TO BE HULK-KORRECTED

 Useless boomer-kid recollection #337: back in the Silver Age of Comics, a few HULK comics, upon ending on a cliffhanger, would end with the goofy phrase, "To Be Hulk-inued." Hence, my title.

So on the CRIVENS blog, I was talking with Kid on a response-thread about the evolution of the HULK comic in the sixties. I wished I could have found a certain old article by Will Murray, in which he discussed the Hulk's sixties career in detail. But not only did I not remember where it appeared, I was briefly on a listserve with Murray, and when I asked him where he'd done the piece, even HE did not recall. So I did my own quickie history of the period of the Hulk's career in between the cancellation of his own title and his getting a berth in TALES TO ASTONISH.

So HULK 6 is dated March 63. It's roughly 7 months later that Stan and Jack have Hulk join the Avengers. Two months after that, they do a callback to FF#3, where the Torch splits from his group--- but the guys keep things unpredictable. Not does the Hulk not rejoin the super-group, he becomes an ally of a Public Enemy, the Sub-Mariner, in AVENGERS 3. (That by itself might've got the pardon revoked.) But after #3, Hulk-- still more or less "Tough-Guy Hulk"-- doesn't do much of anything. The Avengers supposedly keep looking for him but somehow don't manage to cross paths with Greenie until FF #25-26, starting in April 64. Was Stan thinking about launching the TTA series even back then, which began in Oct 64? In the FF stories, I might argue that Hulk is more obsessive than he is in the "Tough Guy" stories, getting into a massive snit because his kid-partner has supposedly started hanging out with the WWII living legend. SPIDEY 14 follows two months later, which also might be advance publicity for the TTA series. One issue before the Hulk officially gets his own berth, he also fights Giant-Man in Sept 64, suggesting to me that Stan may've thought that even though Greenjeans had been cancelled before, he still couldn't do worse than Gi/Ant-Man. And from here, it looks like Stan's policy of farming the Hulk out in various features built up reader curiosity about him, improving TTA's sales enough to jettison Henry Pym-- who certainly went on to a better class of stories once he rejoined the Avengers than he'd ever had in his own title.

17 December 2025 at 16:51

All the dates are correct, but I'm not sure I was correct about the Hulk-promotion being Stan Lee's idea. ALTER EGO #60 (2020) contains an overview of the career of Timely/Atlas/Marvel publisher Martin Goodman, and in the course of said overview, author Will Murray (him again) paraphrases an unsourced Ditko quote:    

Circa 1964, Steve Ditko recalled Lee telling him that Goodman directed him to revive three underutilized characters, the Hulk, Sub-Mariner, and the old pulp hero Ka-Zar. Lee gave Ditko his choice of which to work on...    

Now, I absolutely believe that Ditko quoted what he recalled Lee saying. That doesn't necessarily mean that Lee was accurately reporting what Goodman had told him, though there would seem to be no obvious reason to prevaricate on the subject of his boss's commands. So Goodman probably said something along those lines.

At the same time, the overview gives evidence that Goodman only intermittently interacted with editor Lee about the operation of Goodman's comics-line, so the statement seems a little anomalous. All we know, as crusty old fans, is that Goodman's bottom line was always whether or not he could make a comic temporarily popular, preferably by following a trend or imitating a show from a more mainstream medium.

So I'll break down the three characters Lee mentioned to Ditko.

What would have prompted Goodman to stump for more Sub-Mariner exposure? By early 1964 Namor had become a regular featured player in FANTASTIC FOUR for about two years and had appeared in various other Marvel comics. Still, I don't get any sense of a huge fannish demand for a new SUB-MARINER comic, and not until 1965 does Namor displace Giant-Man in TTA. It does make one wonder if Stan would have put Namor, rather than Hulk, into TTA had Ditko said he wanted to draw the sea prince.

Why Ka-Zar? Unlike Namor, the jungle man hadn't been anything but a backup feature in Golden Age comics, and even his own pulp had only lasted three issues. But maybe in 1964 Goodman looked around at the still popular Tarzan movies, and at the Dell/Gold Key comics for the character, so the publisher just thought Ka-Zar could coattail on his inspiration. That at least might explain why Ka-Zar started showing up as an occasional guest star in DAREDEVIL-- though the first of the DD appearances didn't occur until late 1965.   

The Hulk is a little odd, though, because his only comic had not sold well. One possible motive might be that Hammer Films was still producing Frankenstein films in the early 1960s, and maybe Goodman thought kids would still buy HULK comics because he looked like the Monster. As I said, Stan almost certainly made the decision to stick the cancelled colossus into the AVENGERS in late 1963, and then to have Greenskin depart the super-group in the second issue. But the only result of Hulk's defection is that he teams up with Sub-Mariner in AVENGERS #3 (dated Jan 64), and when that coalition breaks up, the Hulk wanders off and not much happens to him until the FF issues (dated April 64). 

So if the Hulk's appearances in FF and SPIDER-MAN were meant as advance hype for the TTA series, dated for October of that year, that only gives Lee roughly three months to start pouring on the juice for the Hulk, maybe to make sure that Greenie's second shot at stardom would get every chance to succeed-- which it did. Another alternate explanation for Goodman's Hulk-positivity could just be that AVENGERS #3 sold really well and the publisher wanted to jump on that success. I don't think for a moment that Goodman would have cared about the character for any reason but that of sales potential. But Stan could still have made the decision to take things slow and build up the Hulk's profile in Marvel's best sellers, because he appreciated the Hulk's dramatic potential and thought he could do good, profitable stories with the character.   

The only other nugget from the ALTER EGO piece is a mention that when 1950s Goodman found out about an impending WYATT EARP TV show, he had Lee launch an EARP comic that came out a few months before the show hit the airwaves. This sounds a little counter-intuitive, trying to coattail on a show that hasn't appeared yet. But apparently Goodman did the same thing with Atlas' YELLOW CLAW feature, which also appeared on stands a month or two before the airing of the ADVENTURES OF FU MANCHU teleseries.