MONSTER / MONSTERS

In 1985, my family went to Canada for a family holiday. The first trip abroad we’d had. One of the highlights of the trip for me was access to comics I couldn’t usually get. American Marvel, DC, and other comics. I discovered Archie Comics on this trip.

Marvel Super Heroes Secret Wars had just begun to be published by Marvel UK, and I was eagerly reading that series. One of the comics I got in Canada was Secret Wars II #3 – a jump into the future which blew my mind. 

Another Secret Wars related comic I got was Incredible Hulk #312. The Secret Wars II tie-in element was a few pages tacked on at the end of what was actually a very powerful story. A retelling of Bruce Banner’s life with the conceit that the Hulk was part of his character from the moment he was born. 

The story by Bill Mantlo and Mike Mignola showed that Bruce’s father was possibly irradiated over the years as he worked with dangerous materials. Bruce had suffered mental and physical abuse throughout his childhood, and so when the gamma bomb from The Incredible Hulk #1 went off, it released the Hulk creature which had always been inside him.

It was heady stuff for The Hulk comic, I read it a thousand times and it became a real favourite.

Many years later in 2003, around the time of the Ang Lee Hulk movie, I read an interview with Barry Windsor-Smith in Comic Book Artist #1, where he said the idea of that story had been his. He’d pitched it to Jim Shooter, but for various reasons depending on who you speak to, they’d gone ahead with a Mantlo/Mignola version. Windsor-Smith let the readers know he’d continued working on the comic in the eighteen years since, and completed pages from it were shown in the magazine.

It was shocking to see that one of my favourite Hulk comics had this background, but exciting to think a more expanded, purer version of the story was on the way. 

I used to write letters in to Comics International magazine, and in #163, I sent in the following to them:

Fast forward another eighteen years. As a regular guest of Tony Esmond’s Never Iron Anything podcast, I am called upon to choose different comics to discuss in depth with him. I decided Hulk #312 would be a good choice, as I had seen that Fantagraphics were going to publish the apparently completed “Monsters”. This would be a timely conversation! Have listen here.

Today, my copy of Monsters arrived and I am keen to read it. In fact, I am a bit trepidatious to read it. What if it’s crap? We’ll see…

NEVER IRON ANYTHING: The Incredible Hulk #312

I discussed the influential issue 312 of The Incredible Hulk by Bill Mantlo and Mike Mignola with Tony Esmond on his podcast.

Have a listen here.

THOUGHT BUBBLE 2016

I travelled to the Thought Bubble convention in Leeds at the weekend where Treehouse issue 10 was launched.

Cover by Kathryn Briggs

This latest issue features Kathryn Briggs, Andy Herd, David Peter Kerr, Balazs Lorinczi, Stuart McAdam, Neil Scott and me!

It's available to buy online now, along with my new edition of the collected Berserkotron. Have a look here.

The con was great fun. I always enjoy hanging out with the Treehouse crew and it's nice to see in person comics creators from across the UK that I admire and/or usually only converse with online.

This year it was good to see many folks from the Dundee Comics MLitt course in attendance too, as exhibitors, volunteers and punters!

I managed to completely miss people I would have liked to have seen, but it's so busy that always seems to happen.

A couple of haul photos!

I bought these comics from creators tabling at the con:

Also dug around in the back issue bins for this lot:

I was geeking out a bit about Mike Mignola being in attendance and got him to sign a few comics I brought along…

On Saturday afternoon I took a little detour and walked into Leeds city centre. I'd taken part in the Thought Bubble competition this year and they had the entries on display digitally in the library's art gallery. 

Another enjoyable Thought Bubble Comic Festival!

THOSE PEOPLE ARE NOT GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY

After having given their biggest characters to Fox and Sony in order to avoid going out of business altogether, Marvel Comics made enough money from their share of the success of Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man and Bryan Singer’s X-Men films to firstly stay alive and then later start up their own movie studio. Against the odds, they somehow had a huge mainstream hit with the character Iron Man, and struck gold with the Avengers movie. Now though, Marvel have pretty much ran out of already popular and famous characters. They are aware of this, and quite cleverly, if cynically, factored it in to the first trailer for the upcoming Guardians of the Galaxy...

“Who are you?” 

“Star Lord” 

“Who?”

Then a roll call of the characters as Peter Serafinowicz is told who they are.

I remember Rocket Raccoon from The Hulk’s 20^th anniversary issue, so that’s 1982. He was a bit of a joke character really, with his name a play on the Beatles song. Hulk even complained about him on the cover...

A bit later, there was a lovely looking 4 issue series drawn by Mike Mignola, prior to Hellboy...

Gamora was a terrific character from Jim Starlin’s Warlock series in the mid 70s...

Groot was another one who guest starred in Hulk; in the 1976 Annual drawn by Sal Buscema, to be exact. Groot was originally drawn by Jack Kirby in the old Marvel monster comics. This story had a bunch of old weirdos reappear so the Hulk could smash them to bits one after another. Quite literally in Groot’s case…

Starlord was a good comic by Chris Claremont and John Byrne in the late 70s. Some visceral violent action, shades of Star Wars – “a sith lord” even turns up...

A bit later I bought black and white Star Lord comics aimed at a slighly older audience, with Carmine Infantino drawing a sexy lady called Caryth. Here is her emotional (and topless) death scene...

Star Lord’s costume is completely different in the trailer, I observe.

And wait, why is Star Lord in this film ? Why are any of these people in this movie?
Because I read Guardians of the Galaxy too, and none of these jokers were in there.

The Guardians of the Galaxy were first featured in Marvel Premiere 18 in 1969. I was lucky enough to pick it up in the late 80s for 10p in a second hand bookshop.

It had intriguing concepts . The characters were from different planets in the solar system and so their bodies had grown differently due to their native atmospheric conditions. As well as being a good sci-fi idea, this also gave scope for the characters being distrustful of other “races”.
Then there was poor old (very old) Vance Astro, who had set off on a thousand year space mission in hibernation to the nearest star system, only to find humanity had developed faster than light travel and arrived there hundreds of years before him. They still gave him a hero’s welcome, but he was tortured by the events. And the Badoon were scary villains (I thought the Judoon from Doctor Who owed something to them).

Beautifully drawn by Gene Colan, as you can see above.

I recall the Guardians reappearing to guest in Avengers comics with a few more characters added. 

At some point Marvel must have completely rebooted the Guardians of the Galaxy comic, ditching the original characters, and the movie is based on that.

I feel like I turned up for a Temptations concert and nobody’s left in the band.

TAKE FIVE (HAPPY ANNIVERSARY HULK part 6)

Here are five more Hulk artists I think are just groovy.

First up is Ron Wilson, who did very little Hulk as far as I know, but I love what he did in the late 70s...

Black and white, as it appeared in the British magazine I read it in, but 7 year old me has helped by colouring the Hulk figure using watercolours in panel 2 and a felt tip pen in the last one.

Okay, now let’s have Hellboy creator Mike Mignola’s work from the mid 80s. Mignola took over the comic when Sal Buscema left. He stayed around long enough to draw “Monster”, one of the all-time great Hulk stories. Here's the splash page...

John Romita Jr. took after his dad and became a Marvel artist, beginning in the 70s. He’s done good runs on X-Men and Spider-Man. By 2001 he was on the Hulk, and again he did good solid work...

In 2003 Bruce Jones was writing the comic. He wrote it as a mystery, with Banner on the run, rarely showing the Hulk, etc. Around the time of Ang Lee’s movie a slight change of pace ran in the comic – a story drawn by Leandro Fernandez. I like his style...

Last up is James Kochalka. He is one the best writer/artists out there today. Check him out here. His version of the Hulk touches on everything that is scary, magnificent, stupid and sad about the big green one...