Marvel Knights Hulk #3

Yesterday, the normal prevailed in the Emerald City. A June weekend filled with clouds and cool temperatures provided all the excuse I needed, now that an ailing left foot has migrated to a painful strained right knee, to bunker in the studio here and watch the World Cup. I saw Greece torched by Colombia and Costa Rica impressively dominate Uruguay.

On Wednesday this past week, hobbling across Broadway from the neighborhood comic shop, I ran into a couple who live in my apartment building. They were on their way back home. So I joined them.

I was somewhat embarrassed since I was holding in my hand a brown paper bag filled with comic
books. People usually view adult comicbook readers as they would male crossdressers -- somewhat disturbed individuals who suffering are from a mental imbalance. This can make for awkward moments when one is outed. But I try not to hide that I am reader. I think most people I work with know. It is really not a big deal.

So I immediately fessed up. My neighbors, an interracial couple who have lived in the building for years, expressed surprise that there was a comic shop in the neighborhood. I told them that it had been open for a year, but that I had just started going there in the last couple of weeks. Usually I acquire comics online from a large store in Oregon.

Both husband and wife then proceeded to describe their long-gone childhood comic collections. She was an Archie Comics reader; he, Justice League of America. "My brother and I had boxes," he said.

"What happened to them?"

"Oh, I don't know. We just got rid of them."

From there we talked about growing up and the importance of Jonny Quest (1964-1965). I told them I had recently thought about the "Sargasso Sea" episode. We marveled at "Race" Bannon's martial prowess; we commented on his silver-white hair and Dr. Quest's red beard.

On we strolled, discussing the The Banana Splits (1968-1970) and H.R. Pufnstuf (1969). "Witchiepoo!" exclaimed my neighbor.

I offered, "Things were getting psychedelic. We pulled up though. We should have kept going."

At the root of our collective consciousness are these comic characters. This struck me as I was working my way through an unremarkable four-part limited Marvel Knights series featuring Hulk. The story, by Joe Keatinge, is what could be considered a default Marvel Hulk narrative. Bruce Banner is suffering from amnesia. A.I.M. is involved, as is an A.I.M.-cloned female super-assassin who has gone rogue from the criminal agency. She extracts Hulk juice from the amnesiac Banner and uses it to manufacture a Hulk serum. If injected into a person the serum creates a Hulked-out walking superbomb. The plot involves travel to another dimension, whether spatial or temporal was unclear to me. Then in the final issue there is a climactic battle and Banner regains his memory.

What made an impression on me were a few pages from issue #3 where Banner recollects the fateful event that led to his becoming the Hulk. The art is by Piotr Kowalksi. The color artist is Nick Filardi.

 

These images -- Banner running out to the open desert of a New Mexico test site to rescue a carefree teenage Rick Jones and then catching the gamma-bomb blast -- are part of our collective consciousness. Fear of the bomb, of nuclear annihiliation -- this is what Hulk's origin taps into.

These images and the stories they tell, along with others by Marvel (the Death of Gwen Stacy, the Death of Bucky, the Birth of Captain America by means of the Super-Soldier Serum, etc.), are more important to national identity in the United States than the Old Testament.

The Defenders #10

Recently I read all the issues of The Defenders, Vol. 4, which kicked off at the end of 2011 and then was cancelled at the beginning of 2013 with issue #12. Matt Fraction authored the comic book throughout its run, and I'm sorry to say that for the most part -- and by this I mean something like three out of every four issues -- were tired, distracted, emotionless loops around the superhero comic carousel. Don't get me wrong. I'm a fan of Matt Fraction. I loyally read his Hawkeye, Vol. 4, a brilliant, refreshing, cutting-edge book. And I said before on this page that his Invincible Iron Man will go down in the history books as synonymous with the period of hope and change (it turned out to be delusional) that Obama's 2008 campaign and first years in the White House ushered in. But what I have also noticed is that Fraction is willing to pimp himself out to the point of overextension. His work then tends to the overly sarcastic and thin. I'm thinking here of his run on The Mighty Thor.

The Defenders when it first appeared in the early 1970s was unique in spotlighting a team of outcasts. This was Marvel's answer to the recently spawned "One Nation Underground." The social upheaval of the late 1960s might have been checkmated politically by Nixonland, the "Silent Majority," but at the end of the day in the United States you still had an enormous counter culture, a massified bohemia that had its own newspapers, grocery stores, film and music -- and those tastes were coming to dominate the mainstream majority.

Roy Thomas, like so much that he did for Marvel in the early '70s, was just being a shrewd businessman when he stuck a Greenwich Village beatnik (Doctor Strange), with a Gamma-powered Frankstein monster (Hulk), a cosmically-juiced master of the spaceways (Silver Surfer) and last but not least, Marvel's founding anti-hero, the underwater Tecumseh, Namor the Sub-Mariner. This was a group that could speak to the Hippies.

Below you'll find five scans from Fraction's The Defenders #10. The cover, by Joe Quinones, is a wonderful homage to the early Bronze Age. The four stunning interior pages are by Jamie McKelvie with Mike Norton; Jordie Bellaire provides the color. The final page pictures Red She-Hulk wiping out a crow.

Ultimate Comics: The Ultimates #8

Hopefully the six beautiful pages you see below will prove not to be "ripped from the headlines."

Scanned from Ultimate Comics: The Ultimates #8, written by Jonathan Hickman with pencils by Esad Ribic and colors by Dean White, they show an Obama-like president going before Congress to inform the world of a massive nuclear strike against Reed Richards' Children of Tomorrow who reside in a enormous sentient sphere known as The City which has gobbled up a sizable swath of Europe.

The United States Government is not an innocent actor for the greater good in this story. They have extorted Hulk into attacking The City by holding Betty Ross in confinement and threatening her life. Reed Richards enlightens Bruce Banner.

Hulk is obviously a stand-in for the American public. I admire Hickman's prescience and Ribic's art, which reminds me of the Norwegian painter Odd Nerdrum.