The birth of the Hulk, and the distorted origins of Marvel Comics

Rereading The Origins of Marvel Comics has reminded me that nobody did more to destroy Stan Lee’s legacy than Stan Lee.

I’m reading it because on chapter of my Jekyll and Hyde book will be devoted to the Hulk. Many comics characters have a Jekyll and Hyde influence — Two-Face, Eclipso, Mr. Hyde (yes, obviously) but the Hulk stands out by his spectacular success. Two Hulk movies, several cartoons (more than I’d realized before starting this work) and the Bill Bixby/Lou Ferrigno TV show. I’ll be watching all of them but first I wanted to read Lee’s own account of the Hulk’s genesis. So I turned to Origins of Marvel Comics.

The book, with the cool John Romita Sr. cover, was so damn cool when it came out in 1974. Not only the origins of multiple heroes, plus several stories from later in their various series, but Lee’s account of how he created all of them. And to be clear, he gets all the credit for their genesis. He conceived of the Fantastic Four, the Hulk, Thor (Marvel’s version, anyway), Spidey and Dr. Strange (Namor doesn’t get his origin in this book, just a crossover with the Hulk). He also invented characterization and realistic dialog in a genre devoid of it. The artists — and he does lavish praise on them — then transformed his ideas into visual form, then he dialogued it.

As John Morrow and Tom Brevoort have both chronicled, that isn’t true. Not only did the artists do a lot of the plotting under the “Marvel method” of the 1960s but Steve Ditko and Jack Kirby played a larger role in creating the characters than Lee gives them credit for here. As noted at the second link, it’s possible Lee did come up with the idea for a character named Spider-Man but it’s also possible Kirby did. Either way, there’s solid evidence Kirby developed the character and drew a few pages only for Ditko to spot that Kirby modeled him on an earlier non-Marvel creation. At which point either Ditko or Lee or both fleshed out the Peter Parker we know.

In the case of the Hulk, Lee claims in origins he was inspired by multiple sources: the Thing’s popularity in Fantastic Four, the tragic figure of the Frankenstein creature, and decided to throw in Jekyll and Hyde as well. I don’t buy the Frankenstein angle — Hulk’s a nasty brute here and not at all sympathetic — and my friend Ross and I agree Hulk’s origin looks closer to a knockoff of Amazing Colossal Man. In that Bert I.Gordon film a soldier drags a man away from a nuclear test site, gets caught in the blast and transformed into a monster.

Jack Kirby, however, claims he came up with the Hulk, a spinoff from one of his other monster stories. Kirby (who provides that first coer) isn’t necessarily accurate either, as he claims he came up with the FF, Spidey and the Hulk back in 1959, two years before the FF appeared (so why the delay?). Though it’s just as likely as Lee coming up with it.

Of course it’s quite possible parts of all these stories are true. Kirby could have come up with the core character, then Lee introduced the Jekyll/Hyde aspect. Same thing if Amazing Colossal Man was the inspiration — and no question, giving the Hulk a part time human identity made him a much more successful series character. Well, sort of. Sales were anemic, for whatever reason (possibly because they kept changing the rules to make the character work) and the book was almost canceled after three issues (it made six). A couple of years later, they tried again with Steve Ditko as artist and co-plotter, and this time it worked. See the link for my thoughts on why.

Lee didn’t always deny his artists’ contributions — the Morrow shows that as Marvel took off in the Silver Age, Lee frequently did give them credit, but he was somewhat more likely to deny they’d done anything but draw. This inevitably led to some buffs claiming Lee contributed nothing but I don’t agree; comparing his work with Ditko on Spider-Man (including the classic cover here) or with Kirby on FF and Thor to their later work without Lee — don’t get me wrong, they did good work post-Silver Age, but Lee definitely brought something to the table. And managed to do good work with other artists such as Marie Severin, Romita Sr. and Jim Mooney too.

By 1974, however, Lee was Marvel’s top dog and Ditko and Kirby were long gone from the Bullpen (though they’d return to do more work eventually). If he wanted to paint himself as an auteur, there was no-one to call him on it. So no, I can’t be certain Lee conceived Hulk or that he conceived him as a Jekyll/Hyde riff. But as I can’t rule it out, the Hulk goes in the book.