Sanderson on Comics

Peter David’s Hulks, Part 2

A major element of the Marvel Revolution by Stan Lee and his collaborators in the 1960s was the addition of more realism to the fantasy of superhero stories. Part of that was allowing characters to die. For example, in the first decade of “The Amazing Spider-Man,” Ben Parker, Bennett Brant, Frederick Foswell, Captain George Stacy, and famously Gwen Stacy all died. Their deaths were meant to be real and the deaths had repercussions. They were tragedies that haunted Spider-Man’s life.

But in recent decades in comics at both DC and Marvel, death has become meaningless. Perhaps the highly successful “Death of Superman” saga is partly responsible for all the imitations that followed. But now it is hard to think of a major superhero at either company who hasn’t died and been resurrected at least once. Death in superhero comics is almost always reversible. It’s just a temporary time out. And as a result superhero comics have become less mature. They do not take mortality seriously. They have undone part of Stan Lee’s revolution.

So it is a wonder when a superhero comics story in the 21st century depicts death as real and permanent. That is what the late Peter David did in his story, “Hulk: The End.” It originated as a prose short story by Peter, which he adapted into a comics story, drawn by his longtime “Incredible Hulk” collaborator Dale Keown, and which first came out in 2002.

The fact that Peter David himself passed away this year after years of battling health problems, makes “Hulk: The End” even more resonant today as a contemplation of mortality.

In Peter David’s “Maestro” stories, which I discussed last week, most of humanity was wiped out through nuclear warfare. In “The End” all of humanity was obliterated by nuclear war with the sole exception of Bruce Banner / The Hulk, presumably through his considerable immunity to atomic radiation. And as in “Hulk: Future Imperfect” all of the superheroes are dead as well, having been unable to prevent the human race from destroying itself.

The story opens with the horrifying sight of Bruce Banner as he exists in this post apocalyptic world. It is a nightmarish vision of the ravages of old age: Banner is now over two hundred years old and looks it. For those of us who reach our senior years and begin to experience the breakdown of our bodies, Bruce Banner in “The End” embodies the physical deterioration of extreme old age, a nightmarish situation that can only be escaped through death. But the Hulk won’t let him die.

In “The End” Banner still regularly transforms into the Hulk, who seems to be immune to old age, apart from his hair turning white, and seems as powerful as ever, and even more indestructible. In his long run writing “The Incredible Hulk,” Peter David avoided doing the traditional version of the Hulk, the brutish monster with a low intellect, easily enraged, who insisted he only wanted to be let alone. In “The End” Peter used the more traditional version, but with a difference. In the 1960s and 1970s, the Hulk was often depicted as rather childlike, appealingly so: a kind of innocent who only sought peace and perhaps friendship, and who only erupted into tantrums of rage when provoked. The Hulk in “The End” is clearly monstrous in personality, continually seething with anger. He wants to be alone due to his intense hatred of other people, and his paranoid insistence that everyone else is a potential enemy. The traditional Hulk has always been egocentric and narcissistic, boasting that “Hulk is strongest one of all!” or complaining that his adversaries “hurt Hulk!” Like a small child, his own feelings are of paramount importance, but he has become an embittered, angry, misanthropic adult. Banner notes, “He cared about two things, and two things only: Being the strongest one there is. And being left alone.”

Stan Lee and Jack Kirby based the Hulk in part on Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and the Hulk of “The End” is pure Hyde, the dark side of humanity in grotesque form. They also based the Hulk on Boris Karloff’s portrayal of Frankenstein’s Monster. But whereas Karloff made the Monster a sympathetic figure, as various writers did with the Hulk in the 1960s and 1970s, there is nothing appealing about the Hulk of “The End.” “He never feels cold…or love…or anything except anger.” Incapable of love, this Hulk instead feels hatred.

This Hulk is utterly devoid of empathy. He “derived a sort of satisfaction” from the annihilation of the human race “as if somehow seeing mankind destroying itself was some sort of validation of the opinion he’d held for so long.” In other words it’s as if this post apocalyptic world, devoid of any humans, is this Hulk’s wish come true.

But he is not alone and this world is not a grim paradise for him. Everyone is familiar with the notion that cockroaches would survive even nuclear devastation of the planet. In this story that is true, and moreover the cockroaches have evolved to gigantic size and apparently gained the super-strength necessary to pierce the Hulk’s superhuman hide. Every day a swarm of giant flying cockroaches attack the Hulk, overwhelm him and succeed in devouring most of his body. The artwork in the story depicts the result, which I find too visually horrifying to picture here in this essay. And then each night the Hulk’s body heals itself, fully restoring him. The Hulk didn’t have this sort of superhuman fast healing ability in previous decades. That self-healing super-power was given to Wolverine, and Peter David adopted it for the Hulk and took it to an extreme, so that he could recover overnight even from having his body half eaten.

But the Hulk returns to normal, only to begin the cycle over again, reverting to the elderly Banner, turning back into the Hulk and being attacked and devoured once more. He is like Sisyphus, endlessly repeating this cycle of torment. This post apocalyptic world is not the Hulk’s heaven but his hell.

There’s an even more apt comparison between this Hulk and classical mythology, and Peter David was well aware of it. Banner likens his and the Hulk’s fate to that of Prometheus, the Titan in Greek mythology. Prometheus gave the gift of fire to the human race, and that made possible humanity’s use of tools, both for creation and destruction. Zeus, monarch of the gods, was furious at Prometheus for thus empowering humankind. As punishment, he had Prometheus chained to a mountain peak, where every day a gigantic vulture devoured his flesh. But Prometheus was immortal, so he did not die, and every night his body healed itself so that the vulture could feast again the next day. Peter David’s story does not mention that Prometheus was eventually rescued and freed by Zeus’s son Hercules. But there is no one to liberate the Hulk from his own cycle of endless torture.

It occurs to me that the Hulk’s fate is a horrific version of the standard death and resurrection trope from religion and from the superhero genre. In a typical superhero story the hero will figuratively and sometimes literally die only to return to life, providing a positive, triumphant and hopeful end for the story. In “The End” the Hulk is brought to the brink of death every night and recovers only to be nearly killed again, never to break out of this endless cycle of torment.

Prometheus’s gift to humanity produced good as well as bad. However, in “The End” Banner regards his own “gift” to humanity, a new form of nuclear bomb, as entirely negative. “The Hulk is heir to Prometheus, the living symbol of nuclear fire.” In his post apocalyptic future, he is responsible for the extinction of humanity through nuclear devastation. And so he “has to continue to be punished, because there are some crimes that are simply so awful, so beyond forgiveness, that punishment must continue to be exacted.” And so the Hulk is condemned to endless “Hell on Earth.”

The difference between Banner and the Hulk in “The End” is that Banner is a human being who recognizes his guilt and is sorry, whereas the Hulk is an unrepentant monster. Could Banner be forgiven? Could he achieve peace? According to Banner himself in this tale, his crime in giving humanity the means of its destruction is unforgivable. Yet, though trapped in hell on Earth, he longs for a heaven beyond Earth.

Longing for companionship and love, Banner hallucinates seeing a beautiful nude woman who welcomes him. Banner imagines himself growing young again and making love to the woman, only to be awaken from his fantasy by sharp pains in his chest and again faces the horror of his reality. I find this sequence affecting, in its evocation of the depths of loneliness and the need for bonding with other people, and in how it again captures the anguish of one’s physical deterioration with old age, longing for sexual fulfillment that is now beyond one’s physical capacity.

Banner longs for release from his purgatorial existence. The sharp pain in his chest seems to signal that he is at last on the brink of death. “The End” has depicted a post apocalyptic world that it likens to hell. Now the story gives Banner a vision of heaven. Is it real? Banner believes it is. He sees a vision of his wife Betty, his best friend Rick Jones, and other friends and lovers from his past. Banner wants to die and join them in this hereafter, to finally find love and peace and happiness.

But the Hulk will not let him. Obsessed with his hatred for every other person, the Hulk will not let Banner take him into this heavenly community. And so “The End” concludes with the Hulk seemingly shutting Banner down permanently. The Hulk will sapparently no longer revert to his human self: his Banner side is truly dead. Only the Hulk is left, in a seeming eternity of loneliness.

“Hulk: The End” is as dark in its vision as Peter David’s comics get, and perhaps as dark as the superhero genre can become. Yet when I think of the majority of Peter David’s comics work, I first think of his humor, his irreverence, and his flair for comedy.

So let us turn to another of Peter David’s Hulks, in one of his final works in the comics medium, the “Joe Fixit” miniseries in 2023, only two years ago, drawn by Cully Hammer. In it Peter returned to his 1980s version of the Hulk with grey skin, intelligence (though no genius like his “Professor Hulk” persona), who worked as an enforcer for an organized crime boss in Las Vegas, and wore a hat and suit that made him look like a gangster in a movie from the 1950s.

I have observed that nowadays when Marvel has a comics writer from my generation (like Chris Claremont and Louise Simonson, or earlier, like Roy Thomas) to do new stories with a character with whom he or she is associated, the stories are usually set in the past, back when he or she was regularly writing the character. That way the veteran writer doesn’t have to deal with the characters’ current continuity, which may have evolved far away from the previous writers’ concepts. Also, presumably Marvel is aiming these stories at a “retro” audience of older readers such as myself who are nostalgic for the old stories and want to see more like them.

So Peter David’s “Maestro” series were prequels to his “Hulk: Future Imperfect.” And the 2023 “Joe Fixit” series was Peter’s return to a period in his work on the Hulk that is now regarded as both classic and an object of affectionate nostalgia.

The “Joe Fixit” series also gave Peter the opportunity to do a story that somehow never happened in the 1980s although in retrospect it seems like such a good idea. What if the “Joe Fixit” Hulk and his boss, Michael Berengetti, crossed paths with Marvel’s most prominent organized crime boss, Wilson Fisk, the Kingpin of Crime? And for that matter, what if the other Marvel character with whom Peter David is most associated, Spider-Man, turned up as well?

There is a comedic aspect to the Hulk looking and acting like an archetypal movie gangster. And of course Spider-Man, despite the many tragedies in his life, is quite a comedian, fighting his adversaries not just with his fists but with his witticisms deflating their pomposity. So the “Joe Fixit” series, though it is a serious action-adventure story, is essentially lighthearted. Too many superhero genre writers in comics and other media subvert their stories with humor, turning them camp. Peter David always had the knack of using humor to leaven his comics stories, to make them more entertaining without undercutting the drama and suspense. Of course that’s what Stan Lee did as well! I should also point out that for a Las Vegas crime boss, Mr. Berengetti seems rather benign in “Joe Fixit” compared to the far more sinister Kingpin.

So even in a fight scene like the one I show here, with the Hulk overpowering the Kingpin, there is room for humor, with a gag that is surprisingly yet fits. By the way, when Stan Lee and John Romita, Sr. introduced the Kingpin in “The Amazing Spider-Man” in the 1960s, the Kingpin was somehow strong enough to be a threat to the superhumanly strong Spider-Man in hand to hand combat. This never made sense to me. It made more sense when Frank Miller adopted the Kingpin as Daredevil’s prime adversary in the 1980s: it was more believable that the Kingpin, whom Miller likened to a sumo wrestler, was stronger than Daredevil, who had no super-strength. Anyway, in “Joe Fixit” Peter David uses the Lee/Romita Kingpin who can indeed have a tussle with the Hulk (as we keep in mind that the grey Hulk is far less strong than the green version).

The “Joe Fixit” series is essentially a comedy, in which the Kingpin and an assortment of super-villains get their just deserts, and so the series very much has a happy ending. The final page shows the “Joe Fixit” Hulk and Spider-Man happily walking out together, as if this was the end of a “buddy movie” comedy. It’s such a joyful note with which to end Peter David’s long career as one of the leading writers of our generation in comics, and a reminder of all the entertainment that he gave to us.