Sometimes I wonder why I like the Hulk.

Not the in a negative way. It’s not like I question my feelings for the character like some people question their feelings about someone in their life who is problematic. It’s not like Hulk and I have a toxic relationship, but I just can’t quit him.

(It occurs to me that I just made a Brokeback Mountain reference related to the Hulk. I didn’t mean to. It just happened. Now I have to acknowledge the comedic irony of using a line from an Ang Lee film to describe a character that Ang Lee made a film about. Weird. Again, it was unintentional.)

What I mean by questioning my love for the character (he’s tied for number two with Batman) is that I don’t have a good, one or two sentence reason why. I can’t boil it down to a single answer. When asked the same question some people will mention that he’s an anti-establishment figure. Some people like the whole Jekyll & Hyde/duality aspect to the character. Some people just like to see the destruction Hulk can unleash on the world. Some people like that he is a hero. Some people like that he is a monster.

Then there’s the, “We all have a Hulk inside us,” answer. Which is fair. We all have a dark side. Our struggles with it differ, but, like the title card of The Incredible Hulk pilot read, “Within each of us, ofttimes, there dwells a mighty and raging fury.”

I guess my issue is that, like I wrote at the top of this, I can’t boil why I like…scratch that…love the Hulk into a single sentence or even a paragraph. It’s a lot of things. All at once.

Part of that love comes from the live action series that ran from 1977 to 1982. While I am almost certain that I watched re-runs of the Grantray-Lawrence cartoons when I was really young (I knew the theme song by heart at a very early age) Bill Bixby and Lou Ferrigno were my first real exposure to the character. I have very dim memories of watching the show on Friday nights when it was in first run and more vivid memories as I got older of watching the show in syndication. One of my earliest memories is watching some infotainment show (possibly PM Magazine) and they had a segment about the Hulk show and there was a shot of the Hulk rolling a car down a hill. I remember seeing that, turning around, looking at my mom…

…and bursting into tears because I was scared.

I was a sensitive lad.

How sensitive?

Fun fact/confession…I was ten years old before I could actually watch a Hulk out. Whenever Bill Bixby’s eyes went white, I would close my eyes and wait for the music sting that let you know that Lou Ferrigno was in full Hulk mode before I opened them again.

Is that embarrassing to admit? A bit. But it happened and now I can laugh about it. Because it was kind of silly.

Another part of my love of the Hulk comes from the 1982 animated series. It was appointment television for seven-year-old me. Oddly enough I didn’t have a problem with watching the transformations on that show. Maybe it was because it was a cartoon and therefore not “real”, but I could sit through an entire episode without ducking for cover.

I was a weird kid.

I also didn’t have a problem with the fact that Bruce Banner’s clothes would return with nary a rip or a tear when he was done being the Hulk. Nor did I have a problem that he was Bruce Banner instead of David Banner. I just rolled with it.

Another part of that love comes from the comics, though I have to admit that I was later to the party on this one. In retrospect, this is kind of weird. You would think that when I finally took the plunge into comics that I would run to the characters that made me love super heroes, but that didn’t happen.

To be fair, during the primordial days, before comics became a going concern, I had three issues of Incredible Hulk that I loved. One, issue 293, I literally read until it fell apart. Issue 315 was another impulse buy that I eventually had to staple back together. Issue 324 was one of the books I got right before my family moved from Mountain Top, PA to Wescosville, PA which was just outside Allentown. Then there was Marvel Saga #2, which I got specifically because it promised to tell me the origin of the Hulk.

(That was also when I learned to pronounce the word “origin”. I grabbed the book off of the spinner rack at Triangle Pharmacy and asked my dad if he would get it for me because it had the origin of the Hulk, but I pronounced the g like it sounds in the word “go”. Dad corrected me and said the g was different, like in the word “gin”.)

Marvel Saga #2 did live up to its hype. I found out the comic book origin of the Hulk and discovered it was closer to the cartoon than the live action series. Somehow my nine-year-old brain was able to process this information and compartmentalize it. “That’s the comics and that’s the TV show. Okay. Got it.” Why I got so hung up on shows and movies being comic book accurate in my twenties and even into my thirites is beyond me at this point.

Once comics became a regular thing the Hulk was just not on my radar, which, again, is kind of weird. To be fair, I don’t remember seeing Incredible Hulk on any of the spinner racks at the various places I bought comics in the early days. I’m not saying that if those racks did have issues of Incredible Hulk, I would have been a Hulk person from the jump, but in those early days when everything was on the table, so I would have at least checked it out.

Despite getting the odd issue of Incredible Hulk here and there and getting a small run from the early 200’s from my brother-in-law shortly after he married my sister, it wasn’t until late 1996 that I started buying the comics, both new issues and back issues as well. The reason was Peter David. A year earlier I had picked up his prose Hulk novel What Savage Beast and absolutely loved it. Then, in the summer of 1996 my friend Ryan lent me his copy of a collection of David’s But I Digress columns and that sealed the deal.

Over the course of 1997 I put together David’s entire run of Incredible Hulk. It was my first big collecting project and had me haunting every comic shop I could find to get the issues I needed. I bought most of them at my “home” shop at the time, Titan Games and Comics. The issues they didn’t have were found at some of the other comic shops in the area. I was mostly successful in my quest with one exception.

Incredible Hulk #440.

For whatever reason, that issue eluded me. None of the shops I went to had it. Not even Oxford Comics in Atlanta, and they kept months, if not years, of issues on their new comics racks. It was very frustrating. If I was doing the same thing today this would be easy. Go to one of the many online stores or eBay and snap it up. This happened during the analog phase of my collecting career. The frustrating part (back when this sort of thing was the most frustrating thing I had to deal with) was I was holding off reading Peter David’s run until I had all of them.

Finally, I lost patience and started going through David’s issues. I figured that issue 440 was pretty deep in the run and I would find it before I got there. At the time I worked third shift at a convenience store and got really good at getting all of my side work done quickly so that I could focus on the important things like talking to my friends who came to hang out and reading comics. The store I worked at was not all that busy at night, so I got a lot of reading done.

Going through Peter David’s Hulk run was amazing. It was a roller coaster that never let you get too settled before he would change the status quo. There were parts I liked less than other parts but going from the early days when the Hulk was grey and Bruce changed at night to the Joe Fixit era to the merged Hulk era, which involved the Pantheon, to the fall of the Pantheon was so much fun. I was emotionally invested in Bruce and Betty and Rick and Marlo and the other characters.

Issue 440 was getting closer and closer and it still proved elusive. Chuck, the manager at Titan, did his best to find it at the other stores in the chain, but it was nowhere to be found. The frustrating part is I remember seeing the book when it was new, but I wasn’t buying it at the time, so I didn’t get it. I was faced with a choice; either skip the issue and keep reading, and risk not owning and reading the whole run, or stop reading until I found it and risk losing that momentum that a read through creates.

Then, in early 1998, I went to a one-day comic show in Atlanta. I spent a couple of hours going from one dealer to another and generally having a good time when it happened. I crouched down at one booth, started going through the back issues and there it was.

Incredible Hulk #440.

I was two or three issues away from needing it.

And there it was.

If it was a movie this is the moment when Handel’s Messiah would start playing. Or, if the budget allowed the track It Is Accomplished from Peter Gabirel’s score to Martin Scorsese’s adaptation of The Last Temptation of Christ. Messiah is pretty obvious. It Is Accomplished is a little more esoteric. And pretentious. Given that I was 21 years old at the time, and a bit pretentious, I would have definitely gone for It Is Accomplished.

Because it…was…accomplished.

In the years that followed I’ve read a lot of Hulk comics, either as they came out or later as back issues. John Byrne’s second run with the Hulk, Paul Jenkins’ run, Bruce Jones’ run, Planet Hulk, World War Hulk, the Red Hulk era by Jeph Loeb, some of Mark Waid’s run of Indestructible Hulk run, and the start of both Al Ewing’s and Phillip Kennedy Johnson’s work with the character.

I have aslo gone back and read most of Bill Mantlo’s run, the first John Byrne run, and the stories that followed when Byrne quit the book. On top of all of that I have, in fits and bursts, spent the few years slowly making my way through the Hulk from the beginning, starting with his original six issue run, into the wilderness years, the Tales to Astonish era and then into his second volume all the way through Roy Thomas’ time writing the book.

Some of the stories I liked. Some I didn’t. Some were fine. Some were amazing. Some were a complete slog.

There’s more I could mention, but this piece is running long as it is. The 2008 film. His role in the 2012 Avengers movie. The Avengers: Earth’s Mightiest Heroes animated series, which has one of the best adaptations of the Hulk ever. The Planet Hulk animated film. Hulk and the Agents of S.M.A.S.H., which is a lot of fun. The various actions figures and toys I’ve bought over the years, especially the Mego doll, which I need to re-buy at some point. The prose novels. All of them get thrown into the mix and I end up with four conclusions.

1. As good as some of the other runs have been Peter David’s first run will always be my favorite.

2. The Bill Bixby/Lou Ferrigno show has aged really well. Mostly.

C. The 2008 film is criminally underrated.

4. I really love the Hulk.

All of what I just wrote is why I can’t boil why I love the Hulk to one, simple thing.

Because it’s not just one thing. It’s a lot of things. Some really good. Some not so much, but it’s all part of the tapestry.

Which isn’t neat and tidy, but that’s kind of fitting when it comes to the Hulk.

Though, I will admit that sometimes I just like to see him wreak havoc on the world.

Because, deep down, I can be a simple creature.

More to follow…