The Incredible Hulk!
by
Stan Lee, Jack Kirby & Dick Ayers
Alicia Masters and Thing are on a date. As the couple leave a performance of Beethoven’s 5th, their conversation about music is interrupted rather rudely by a man pointing out the soldiers patrolling the Manhattan streets in front of them. Thing starts to accost the rude man for his interruption, when the man’s shouts of panic are heard by a passing military unit. Witnessing his vast strength, the soldiers mistake Thing for their intended target. The troops surround Thing, who after making sure Alicia is safe, pulls out a fire hydrant next to him in order to slam his weight down on top of the water, making it geyser all over the soldiers.
Before Thing can escape the soldiers, they fire an entrapping device that shoots out of a bazooka style gun. After he easily busts out of the confines of the device, the soldiers shoot a heavy gas at him to knock him out, just in time for the captain of the unit to realize the mistake they’ve made. Minutes later, Thing comes to and the army captain profusely apologizes, explaining that they mistook him for the Hulk. As a frustrated Thing tries to retaliate, Alicia holds him back. After she manages to calm him down, Thing walks her home.
Leaving Alicia at her place, Thing arrives at the Baxter Building. Realizing he lost his special elevator belt beam thingy, he decides to tear open the elevator doors and climb up the cable, through the elevator shaft, to the 35th floor where the Fantastic Four’s headquarters are. When he arrives, the group notices his foul mood. The Thing tells them what happened on his date. This leads Reed and Sue to reveal that they just got a call from a General Ross, who is on his way to meet them about the Hulk. The Thing exclaims that he doesn't even believe in a Hulk, when suddenly their buzzer rings. Sue notices it is General Ross and lets him in.
General Ross and his aide, Captain Nelson, meet everybody before they get down to business. He explains there has been a national alert out for the Hulk. They suspect him of sabotaging certain missile defense systems in the southwestern region of the US. He points out that the mistake with the Thing happened because one of the main ways of recognizing the Hulk is his tremendous strength much like his. Showing the group a picture of the Hulk, Ross says he wants their help to capture and destroy him.
In the living room, General Ross continues his presentation. He runs the most recent footage captured of the Hulk destroying military equipment. The image of the Hulk frightens Sue, so that she loses control of her powers and starts to fade. When Reed comforts her, the team describes the various ways they plan on taking out the Hulk; Thing by brute force, Human Torch by making a maze of flame to confuse him and Reed by stretching himself flat on a ceiling and then dropping over the Hulk like a tarp. Sue makes a comment about how useless she’d be, but General Ross assures her that she’d be useful in keeping the men’s morale up and Reed concurs. Johnny gets so caught up in his fantasy that he forgets to turn his flame off before it burns out. Thing catches him and Ross admonishes Reed for having such a young member on his team. Reed explains that his powers are one of their most important weapons and he has great mechanical skills.
The Fantastic Four lead General Ross into their garage. There they show off their new and improved Fantasticar, which Johnny helped design. They all get into the vehicle and fly off towards General Ross’s base in the American Southwest. On the way there, Ross points out an example of some of the wreckage caused by the Hulk. After they land, they meet with Ross’s scientific executive, Bruce Banner, and his assistants, Rick Jones and Dr. Karl Kort. Bruce argues that the destruction couldn’t be the work of the Hulk because all of the equipment he supposedly destroyed happened from the inside out, not the other way as the Hulk would do. General Ross explains that he put this team together to go after the Hulk and that is what they are going to do. Reed and Bruce shake hands, expressing their admiration of each other’s work.
Out in the hall, the rest of the Fantastic Four wait for Reed and Bruce Banner to come up with a plan. Karl leaves to get back to work. As he passes by, a bored Thing and Human Torch tease him with their powers. The assistant flees from them and accidentally drops his wallet in his hurry. Torch picks it up with a flaming lasso trick he’s been working on. Thing gets fed up with waiting and bursts into the meeting room with his teammates.
Thing, Human Torch and the Invisible Girl all burst into the office, startling those within. Sue snatches a gun out of one officer’s hand to prevent him from shooting them. General Ross has trouble calming them all down. Bruce Banner points out to the general that the team was invited there to help him, so they should all be in on the plan. When General Ross comments that he thinks Thing is afraid of the Hulk, Thing proves his might by taking Ross’s bound set of telephone books from a shelf and tears them all in half. Reed promises to reimburse him to calm the general down. Bruce informs the team that he and Rick believe the saboteur to not be the Hulk, but somebody they have dubbed “The Wrecker.” They can’t reveal that they know the Hulk is innocent because Bruce fears what would happen if his secret identity as the Hulk is exposed. Before the two of them take off, Johnny stops Rick to hand over the wallet Karl dropped in the hallway.
Bruce Banner and Rick Jones make their way to Banner’s secret lab in the caves. Bruce tells Rick that they are going to have to figure out how to expose The Wrecker in order to convince the FF and General Ross of the Hulk’s innocence. Rick is shown the scale model of project 34, the latest device Bruce has invented that The Wrecker has destroyed. It would be placed in the center of a city and produce electro-magnetic waves to blanket the area as an invisible shield against enemy missiles and aircraft. As Bruce continues to ponder, Rick realizes he still has Karl’s wallet. He heads out to return it to his home at the military base. As he approaches the building, he snoops through the wallet to find a card registering Karl as a foreign communist agent. Karl opens his door as Rick realizes this and pulls a gun on the boy.
Back at the main base, the Fantastic Four are helping General Ross out. Reed has repaired an experimental rocket sled for him and Thing is giving it a test run. Enjoying himself in the sled, it whizzes smoothly across the rails, until it comes upon a twisted up section of metal. The rocket sled slams into the busted rail, sending Thing careening through the sky from all the pressure built up behind him. Johnny flames on and immediately takes off to the rescue. He manages to grab hold of Thing, but his weight drags them both down. Human Torch falls in spirals to slow their descent, but his grip on Thing loosens. Reed stretches like a trampoline under his best friend, bracing his impact as he hits the ground. After they’ve gathered their wits, they argue with Ross that it was sabotaged. Suddenly Bruce Banner appears to inform them all that Rick Jones is missing and he suspects The Wrecker has kidnapped him. However, Thing is now convinced the Hulk is behind it all due to the twisted rail tracks. Bruce insists it is The Wrecker, but decides not to show them the note he found to Hulk, from The Wrecker, that says if he doesn’t get the Fantastic Four out of the area, he will harm Rick.
Bruce returns to his secret lab. Believing there is no way he can convince the Fantastic Four without revealing his secret identity, Bruce steps on his device that duplicates the gamma rays from the gamma bomb. Within seconds, he turns into the green, brute form of the incredible Hulk. Elsewhere underground, Karl Kort leads Rick from his own secret lab in the desert, through the catacombs to beneath a ghost town. Stalking the catacombs himself, Hulk is searching for project 34. Before he can go further, he hears voices just around a corner of the tunnel. It is the Fantastic Four, lead by Thing. He had a hunch there were tunnels below the rocket sled rails due to the ground having a hollow sound. As the Thing rounds a corner, he suddenly stands face to face with the Hulk.
Hulk throws the first punch, striking Thing off his feet. Human Torch blocks Hulk’s way, but the green behemoth scoops up a load of sand and dirt into him to extinguish his flame. With those two taken care of, Hulk emerges to the surface of the ghost town, assuming Mr. Fantastic and Invisible Girl have escaped there. After Hulk buries Torch and Thing in the rubble when he digs to the outside, Reed stretches his arms up through the cracks in the dirt to coil around Hulk. Hulk easily frees himself from Reed’s limbs to find the whole group free. He picks up an entire building structure and hurls it at them, but Thing manages to block it.
Believing his only hope is to beat the group separately to get to Rick, Hulk leaps to smash Thing. Reed curls around him again, but Hulk spins so fast that the centrifugal force unwraps the FF’s leader, leaving him sprawled on the ground. Human Torch proceeds to renew his attack, but Hulk slams his hands together with such might to create a sonic boom, powerful enough to knock everyone but Thing out. The two of them start really going at it, when suddenly a beam from underground strikes Hulk which knocks him out too.
Robbed of his victory, Thing burrows the ground up to find a giant robot which he quickly turns into scrap. Sue, who has awoken by now, tells Thing that she saw the beam of light that hit Hulk. Realizing it has been sabotage all along, Thing follows the tunnel to The Wrecker’s lair. Invisible Girl fades away and follows as Thing bashes the door to Karl’s lab open. Karl threatens to blast Thing with the ray he shot Hulk with, when the invisible Sue knocks it from his hands. Thing grabs Karl while Sue unties Rick Jones. Sue has to remind Thing not to harm Karl, the general will want to question the spy. Reed and Human Torch run in to find everything settled. Sue wonders what became of the Hulk.
Directly above the Fantastic Four, Hulk overhears their conversation. They all realized that Karl was the Wrecker and Hulk is completely innocent of any sabotage. Alone and weary from the ray blast, Hulk leaps to his underground lab to turn back into Banner. As the Fantastic Four and Rick Jones search for him on the surface, General Ross appears with Bruce to take Karl into custody. After Reed and Bruce exchange goodbyes, Bruce tells Rick he suspects Reed might know his secret. Before the Fantastic Four leave for New York, the military holds a ceremony in their honor. The next day, Hulk wonders if they will ever meet again as he watches the Fantasticar fly home.
Notes
Thing and Alicia Masters are definitely a couple in this issue. Their early romance works the best out of all of them because there are no confusing secret identity issues, there are no complicated triangles at this time and Alicia role isn’t diminished to being a nag.
So begins the biggest question in the Marvel Universe. Who wins between Thing and Hulk? More seriously, this begins the relationship between Thing & Hulk, which is a thing that gets developed over time.
In 12 issues, the Fantastic Four have gone from being feared and pursued by the government, to having ceremonies conducted in their honor by the military.
There is a miniseries that came out in 2004/2005 called Hulk & Thing: Hard Knocks by Bruce Jones & Jae Lee that completely revisits this whole fight between Hulk & Thing. It was around this time that my interest in modern Marvel comics started to wane, so I don’t have a lot of memory of it.
This is the very first comic to show that the Stan Lee/Jack Kirby Marvel Universe is a shared universe. Two separate, established Marvel characters during the Marvel age. The very beginning of the Marvel Universe as a whole.
There was one very minor crossover before this. In the issue of Journey into Mystery/Thor 86 that introduced Tomorrow Man there is a panel of someone who looks just like General Ross, but he has one panel of dialogue, appears for only the one panel and isn't mentioned by name.
This is the first Marvel age crossover, however it is not the first crossover. During the golden age, when Marvel was Timely, Sub-Mariner and the original human-android Human Torch/Jim Hammond had a really neat crossover in the pages of Marvel Mystery Comics #8-10. We see the events from the Human Torch’s eyes and we see them from Sub-Mariner’s point of view and then they clash.
Review & Ranking
This is a very strong story. It sets up the Hulk/Thing dynamic in a good way. It’s a bit more layered of a story than we are used to in these early stories. The theme of mistaken identity runs throughout the whole issue.
Thing seems to be the main character focus of the story; it starts with him, he gets the most battle out of the Hulk and it’s mainly him with Sue’s help that resolves the main conflict. We learn more details, that he prefers jazz music to a symphony. The pathos always manages to center around either him or the Hulk.
Sue Storm is at her best in this issue. She is more alert and helpful than she’s been in the past couple of issues, helping to defeat the real villain. We didn’t see her do this, but I imagine she’s the one who rescued Thing and Johnny when they got buried by Hulk, much like she rescues Rick at the end.
Johnny Storm is pretty much sidelined this whole issue; his attacks against Hulk are pretty weak, he doesn’t contribute much beyond getting the plot device (Karl’s wallet) from point A to point B.
Reed is in typical leader/genius mode, but for the first time he doesn’t have to know everything. Perhaps he has been a bit humbled by his switch with Doctor Doom a couple issues ago. I like that he is late to the resolution of the story (instead of having him explain everything because he’s the leader) for once.
Hulk seems a little toned down in his anger, but not too far off-character this early on. I think all of the Hulk related stuff is pretty good, except they are missing Betty Ross. By far the weakest element of this whole story is the villain, Karl Kort. We don't get a satisfying reason of how he got to be Banner’s aide or why he is sabotaging things beyond him being a communist spy, which is pretty much the definition of being shoehorned in.
The artwork in this starts out about average, but midway through it becomes really simple with a lot of empty backgrounds. There’s no real definition in most of the Hulk fight. It feels like Kirby or Ayers didn’t have a lot of time working on this one. It makes the main Hulk battle feel less intense overall.
I’m slipping this issue right below Fantastic Four #8. They both have a similar layered story structure, but FF 8 has much, much stronger artwork throughout. And I’m more interested in the Hulk crossover element than the Impossible Man story below it.
Next Time: Thor gets a new artist and has one of his worst adventures to date in a contender for worst Marvel Comic of the era.
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