As we look at the topic of Foundations for the latest Super Blog Team-Up, it would be pretty cool to write about the first comic I bought or read. But while I remember some key issues – Marvel Saga #7, Amazing Spider-Man #280, Classic X-Men #14 – I'm not sure any of them was my first one. It might have been one of the mini comics that came with a Masters of the Universe action figure.
But what I do know is that Incredible Hulk #333 was my first next issue – the first time I intentionally bought the next issue in sequence and therefore the official start of my collecting.
Incredible Hulk #333
“Quality of Life”
Writer: Peter David
Penciler: Todd McFarlane
Inks: Pablo Marcos
Letters: Rick L. Parker
Color: Petra Scotese
Editor: Bob Harras
Editor-in-chief: Jim Shooter
Cover: Steve Geiger and Bob McLeod
Published by: Marvel
Released: April 7, 1987
Part of my fascination with superheroes was born from the one-two Saturday morning animated punch of “Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends” and “The Incredible Hulk.” I remember buying* Incredible Hulk #332 and finding out Rick Jones was a Hulk now and THE Hulk was gray. Prior to that, I had largely bought whatever comic's cover caught my eye, but for some reason, I was intent on seeing this story through, probably due in large part to Jones, the Hulk and, another show regular, the Leader, being caught up in a big explosion at the end of 332.
So almost certainly at the very same Waldenbooks I got the next issue, featuring a shadowy Hulk I incorrectly assumed was drawn by McFarlane looming over a pretty defenseless-looking woman. If that seemed weird to me, it paled in comparison to the tale inside.
We don't get the Hulk or any of his supporting cast or arch-nemeses in the first two pages. Instead we find a crying woman, Blaire, listening as her husband complains about a “misunderstanding” they had the night before. As she reaches into a drawer and pulls out a handgun, we see the misunderstanding left her with multiple bruises and a nasty black eye. Her husband walks out of the bathroom, right into her line of fire, and she pulls the trigger, then smiles.
Then we see the gray goliath, standing over an unconscious Rick Jones, who was de-Hulk-ified last issue in an effort to give the Leader back his enhanced gamma brain power. In exchange, he promised to help the gray Hulk – not as strong as Banner's green counterpart, but more articulate and much nastier – get rid of his puny alter ego once and for all. Only something went wrong, the Leader is missing, and the Hulk is looking to put as much distance between himself and the Hulkbusting crew at Gamma Base as possible. That leaves Rick to drive back to the base in an ambulance with a dead body inside.
Hulk leaps to a small town and busts into the liquor store, determined to keep Banner in place by making sure he's plastered when he changes back with the sunrise. His plan succeeds and Bruce is subsequently arrested by the sheriff – Blaire's husband from the opening scene.
Back at Gamma Base, Rick is confronted by Betty Banner, not about the body in the ambulance,** but about her husband being the Hulk again. Rick says he did it to help him, but Betty's not listening. She's actually reading a letter she got from her maybe ex-husband Ramon asking her to meet up.
It's not just her that he controls through fear and violence, but the whole town. He's particularly rough on outsiders and also may have been involved in the disappearance of another candidate for sheriff. Comparing her situation to the storyline in the then-contemporary film “Peggy Sue Got Married,” she decides she would tell her younger self to “run as fast and as far as you can” and takes her own advice.
Banner is sleeping off his unwilling bender in a jail cell, dreaming about recent developments with the Hulk in a couple of helpfully expository pages. When he wakes up and realizes night is about to fall again, he tries to warn the sheriff and his deputy, but Big Mike isn't going to take orders from some scrawny drunk or anybody else. Like the paragon of macho justice that he is, he whacks Banner's hand with the trusty bent iron bar he still carries, just in time for the sun to go down.
The Hulk doesn't like Banner any more than Mike does, but his hand still stings post-transformation. Unfamiliar with just who is in his jail, probably because he hasn't read the Hulk's gray adventures, Mike punches him right in the face. Later, he tries to use his gun, but that doesn't work either.
This Hulk is not a nice guy, but he recognizes pretty quickly what a turd the sheriff is. Their one-sided scuffle spills out into the street, where the fleeing Blaire happens upon the scene.
The folks in town are thrilled to see someone putting their strong-arming sheriff in his place, and you'd think Blaire would be too. Instead, she picks up Mike's gun the Hulk swatted away and tells him to leave her husband alone. Impressed by her actual guts versus her husband's abusive arrogance, the Hulk says he's all hers.
Not impressed with this turn of events is Mike, who starts berating Blaire for embarrassing him in front of the town. He tries to jerk the gun out of her hands, but this one is loaded.
Blaire says it was an accident. The Hulk's not buying it, and us readers are understandably skeptical. Hulk leaps away, telling the distraught Banner trapped in his psyche to take heart because “there's monsters everywhere.”
The story wraps up with Betty meeting up with Ramon and asking him to make her feel special. To his credit, I don't think he knows her new husband is the Hulk.
Yeah, that's what I was reading in the first grade. As an adult, I look back at it and know with confidence my mother had no idea the comic she bought me based on a Saturday morning cartoon was dealing with spousal abuse, infidelity and matrimonial manslaughter. Sometimes I forget comics were pivoting away from child audiences well before the '90s.
I don't remember if I recognized the “real world” nature of the story as a 7-year-old. I thought of Mike as the villain of the issue, just like Doctor Doom or Loki or the Scorpion, albeit not much of a threat to the “hero.” Of course, I recognized that Mike was a lousy guy, and I do recall finding Blaire's decision to try to save him surprising
My main memory of this issue though is that I had never seen the word “cripes” written, nor could I recall anyone speaking it. Though I understand now it's a substitution for taking Jesus Christ's name in vain – sort of like heck, I guess, although heck doesn't feel disrespectful and a weak attempt to dodge sacrilege – I did not know that then. I actually thought Mike had some sort of physical condition that caused him to emit an involuntary high-pitched sound that was phonetically spelled “c-r-i-p-e-s.”
While acknowledging that this wasn't an action-packed, kid-friendly romp, older me can appreciate what David did with this issue. I don't know if it's what he was going for, but it feels like an episode of the old live-action Hulk TV show, where Bill Bixby wandered into a situation that somehow benefited from him getting angry and switching places with green Lou Ferrigno a couple times over the course of an hour. And David did this while advancing the ongoing plot of the series, something that was virtually non-existent, as I recall, on the show.
Sure, there were details I didn't understand (like the corpse in the ambulance), but 7-year-old Evan felt like he had a pretty good handle on what was happening in this story. I wanted to read the next issue, and I was certainly curious to learn more about how we arrived at this status quo, but I didn't feel like I needed to read anything else to follow along. And, in a circumstance that is sure to shock some comic marketing folks today, that was the case even though I started the series in issues with triple-digit numbers. It's impressive for a series these days to reach issue 32 or 33, let alone have 300 in front of that.
I would get the next four issues of the title, and snag a couple between 338 and 345 – not, alas, #340 with Wolverine – before picking it up again with 346, in the aftermath of the Hulk's supposed death. Then the action shifted to Las Vegas, with the Hulk working as the muscle for a casino owner/gangster and dating and everybody acted like that was perfectly normal. I fell behind as things hurtled toward the emergence of the “Professor” version of the Hulk and didn't revisit those tales until years later, in the Marvel Visionaries trades. David, would of course continue writing the Hulk until issue #467. McFarlane was on the verge of superstardom but his art wasn't quite as distinctive here as it would become. I always remembered them as the first writer and artist I recognized and followed.
There have been much longer runs that I've followed, including by David himself.*** But this one marked my transition from comic-grabbing kid to comic collector and will always have a special place in my heart.
Now check out some other foundational posts from the rest of my associates in the Super Blog Team-Up!
Between the Pages Blog - Everything I Need to Know I Learned from Star Trek
Dave's Comic Heroes Blog - Justice League of America 200
The Source Material Comics Podcast - Traumatic Resonance: What I Learned from Deb Whitman
DC Multiverse - What is a Penny Worth? Enough to Fund the Wayne Foundation
Superhero Satellite - Foundations: A Digest Story
* - Well, my mom buying
** - Which I'm pretty sure was explained in the previous issue.
*** - His return to X-Factor, for example.
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