The Four Color Media Monitor

William Kulesa, a comics columnist for the Jersey Journal, has some difficulty understanding what the Hulk is about while reviewing one of the recent Loeb/Sale miniseries for the green goliath.

I 've never really been able to figure out most people's attraction to the Hulk. Sure, he's big, green, indestructible and in the recent "Ultimate Hulk vs. Wolverine" he ripped Logan in half, but I just never got it. What can you do with the Hulk besides smash things?

Answer: you can have him go after communist and fascist villains, as he first did during the 1960s, when the Cold War was raging on. (And from the looks of things today, it just might be coming back!) The whole fun of the Incredible Hulk to begin with was that the 7-foot tall anti-hero would find himself on the trail of all sorts of commie criminals, one who created him (Igor Drenkov) when he hoped for a chance to get Bruce Banner out of the way so he could steal his classified files (changing into the Hulk at night, Bruce went on his first Hulk rampage, heading for his living quarters where he found Drenkov trying to burglarize the house, and knocked him senseless). And of course, there was the nifty rogues gallery, one of the first being Gargoyle(?), and most certainly the Leader, whose main challenge was that he relied more on brains than on strength.

But with the names Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale on it I couldn't resist picking up "Hulk: Gray."

There is something about the team of Loeb and Sale that in my experience produces nothing but greatness. Some of my favorite comic books are those they have written which revisit the origins of some of the greatest comic book heroes in the industry and I eagerly anticipate any work they put out together.

It's easy to judge the Hulk by the vast majority of the stories that have been written about him. He is big, dumb and he smashes things, end of story. On the other hand, when in the hands of a writer capable of nuance and depth we find more to the character than ever might have been imagined. Utilizing the much maligned device of the flashback Loeb grants us insight into the Hulk and those characters that surround him. He is no longer a Jekyll and Hyde stand in and Betty Ross takes on immense psychological import. The character of the Hulk takes a back seat in "Hulk: Gray" and becomes a plot device for exploring all those that revolve around him.

Well, I wish he'd think to mention the fact that the Hulk actually did become more than we might imagine when Peter David took up the writing in 1987, after Al Milgrom left (and I just went and bought two of David's Visionaries collections last week!) That aside, what's that about the Hulk being "dumb"? Not really. He did get his intellect lowered for a time shortly after his first appearances, but over the years, he regained some of the intelligence that he lost.

To me, Hulk remains in the same category where I placed such characters as, Punisher and Ghost Rider. They make interesting sub characters in the greater comic book universe they dwell in but have little merit on their own over an extended title. Starring in mini-series which explores the depth of their extreme psyches though, we see their true colors. These characters have more to offer literature than the mayhem they may commit - it's possible that they can tell us a little something about what it means to be human.

Yeah, but there's a difference: while I can't think of anything to say about Ghost Rider, Punisher, as some have argued, is a one-trick pony because he - or the writers - leave no room for recurring adversaries: Frank Castle slays them all. For the Hulk, his own adversaries, like the Leader, for example, are just too smart to be destroyed. The Punisher's also got almost no supporting cast, if at all, whereas Bruce Banner's had plenty, whether Betty Banner, her father, Thunderbolt Ross, Rick Jones, Dr. Leonard Samson and maybe even the Avengers as well.

Labels: Hulk, marvel comics