I've been re-reading a fair number of 1970s HULK comics lately, mostly written by Roy Thomas or Steve Englehart. There aren't any great breakthroughs except for (as I critiqued a long time back) the debut of Marvel's "Valkyrie" as a character independent of her creatrix The Enchantress. But I did find myself more attentive now than I was then to weird minutiae-- like the attempts of writers to associate their kids' comics with adult literature.
In fact, the title of that 1971 Hulk-Valkyrie yarn, "They Shoot Hulks, Don't They?" is a good example of such pretentiousness. The story has nothing to do with either the 1935 Horace McCoy novel or the 1969 Sydney Pollak film, though author Roy Thomas certainly counted on readers to be somewhat aware of the Pollak movie of two years previous. Rather, "Hulks" is a play on a topic raised in a 1970 Tom Wolfe story, "Radical Chic," in which wealthy white people dabbled in "radical" causes in order to seem fashionable. The HULK tale involves similar superficial Richie Riches taking up the "cause" of the Green Goliath, which turns violent when the Enchantress projects the power of The Valkyrie into a young and somewhat obnoxious feminist. I don't know if in 1971 I learned about the Wolfe story in Marvel's own letters-page, but it seems likely. But the references both to Pollak and to Wolfe were all in good fun; I doubt anyone thought them overly pretentious-- unlike the following reference from the very next issue, HULK #143.
Back in 1971 I don't remember thinking anything of Thomas's VERY pretentious reference to William Faulkner for a very logical reason: I hadn't read the novel SANCTUARY then and did not do so until at least the 1990s. But now that I reread this throwaway "apology to Faulkner," my main thought was-- "Really, Roy? Did you want to impress readers who also had not read SANCTUARY all that badly?" Without driving the topic into the ground, there are no similarities between the two "Sanctuaries."
It would have been far more appropriate to write, "With apologies to Victor Hugo." To the extent 20th-century readers ever thought about the Christian custom of persons seeking "sanctuary" in Catholic churches, most if not all probably would have recalled the expression of said custom in various movie adaptations of Victor Hugo's NOTRE DAME DE PARIS. Not that there's a huge likeness between that novel and the story in HULK #143. Bruce Banner, on the run from the military, accepts the "sanctuary" of diplomatic immunity extended to him by the ever affable Victor Von Doom. The "sanctuary" plays a very tiny role in the two-part story, which is mostly another story in which a noxious supervillain seeks to co-opt the Jade Giant's power; no better or worse than a hundred like it.
But still, Roy-- if you were going to make a pretentious literary quote, quote the right author!
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