is the traditional childlike green Hulk, who mood swings between his catastrophic temper tantrums, his defiant insistence on solitude, and his lonely longing for companionship. Then there is the more intelligent and Hyde-like gray version of the Hulk.
But the TV Hulk does not talk; the movie Hulk only speaks two lines (one in Bruce’s hallucination). Their personalities seem restricted to a short spectrum of responses: rage at enemies or awkward, confused stillness when confronting a loved one, like Betty in the movie or his relatives in the TV episode. Thus the Hulk really comes across only as a kind of animal, often wild, sometimes tame, whereas the writers of the comic book Hulk can turn him into Banner’s distorted mirror image, a character as complicated as Banner’s “normal” human self can be.
As an example, I am taking this opportunity to revisit another of my columns about the Hulk, which dealt with the initial issue of writer Jeph Loeb and artist Tim Sale’s Hulk: Gray mini-series (see Comics in Context #16.) It’s my hope that whenever I review the first issue of a limited series, if it seems interesting enough, to do a subsequent critique of the entire series after its completion.
My original qualm about the first issue was that Loeb and Sale redid scenes from Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s first Hulk story, with Loeb rewriting Lee’s dialogue. My preference would be to keep the original dialogue intact, just as Sale, without imitating Kirby’s style, adheres to his basic designs for the characters. It seems to me that the major comics companies too often act as if individual creators are unimportant except as sources of raw material that can be reshaped by contemporary writers, artists and editors at will. To my mind, to rewrite Lee’s dialogue from his classic work implies that his writing style has no real artistic value.
However, now that I have the new hardcover collection of the entire Hulk: Gray series, I can see that most of it consists of brand new sequences that Loeb and Sale have inserted into the first twenty-four to forty-eight hours since Bruce Banner’s initial transformation into the Hulk. I have no problem with inserting new scenes or even dialogue into “gaps” in the original story; I’ve done this myself in some of the few Marvel stories I’ve written dealing with past continuity.
Loeb’s expanded tale of the Hulk’s origin is contained within a present-day framing sequence in which Bruce Banner has a session with his psychiatrist, longtime supporting character Dr. Leonard Samson, himself a superhero known as Doc Samson. Through this device Loeb provides insights into Banner’s personality through subtle means that one does not expect in superhero comics, which usually operate in broad strokes. (In the Tuesday, August 10 New York Times is a new article about the ongoing dispute among psychiatrists over the value of traditional talk therapy in this new age of Prozac. But I note that the traditional “talking cure” retains its grip on popular culture, whether in Frasier or The Sopranos or this Hulk: Gray series.)
Claiming that he came because he needed to talk to someone (it is the anniversary of his wedding to Betty Ross, now supposedly deceased), Bruce then tells Samson that perhaps he merely wanted to get out of the rain. Demonstrating his knowledge of French scatological references, Samson replies that “that’s the biggest pile of merde I’ve heard all day.” Here Loeb signals his method to the readers: we are not necessarily to take what Banner says at face value. The Hulk is a manifestation of Banner’s unhealthy psyche; what Banner will say inadvertently points to his psychological problems. In literary criticism, Banner would be classified as an “unreliable narrator.”
For example, Banner responds to the “merde” accusation with an understated warning, “I wouldn’t take that tone with me,” as the colorist gives Banner’s eyes and forearm a Hulk-green hue. Banner tells Samson, “If I were in your shoes, I would be” afraid of him, and then Banner admits to being afraid himself. But Banner is not just talking about how everyone, including himself, fears the Hulk: this was a passive-aggressive threat, the Hulk’s anger emerging into the surface of the Banner persona.
Significantly, the green on Bruce’s forearm vanishes once he acknowledges his own fear of the Hulk and then opens his fist to reveal Betty’s ring: Bruce is afraid of the loss of Betty, which he blames on his life as the Hulk.
In my previous column about Hulk: Gray, I wrote about the following sequence, in which Bruce comments on photographs of General “Thunderbolt” Ross, his longtime nemesis (whose nickname conjures up images of Zeus), and Rick Jones, the boy he saved from the gamma bomb blast, and unwittingly demonstrates the psychological phenomenon of projection. Banner denies hating Ross, but claims that Ross hates him. The General does hate the Hulk, and has often hated Banner, too. But we know that the Hulk hates Ross; surely Banner does too, after so many years of persecution by him. Is Banner in denial about his feelings towards Ross, accusing Ross of the hatred Banner himself feels? Seeing Rick’s photo, Banner hesitates (“um”) and then says “Guilt.” Samson asks if “You blame Rick?” “No,” replies Banner, “he blames himself, don’t you think?” But wouldn’t Banner, at least unconsciously, blame Rick for what happened to him? If Rick had not gone onto the test site, Banner would never have become the Hulk.
For a starting point for their conversation, Samson suggests Bruce talk about his father. “We’ve done that to death, haven’t we?” says Bruce, dismissively. Is this merely Loeb’s way of signaling that he is going to deal with the Lee-Kirby origin story, and not Mantlo’s story of Bruce’s childhood trauma? Or is this Loeb’s sly reference to the story Peter David wrote revealing that Bruce finally killed his father?
From here Loeb and Sale shift to the moment at which Banner was caught in the gamma bomb blast. Banner’s skeleton is illuminated in a green glow by the radiation, not only suggesting the traditional green color of the Hulk, but also making clear that this is Banner’s symbolic death, from which he will be resurrected not as a god but as a monster.
When Banner revives from the blast, Rick thanks Bruce for rescuing him and tells the doctor treating him that Bruce is his “dad.” Since the doctor told Rick he’d get in trouble if he had been “snooping” around the army base, presumably Rick thought it best to conceal his and Bruce’s true identities. Still, the fact that Rick chooses to call Bruce his “dad” is revealing: an orphan, perhaps Rick sees Bruce, the adult who saved his life, as the father figure he’s longed for. This enables Loeb to establish the nature of Rick’s relationship with Banner, dismissing the homophobic Wertham theory about kid sidekicks.
Once the doctor has left, Banner bursts into anger at Rick. The present day Banner speculates that it was because Rick had called him his father, causing Bruce to think of his own father, who is the object of his long-repressed anger. This is a clever stratagem of Loeb’s: the furious Banner is at once rebelling against the idea of being someone’s “father” and yet, by taking out his wrath on Rick, is actually behaving like his father: the abused child finds himself repeating his father’s anger, though not yet his physical abuse. Moreover, Banner’s rage at Rick triggers his first transformation into the Hulk, which begins with Bruce’s eyes turning green, which may be a nod to the television series.
As In the first issue of his series in 1962, the Hulk is colored gray. Commenting on the Hulk’s first rampage through the army base, the present day Banner hypothesizes, “Maybe this was the price I had to pay for unleashing the Gamma Bomb into the world.” So Loeb too recognizes what I’ve called the Faust theme underlying the Hulk’s origin. Whether Lee and Kirby consciously thought this was Banner’s punishment for creating the Gamma Bomb, I do not know. In 1962, the height of the Cold war, perhaps they considered it Banner’s moral duty to devise weaponry for the United States; keep in mind that in the 1960s Tony Stark, alias Iron Man, was a munitions maker. Yet the Faust interpretation fits the Hulk origin.
In issue two Loeb may take it too far in suggesting that in rushing out to save Rick from the blast, Banner was acting out a death wish inspired by his own guilt over creating the bomb. As Banner himself points out, he had given the order for the countdown to be suspended, so he would be safe. He never could have expected that his assistant was a spy and would ignore the order. Perhaps a better question might be why Banner didn’t simply have General Ross send out soldiers to take Rick to safety. Why did Banner choose to do it himself?
Loeb likewise gives Betty Ross, the General’s daughter, who loves Banner but seems nearly as repressed, her own subconscious death wish. Warned of a mysterious threat, Betty nonetheless foolishly opens her door on hearing a knock, only to be confronted by the Hulk. Samson points out that at this juncture she thought that Banner was dead. Hence, subconsciously, she may have felt she had no more reason to live. We could go beyond Loeb and Samson’s hypotheses: perhaps Betty regarded a relationship with Bruce as her only hope of getting out from under the heavy hand of her domineering father. This may be yet more reason why she no longer cares about living. (How appropriate it is that both Bruce and Betty have problems with oppressive fathers, while Rick suffers from not having a father.)
At first Betty is surprisingly brave, defying the Hulk before finally collapsing unconscious in the more familiar kind of reaction for an ingenue in an early 1960s monster movie. Here Loeb may be suggesting the feistier, more independent side of Betty that would emerge in the Hulk series decades later, in more feminist-friendly times.
General Ross arrives and directs an attack on the Hulk. The present day Banner points out that Ross was endangering Betty, whom the Hulk was holding. Ross threatens to kill the Hulk if the monster harms Betty, and yet Ross came close to killing her himself through what seems his own disposition towards using violence, regardless of the consequences.
“We’ll show that – Hulk – what it means to mess with this man’s army.” Top priority for General Ross seems to be proving he’s a bigger alpha male than the Hulk. How different is this from the Hulk’s mantra about being “the strongest one of all”?
Ross refers to Betty as “my little girl,” which may seem simply a fond, fatherly endearment towards someone who is actually now a grown woman. But on the very next page Ross’s phrase takes on spooky undertones. He finds Betty’s baseball from her childhood and recalls how she “actually wanted to play baseball” as a child; the phrasing suggests Ross’s amazement that she would want to do something so untraditionally feminine. Ross also muses that Betty would ask “why girls can’t be soldiers.” This indicates that Betty, as a child, resisted being confined to traditional feminine roles. But Ross has now given her the sedative that he says her late mother would take when she became “overexcited.” Ross notes that “no one would need to know” about the sedative, and says, “I worry that you’ll be. . .just like” her mother. Can we deduce from all this that Ross actually sedated Betty’s mother whenever she acted in too independent a fashion, and that it is because he fears that Betty will take after her mother that he has been so domineering towards her? General Ross intends to keep Betty as his “little girl,” right there with him on the base, and away from potential suitors like Banner.
Through present-day Banner and Samson’s comments on the flashback in which Rick finds Banner (who awakes after spending the night as the Hulk), Loeb explicitly establishes Bruce’s transformations into the Hulk as a metaphor for alcoholism: Banner too can wake up after wreaking all sorts of damage as the Hulk and not even remember what he’s done. (By the way, usually in the 1960s Banner remembers little or nothing of his experiences as the Hulk, as Loeb acknowledges in the notes at the back of the book. As if he had drunk too much alcohol, Banner in effect “blacks out.” To make this framing sequence work, Loeb must have Banner remember what the Hulk did, at least in those initial hours of the Hulk’s existence. But, as noted, Loeb has indicated that Banner’s memories are not altogether reliable.)
Loeb and Sale recreate an iconic motif from the early Hulk stories, in which Banner has Rick imprison him in an underground cave. The Hulk’s pounding at his prison door, bellowing to “Banner! Let Hulk out! Out of dark!” is a brilliant dramatic metaphor for Banner’s attempts to suppress the Hulk side of his psyche. As usual in the 1960s, the Hulk thinks of Banner as a separate person and an enemy. The Hulk thus suffers from his own form of denial: obsessed with being “the strongest one of all,” he cannot acknowledge he is also the “puny human” Banner. (Oddly, by the opening of the third issue, the Hulk is out of the cave. Loeb and Sale have chosen not to explain why he isn’t still trapped.)
In the opening of the third issue, the Hulk, like a child, has adopted a rabbit as a “friend” and unintentionally kills it by petting it too hard. In the back of the book, Tim Sale ascribes the inspiration for this scene to the Boris Karloff Frankenstein movie. Can this possibly also be an allusion to Lenny, the strong but childlike and retarded character in John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men? Whenever you see a cartoon from Hollywood’s Golden Age with a big, not particularly bright character who is obsessively fond of rabbits or other small animals, as in Chuck Jones’s The Abominable Snow Rabbit, that’s a parody of Steinbeck’s Lenny.
In this sequence Loeb introduces another interesting theme. Samson points out to the present day Banner that the Hulk “at least in the way you told the story” (reminding us that Banner is an unreliable narrator), did not intend to kill the rabbit and was “innocent.” Banner denies that the Hulk is ever “innocent.” Burdened by guilt over the Hulk’s actions, Banner, perhaps surprisingly, judges the Hulk more harshly than Samson does or than we might. Loeb and Sale are presenting the traditional 1960s Hulk, who has the personality of a small child, as likely to adopt a pet as to throw a temper tantrum. (In notes at the back of the volume Loeb characterizes the Hulk as a “monstrous child.”) Banner interprets the Hulk differently, it seems: as an evil Hyde-like being.
In notes in the back of the Hulk: Gray hardcover, Loeb observes that the Hulk “transcends the simple Jekyll & Hyde/black and white metaphor because the Hulk has an innocence about him that Hyde never had. There are people-Ross in particular – who see the world in black and white. There is a clear line between good and evil. In Ross’s mind the Hulk is a monster. There is no other choice.” It would appear that Banner may agree with Ross on this. But he is wrong, as Samson maintains. The title Hulk: Gray refers, then, not just to the Hulk’s original color but to the notion that the Hulk cannot be judged in black and white terms. In fact, all of the major characters’ psyches are more complex than one might first think.
Samson counters Banner’s insistence on the Hulk’s evil by noting that despite all the destruction that the Hulk causes, no one was ever killed. That’s true of the Hulk into the 1990s. Hulk: Gray isn’t acknowledging the more recent treatment of the Hulk, in which the monster has indeed caused people’s deaths through his rampages, worsening Banner’s sense of guilt.
Despite Banner’s condemnation of the Hulk, in the present-day dialogue he also seeks to shift blame to General Ross. Banner offers to bet that Ross has made more people’s lives “miserable” than the Hulk has; Samson pointedly refuses to take the bet.
Interrogating Rick about the Hulk, Ross finally hits him. Ross is an oppressive father figure: he is literally Betty’s father, and he is symbolically a father figure to Banner and even to Rick. In striking Rick, he is unwittingly repeating the behavior of Bruce’s abusive father. So it makes metaphorical sense that as soon as Ross hits Rick, the enraged Hulk, the personification of Banner’s anger towards his father, bursts in.
In the fourth issue there follows a battle between the Hulk and Iron Man, wearing the bulky golden armor from the early days of his career. (The Hulk’s first issue was cover-dated May 1962, and Iron Man debuted in Tales of Suspense #39, cover-dated March 1963. Hulk: Gray supplies further evidence that Iron Man’s career began earlier in Marvel history than his first story’s publication date would suggest.)
As the Hulk and Iron Man wage furious combat in the artwork, the present-day Banner recounts a story about a collie tied to a tree by his owner, who started firing a gun towards him; unable to escape, the collie was terrified, traumatized, and driven to brutal violence himself. At one point, Banner says, the owner got drunk: this should remind the reader of the previous comparison of the Hulk to an alcoholic. Samson asks which of the two enemies, the Hulk and General Ross, is the collie and which is the owner. Banner replies, “There are days when I can’t tell the difference.”
This dark parable indicates that beneath all of the Hulk’s and Ross’s bravado and blustering threats, each is actually terrified by the other. It’s surprising that Banner recognizes Ross’s insecurity. It’s also notable that Banner is also accusing both the Hulk and Ross of genuinely sadistic behavior towards the other.
What further interests me about this is that since Loeb runs the story about the collie through the fight between the Hulk and Iron Man, perhaps he means us to see both the terrified collie and the brutal owner within Iron Man as well. That’s a very unusual take on a character who is traditionally depicted as a classic hero.
At one point Samson comments on the Hulk’s difficulty in telling Betty he loves her; this reflects Banner’s own inhibitions about telling her the same thing. But the Hulk ends up abducting Betty and insisting that she stay with him. I wonder if this is another example of the Hulk breaking through Banner’s repression, acting on the feelings that at that time Banner did not dare voice.
At the end of the Iron Man-Hulk fight, the Hulk lashes out at Betty, apparently not realizing who he was hitting, injuring her. The Hulk, as his Banner self would, now feels guilty and takes the unconscious Betty to a gas station, searching for first aid supplies. (There is an “Atlas” sign at the station, perhaps a reference to a previous name for Marvel.)
Banner takes issue with Samson for saying the Hulk hurt Betty. “You mean when I hurt Betty,” Banner retorts, “the first time.” So again Banner is blaming himself for the Hulk’s actions, and here linking his guilt over the Hulk’s injuring Betty to Banner’s guilt over the way his marriage to Betty led to her death. (She was given radiation poisoning by the Hulk’s enemy, the Abomination, who symbolically is an evil version of the Hulk.)
Then, returning to the theme of a previous disagreement, Samson contends that the Hulk hurt Betty by “accident” and should be commended for trying to heal her. Banner tells Samson not to “excuse the Hulk’s behavior as ‘an accident.'” Now that’s actually something one might expect a psychiatrist to say: that there are no accidents, and hence the Hulk subconsciously intended to strike her. (And this would be the Hulk repeating Brian Banner’s physical brutality towards his wife.) Moreover, Banner is again refusing to acknowledge the Hulk’s childlike innocence. In refusing to excuse the Hulk for anything he does, Banner is also heaping further guilt upon himself for the Hulk’s actions. (Though this is an understandable reaction, I wonder if Banner’s obsession with guilt is also just as much a means of self-dramatization as the Hulk’s continual boasts about being the strongest.) Loeb significantly places a caption in which Banner forbids Samson to “excuse” the Hulk in a full page panel in which the Hulk tells Betty, “Hulk sorry.” The childlike Hulk seeks redemption; the embittered, cynical adult Banner denies the possibility of forgiveness for the Hulk or for himself. Looking at Betty as she begins to revive, the Hulk looks terrified, and the reader should recall from the opening pages Banner’s own confession of fear of the harm that the Hulk can inflict.
Once more awake, Betty rages at the Hulk, shouting “You are not going to destroy me!” This seems rather Hulk-like of her, and why not? At this point in the Hulk’s history, she’s another inhibited person who’s been bottling up anger inside herself her whole life, and now she has the opportunity to let it out.
Here the theme of the unreliable narrator reaches its apex. Hearing Banner describe Betty’s angry defiance of the Hulk, Samson asks, “is this what happened or is it how you remembered what happened?” Banner finally admits, “The memory of how she was at the end of her life rings truer to me than maybe how she really was back then.”
So, again, Loeb lets us know that Banner is not necessarily recounting events as they actually took place. In Betty’s case, this enables Loeb to avoid presenting Betty as the stereotypical helpless, timid ingenue she could seem in the early 1960s, though elsewhere in Hulk: Gray he uses that very image to show how the domineering General Ross has tried to keep her in a submissive, childlike role. Maybe, in imagining Betty as more assertive and less frightened than she was, Banner is unconsciously trying to lessen his guilt over the Hulk’s actions towards her. Or perhaps the angry Betty he imagines berating the Hulk is voicing Banner’s own self-accusations.
In underlining the idea of Banner as unreliable narrator, Loeb can justify the departures that Hulk: Gray makes from exact continuity. As panels from the early Lee-Kirby Hulk reprinted in the back of the book show, the Hulk was actually more articulate back then than he is in Hulk: Gray. Loeb’s Hulk speaks in the more familiar style, like a small child with a limited vocabulary, that the Hulk spoke when his series was revived in Tales to Astonish. But this, perhaps, is how Banner recalls how the Hulk voiced his simple emotional responses. The idea of Banner’s imperfect memory of these events even excuses the substitution of new dialogue in the recreation of Lee-Kirby Hulk scenes.
Betty pleads with the Hulk to let her go, and the Hulk glowers at her, commanding, “Stay.” Is he becoming as possessive towards her as her father?
Samson points out to the present day Banner that Betty’s reactions, as he described them, including her anger leading to depression, comprise the five stages of grief. We are thus reminded that Betty thinks that Bruce Banner, the man she loves, is dead, understandably unable to recognize him in his monstrous alter ego. She makes her earlier death wish explicit: “Maybe I’d be better off dead. . . .”
Ultimately, decades later in Marvel publishing history, Betty does end up dead (at least for now, since virtually all Marvel deaths seem reversible). Do Banner – and Loeb – see Betty’s death wish when confronted by the Hulk as an omen of her future? Did Betty actually say this, or is Banner, haunted by her death, imagining that she said it? Considering the way he projected his own emotions onto others in the early scene with the photos, is it possible that the guilt-ridden Banner is really imagining Betty voicing his own death wish, that was established earlier in this series?
As the final issue begins, the Hulk and General Ross confront each other. “Ross hunt Hulk. Hulk find Ross!” says the angry Hulk. There’s brief but interesting phrasing. It implies that Ross and the Hulk have been stalking each other. And in keeping with their game of one-upmanship, the Hulk claims to “find” Ross, implying that he succeeded where Ross failed, though in fact they seem to have simultaneously “found” each other.
Banner recalls, “the only thing I’m sure of is. . .I wanted to kill Ross that night.” The way he puts it suggests that this is an exception to the rule that Banner’s unreliable narration draws the events he describes into question: Loeb wants us to believe that the Hulk really did want to kill Ross.
Banner goes on, “And that either would’ve been the smartest thing the Hulk ever did. . .or something nine of us could have lived with from that point on. . . .” And that suggests that even present-day Banner is still morally conflicted over this moment, that Banner, in his human persona, is still tempted by the desire to murder his nemesis. Ross is a negative father figure who surely reminds Banner/Hulk of his own father. In “smashing” Ross, Banner/Hulk symbolically strikes back at his own father. Soon Banner labels Ross “psychotic,” a description that would presumably fit Brian Banner as well.
Loeb’s Ross keeps calling the Hulk a “monster,” and the Hulk roars back, “Hulk is not a monster!” Can Loeb be alluding to Mantlo’s story, in which Brian Banner insanely thought of his infant son Bruce as a “monster.” In Ang Lee’s film David Banner applies the same word to the movie’s infant Bruce.
Also, as this series has been reiterating, the Hulk and General Ross are mirror images of each other. So, in “smashing” Ross, the Hulk, driven by Banner’s guilt, may also subconsciously be attempting to punish his own dark side.
The Hulk seizes Ross and holds him helpless, while the General defiantly baits him. Ross orders his men to fire on the Hulk, but they hesitate, telling him that Ross is “in harm’s way.” Earlier, Ross didn’t let Betty’s proximity to the Hulk stay his hand, and now he reiterates his order to shoot. So perhaps this is General Ross’s own death wish in action. And perhaps Ross too subconsciously recognizes the Hulk as his mirror image, and that hence to kill one of them is symbolically to kill the other.
Samson emphasizes that, despite the extreme provocation, the Hulk did not kill Ross: the Hulk, in Samson’s view, is simply not a killer. Ultimately, the Hulk gives in to Betty’s plea not to kill her father, but there were long moments before she arrived in the scene when the Hulk was just holding onto Ross, as if frozen in place. Considering how the Hulk so easily gets carried away by his own rage, enough to lash out at Betty without thinking, as we saw earlier, I find it hard to believe that he refrained for so long in this scene from smashing Ross into oblivion.
Maybe this sequence needed more work. Bruce Banner created a nuclear weapon that he knew could kill millions, yet, confronted by the sight of a lone boy in danger of death, Rick Jones, rushed out himself to save him. Is something similar going on here, that the Hulk will gleefully lay waste to weapons but, face to face with a single victim, cannot bring himself to kill in cold blood? Despite Banner’s hatred for his father (and actually killing him in a Peter David story), is Banner/Hulk still cowed by the moral taboo against patricide, even against a symbolic father/authority figure like General Ross?
Infuriated by Betty’s attempt to defuse this confrontation, Ross calls the Hulk a “creature,” thereby denying him his humanity, and calls Betty an “insolent child,” denying her the status of an adult who can make decisions for herself. As for that word “insolent,” “Thunderbolt” Ross storms that Betty is “just like your mother. Confusing defiance with heroism.” Ross, it seems, is a father/authority figure who demands submission and unquestioning obedience from everyone, including his soldiers, his wife and his daughter. Ross sedated his wife and daughter to prevent them from “defying” him. So the Hulk is a particularly nightmarish figure for him: the ultimate rebel (who will turn out to be his potential son-in-law). Readers may see heroism in the Hulk’s defiance of the military that will not leave him alone; Ross castigates those who link “defiance” with “heroism.” (Samson, however, implies that Banner may again be unreliable in describing Ross’s “borderline psychotic” behavior in this scene, as if to justify the Hulk’s murderous rage at him.)
At the end of Banner’s reminiscences, Bruce, back in human form, returns to the base and tells General Ross “I’m sorry” for having been missing for so long. This apology only provokes a torrent of verbal abuse from Ross, who lambastes Banner as “weak” and “cowardly.” The words “I’m sorry” remind me of the “Hulk sorry” line earlier. The Hulk’s remorse over harming Betty is one of his saving graces; Ross regards contrition as a sign of weakness.
The long flashback ends with Betty directly stating one of the book’s themes: “Daddy, you’re as horrible as that Hulk!”
Back in the present, Bruce Banner concludes that he is indeed a “coward” for failing to admit to himself the conclusion he’s drawn from the mirror image theme of this series. Banner concludes that if the Hulk and General Ross are indeed so much alike, then Betty loved him, Bruce, even after finding out he was the Hulk, for the same reason she loved her father: she is drawn to loving “monsters.”
As if referring to the symbolism of the title of this series, Samson cautions that “Not everything is. . .as black and white as you’re saying.” He is warning Banner against oversimplifications. But this concluding sequence of the story is visually depicted in black and white, with green as the color of the present day Hulk, and this reflects Banner’s mindset. Continuing to hate the Hulk and his human self, Banner chooses to believe that Betty only loved him because there was something wrong with her.
Maybe there’s a Freudian rivalry going on here, as if Banner is hurt at the idea that Betty loved him because she saw him as identical to her father. Or perhaps Banner’s fear is that Betty loved Bruce not for his human side, but for his monstrous persona, which he himself detests? Is it that Banner sees Betty as someone who will not break away from a father who abuses her, whereas Banner, as the Hulk, is in outright rebellion against oppressive father figures? Worse, if Bruce thinks that Betty identifies him with her tyrannical father, that may make Bruce see a similarity between himself and the abusive Brian Banner. We’ve already seen Bruce explode into the Hulk’s rage when Rick Jones called him “Dad.”
In the concluding notes, Loeb states that “By the end of our tale, Banner has a new understanding. . .But it’s not necessarily the right understanding.” Banner sees a new aspect to his past, but still lacks a complete vision and comprehension of what happened. Banner’s understanding of his life, of other people, and of himself is fragmented, just as his psyche itself is. He hasn’t pieced together the entire truth no more than he has yet integrated his multiple personas.
So, despite my original qualms about Loeb and Sale’s Hulk project, it ultimately emerges as a true tribute to the stature of Lee and Kirby’s origin story and an object lesson in reinterpreting classic comics work without tampering with the original. So many comics professionals feel the need to rewrite and reboot classic material, so often losing the creative strengths of the originals in the process. In exploring and elaborating upon the themes and characterizations in Lee and Kirby’s original Hulk stories, Loeb and Sale demonstrate just why Lee and Kirby’s best works are enduring classics: they have psychological and thematic depth that have resonated with readers for decades.
Moreover, Hulk: Gray shows how complex and dramatic the characters of Banner and the Hulk can be. The 1970s television series only scratched the surface. The more ambitious 2003 movie still did not go far enough. As yet the Hulk has still received his best work in the medium that spawned him: the supposedly lowly comic book.
-Copyright 2004 Peter Sanderson
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