Friday, March 11, 2016

The Hulk is an Insect in It's Gargantuan Hand!!

Okay, so remember how I kept wondering about the logistics behind the whole "Hulk changes back to Banner when he gets too stressed" thing?  Apparently I wasn't the only one who a hard time with that.

Observe, from Tales to Astonish #70



Yeah.  That makes more sense.  They had the Hulk get hit by... oh, I don't remember.  I don't think it was Random Ray Usage (tm!).  Let's just say he took a swim in a public pool or something.

Anyway, that rule is gone and the tried and true "the angrier he gets, the stronger he gets" rule that we still follow today has been established.  Watch as he frees himself with a mighty "THWUPPPP!"


Oh, and Giant-Man and the Wasp were knocked out of the book they were headlining:



Yup.  We now have Namor, fighting things like the Seaweed Man there.

Yes, the Seaweed Man.  That's not the Man-Thing.  I know, I thought it was at first myself.  But no.  Seaweed Man.  That's the quality of stories we can look forward to with Namor.

So, why?  Stan 'fesses up in a couple of issues:


Translation: We just kept throwing crap at the character, hoping something would work.  Nothing did, so we're moving on.

Funny how things go in the fickle world of comics-not-named-after-any-particular-character.

See you Monday!

4 comments:

George Chambers said...

I read somewhere that the problem with Giant-Man was that he was a DC character in a Marvel comic, and I think this is accurate. Similar to the silver age Atom, Hank Pym was a brilliant scientist who built his own super-powers. Other than a mentioned-once-but-never-again deceased wife, he never had any of the angsty personal problems that characterised other Marvel characters and he had no driving impetus to fight crime (and indeed, took several sabbaticals). Lastly, he had a sidekick, which was common among DC characters but practically unknown in Marvel. Possibly the growing ranks of Marvel readers just couldn't connect with Hank and Jan.

Namor, on the other hand, could be considered the quintessential Marvel character.

Scorpio said...

I couldn't stand the Giant-Man character, but liked the Ant-Man.

Gene Phillips said...

Thanks for reprinting the lettercol section. I think Stan was being pretty honest there: he admitted that they'd tried a lot of things and that nothing seemed to click. There was an essay somewhere that asserted that the sales always went down when Kirby didn't draw the character, which must have signaled to Stan that even with a partner, Pym just didn't "have legs." As it happened, both of them proved much more worthwhile as long-time Avengers characters.

I notice that Stan barely reprinted any Giant-Man stories. He may have been embarrassed by the one clear failure of "the Marvel Age of Comics."

maw maw said...

The Hulk used some pretty big words when he was captured by that huge creature! His I.Q. seemed to vary from year to year in the early days...