I hadn’t read the Hulk’s feature in a while, but the elegant and balanced Gil Kane cover of Tales to Astonish 91 (May 1967) pulled me right in.
“As Carmine Infantino was to the National Periodical Publication covers in the Silver Age, so was Gil Kane to Marvel covers in the Bronze Age,” comics historian Anthony Durso observed. “Marvel’s most prominent cover artist for most of the ’70s, Kane’s work was dynamic and bombastic and so enticing on the newsstand or spinner rack you just HAD to pick it up!”
That was certainly true in my case. “(Kane) began his career in the Golden Age, blossomed as one of the chief architects of the Silver Age and pioneered new formats in the Bronze Age,” comics historian Dan Greenfield observed. “Throughout, his dynamic approach to staging and anatomy thrilled and influenced generations of readers and artists.”
Then, too, this new “Abomination” — complete with Kane’s characteristic fishy-reptilian ear fins — was clearly a mirror-image villain, and those often attracted me. Psychologically, of course, the mirror-image foe represents some aspect of the self.
The doppelgänger tradition dates back at least to those surrealistic Gothic romances where lonely characters find themselves trapped with dark versions of themselves. After all, what is more inescapable than the self?
And think of all the Hulk’s power, and more, packed into the body of someone truly evil. The KGB agent who became the Abomination deliberately exposed himself to a greater gamma radiation dose than Bruce Banner had received. So, like Thor’s foe, the Destroyer, the Abomination appeared to be even stronger than our protagonist.
One shivered in anticipation of the melodrama ahead.
This clash between the two immensely powerful beings was finally resolved by the intervention of a near-omnipotent being, the Stranger, who — requiring a powerful servant — sensibly reasoned that the planet Earth could do without the Abomination.
Writer/editor Stan Lee said he came up with the character’s name before anything else because he realized the impressive-sounding word “Abomination” had never been used for a super villain before, and that he asked Kane to “…make him bigger and stronger than the Hulk and we’ll have a lot of fun with him.”
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