The company that would become Marvel Comics was a small, tight-knit affair without editorial fiefdoms, and that factor permitted it to grow successfully by growing swiftly and organically.
Thanks to Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, and others, Marvel was pretty much one thing from the beginning, a unified fantasy universe.
The company’s seminal success, the Fantastic Four, included a revived and revised Golden Age star, the Human Torch, and the company might have expected that he would be the most popular member of the quartet. Lee had even redesigned the Torch as a teenager to heighten his appeal to the comic book audience.
But Johnny Storm didn’t turn out to be the most popular teammate. That would be the tragic man-monster, the Thing. Early on, the super-strong Ben Grimm was prone to frightening rages about his condition, and sometimes randomly reverted to his human form.
Losing no time, Lee and Kirby took that concept and built a new solo title around it that hit the stands before the Fantastic Four’s fifth issue appeared. The Incredible Hulk 1 (May 1962) was a somber combination of Robert Lewis Stevenson’s 1886 novella The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, the Boris Karloff Frankenstein films of the 1930s, and the parade of shambling radioactive monsters that lit up drive-in movie theatres during the 1950s.
Now, nuclear physicist Bruce Banner would share pilot Ben Grimm’s tragic fate, thanks to the gamma bomb he’d invented.
“In fact, there are some surprisingly heavy themes at work for an early ’60s comic,” observed comics historian Don Alsafi. “Bruce’s genius came up with the devastating gamma bomb — and was punished for it accordingly. And that’s not all: Earlier, when warned of the consequences if his theories were wrong, his arrogance is staggering: ‘I don’t make mistakes.’”
The fact that Banner becomes the Hulk because he heroically rescues a reckless teenager from a nuclear blast tends to distract the reader from the more unsettling implications of Banner’s personality. I don’t think it’s arguable, at least in the early Hulk comics, whether Banner or the Hulk is the more dangerous figure. Whatever happens, the damage the Hulk can do is limited. The damage Banner can potentially do is not.
And the inspiration for the Hulk is winked at more than once, even within the text. In Fantastic Four 5 (July 1962), Johnny cheekily compares the Thing to the Hulk, whom he’s just read about in a comic book.
However, the Hulk is, at it turns out, no mere comic book fantasy because the teammates are asked to corral him in Fantastic Four 12 (March 1963) — but only after the Army has attacked the Thing, having mistaken him for the Hulk.
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