This piece wound up in a slightly different place than I originally expected it to go.

When I first starting thinking about doing a piece on the recently reissued Marvel Masterworks: Incredible Hulk collection, I pretty much had my opening paragraph mentally written:

With the new Hulk movie about to hit theatres, there's a whole load of product being marketed around the Jolly Green Giant. Well, forget most of that crap. This book is all you need to know about the Hulk - as handled by the masters who created him: Stan Lee & Jack Kirby.

All properly condescending and fannish, right? Only one small problem: I hadn't read the stories collected in this book in over twenty years. Picking up the hardbound volume, which reprints issues #1 - 6 of the character's short-lived debut title, I rediscovered what I'd forgotten. The early Lee & Kirby Hulk is far from definitive.

Before Marvel Comics snagged the superhero audience in a big way, they were a middling company whose primary output was monster comics: fright-free stories featuring towering creatures and grotesque alien invaders, scenes of mass destruction and seen-it-before twist endings. Kirby was especially adept at rendering impressive and imaginative creatures, a talent that he'd also put to good use with the line's first big superhero title, Fantastic Four. To readers who'd been following both the monster titles (Tales to Astonish, Journey into Mystery) and FF, 1962's The Incredible Hulk seemed to represent an ideal fusion: another Kirby monster and a tortured hero type.

Stan Lee has stated that he initially saw the Hulk as a cross between Frankenstein and Mister Hyde, but he and co-creator Kirby tossed other monster movies into the pot, too. His origin is straight out of an atom age drive-in pic like Bert Gordon's Amazing Colossal Man, while the earliest stories also took from the Wolfman, as nebbishy hero Bruce Banner only became the Hulk at night. Scripter Lee was not above duplicating himself either, as elements of the Hulk would also appear in Amazing Spider-Man: the cantankerous establishmentarian nemesis who forever vowed to get our hero (in Peter Parker's case, it was newspaper publisher J. Jonah Jameson; in Banner's, Army General "Thunderbolt" Ross), an easily imperiled girlfriend named Betty, the early adolescent sense that the whole world is spiraling against you. The Hulk, at least, had teenager Rick Jones for needed back-up.