Stan Lee used the climax of Tales to Astonish 59 (Sept. 1964) as an opportunity to sharply etch the characters of his three protagonists.
The tale begins with Giant-Man watching a newsreel projected by Iron Man, admitting that he feels sorry for the lonely Hulk. He and the Wasp decide to fly to New Mexico to try to talk the green goliath into rejoining the Avengers.
But Henry Pym’s old enemy Davy Cannon, the Human Top, has been paroled, and secretly gins up a battle between the Hulk and Giant-Man. Pym is only able to keep from being crushed by switching rapidly from ant size to giant size.
Meanwhile, Gen. Thunderbolt Ross uses his field artillery to launch a “small-bore atomic shell” at the remote location where the Hulk can be found, unaware that the man-monster is battling Giant-Man there.
In her brave desperation, the Wasp flies up and clings to the missile, hoping to defuse it but willing to die with Henry Pym if she can’t.
“I’ll keep trying till the last second — and, if I’m too late, then at least Hank and I will go together! I’ll be with the man I love to the very end!” the Wasp says.
A flashback in the first Ant-Man movie is strongly reminiscent of this scene, by the way. There, Janet Van Dyne sacrifices herself to save Ant-Man and stop a runaway Soviet nuclear missile by shrinking into subatomic space.
Although the Wasp can’t stop the shell, the diminutive superhero remembers that she can use her cybernetic insect technology to warn Giant-Man about what’s going on to happen.
But what can he do?
The quick-thinking scientist still has an option, as it turns out.
“Hulk, listen to me!” Giant-Man says. “Look into the sky — directly overhead! There’s an atomic shell coming this way! If it strikes, we both die! Only you can save us!”
“I’m not so sure!” the Hulk replies. “I think I might survive a small atomic blast! But you sure can’t! But I wanna be the one to finish you — not some blamed bomb!!”
Then, as Giant-Man had reasoned he would, the surly monster launches himself skyward to intercept the projectile.
The Hulk’s reaction is the most poignant. Despite the fact that he’s just threatened to beat Giant-Man to death, it’s clear that the Hulk intends to save his former fellow teammate, even knowing that the attempt may destroy him.
What’s most surprising is the casual way the Hulk reveals his own self-loathing.
“If this is gonna be the end of the Hulk, then who cares?” he says. “Maybe it’ll be the best thing that could happen!! I’m no good to myself — or to anyone else!! The whole world hates me almost as much as I hate myself!”
So thundering melodrama need not preclude characterization. Love and loyalty, intellectual brilliance and self-disgust — Lee manages to underline the characters’ essential qualities even as the final fireworks detonate.
Giant-Man fears that the Hulk has been caught in the blast, but in fact he has hurled the shell away to a remote location — ironically the very hills where the Human Top had whirled away to hide.
The Hulk’s guest appearance in Tales to Astonish, drawn by Dick Ayers, was a precursor to his settling in the title in a new feature the next month.
“This is when the Hulk gets his second chance — and this time, the green monster succeeds,” comics historian Don Alsafi observed. “Stan and Jack (Kirby) first tried out the lumbering creature two years earlier in his own brand-new magazine — which, again, in an era of anthologies certainly must have indicated some confidence in the concept — but despite their efforts, it was cancelled with the sixth issue. Sadly, this was due in no small part to the fact that they just couldn’t figure out what kind of character they wanted him to be — a Jekyll-and-Hyde monster cursed with his other half? A superhero able to put on his Hulk suit at will? A freak? — and the book’s six issues are thus a fascinating and mystifying illustration of whiplash inconsistency, as they leap from one concept to the next without ever settling down on any of them.
“This time around, though, they’ll make him work. In fact, the character will go on to become so successful, and so popular, that by issue 102 he’ll even boot his co-star out of the other half, take over the book entirely, and the name of the comic will change from Tales to Astonish to, once again, The Incredible Hulk.”
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