So just out of curiosity, I bought the HULK handbook currently on the stands. I figured, if I’m back to writing him, even for six issues, I should get current, and I’ve been spotty in keeping up with him over the last few years.
So I read the entry on “Absorbing Man” and, much to my amusement, they actually stated that his bizarrely out-of-continuity appearance in “Hulk” was due to a temporal anomaly. Yes, that’s right, the slightly tongue-in-cheek notion that Captain Marvel’s re-creation of the universe in issue #6 was responsible for waves of discontinuity throughout the Marvel Universe has now been officially embraced by a separate Marvel reference volume.
Ya gotta love it. With fans complaining that Absorbing Man’s appearance in Hulk didn’t match up with his previous appearances, I tossed both Marvel and the fans a safety line, and they grabbed it with relish.
PAD
• 
Well, what do you expect? They were in a pickle!
Oh, that’s delicious!
I always love it when the most minor event in an under-appreciated book becomes a major pinpoint in continuity. Case in point — the time Gorilla Grodd made the Flash’s head big. I read and loved “Gorilla Warfare” (GL #30-31, Flash #69-70). It was a silly little piece wallowing in pre-Crisis fun, featuring Gorilla City, Hector Hammond, Rex the Wonder Dog and the Beareau of Enhanced Animals, co-written by Mark Waid and Gerard Jones, and I must have seen at least six references to it after it happened in various comics that had nothing to do with the story.
So Captain Marvel re-creating the universe has gone from a plotpoint in a fringe title to a company No-Prize explanation? Excellent. Now it’s DC’s turn; they need to do a company-wide crossover based on your “Hugga-Tugga Thuggees” story from YJ.
Now if you can just get the restarting the “waves of chronal energy” to explain why cosmic radiation and radioactive spider bites give super powers and you can make a serious claim that Captain Marvel is the father of the Marvel Universe and that its really named just after him.
Well, it’s certainly good to see a Hulk writer from the past be regarded so highly given the current scheme of things.
Maybe the temporal rift could also explain how a certain other you-know-who is the one behind that huge, overly complicated conspiracy as seen in the most recent issue of the Hulk’s own book?
*sigh*
~Gary
and they grabbed it with relish.
at least they didn’t grab it with chili and cheese…
Travis
I haven’t been keeping up on the Hulk, either. What exactky was the discontinuity with the Absorbing Man that needed to be explained?
Renield
Perhaps that same temporal anomaly can be used to explain why the Marvel higher-ups agreed to that whole “Heroes Reborn” nonsense?
Heh, glad to hear it. I really liked when all that was going on in CM.
> Maybe the temporal rift could also explain how a certain other you-know-who is the one behind that huge, overly complicated conspiracy as seen in the most recent issue of the Hulk’s own book?
Not only him, but the temporal rift can explain the Absorbing Man, the Abomination, Nadia Blonsky, Doc Samson, Betty Banner….. the list goes on and on, my friend.
–Don aka Ygor
Peter, this is your “Hypertime’! Start a big company-wide crossover to exploit this!
By the way, I’ve found “CBG’s Guide to the Hulk” publication useful in getting caught up on stuff I didn’t care to purchase.
I have not read the handbook because I figured there would be some glaring errors in it like the Hulk Encyclopedia. From what I read on the Hulk Message board, there are mistakes such as a reference to Banner asked Doc Strange to create the mindless Hulk. Banner never did this. Plus I figured Marvel would try to come up with an excuse for Bruce Jones violating continuity. This really cracks me up.
JHL
Well PAD:
I have to say that Marvel has never been a big fan of continuity, and I doubt that they ever will.
My suggestion would be to write the best Hulk mini series that you can and let Marvel screw up continuity later.
Regards:
Warren S. Jones III
I’m still getting over the fact that you had to buy a copy the book for the company you are an employee of, (shouldn’t they have comped you a copy???)
While i do find it amusing ,i also find this incredibly LAZY on Marvel’s part.I mean wouldnt it be easier for the editor(s) to just say “Wait a minute this is just bûllšhìŧ storyline ,please try again Chumley.”????
Call me crazy but Betty Banner should stay dead, and Doc Samson doesnt wear an eyepatch.By the way I happened to scan the Doc Samson entry …his strength is directly proportional to the length of his hair????????Give me a stinking break !!!Yes i get the biblical reference but i mean please!!!!That being the case just grow his hair about 12 feet long and be one of the strongest people in the Marvel Universe.
Absorbing out of continuity they try to fix but lame crap like this gets past …..Morons!!!
Sorry meant Absorbing man out of continuity they try to fix.Oh thats OK i must have been that temporal rift afeecting my key board 🙂
Dammit there it goes again:)
Deano wrote: Doc Samson doesnt wear an eyepatch.By the way I happened to scan the Doc Samson entry …his strength is directly proportional to the length of his hair????????
Doc Samson has worn an eyepatch since IH v3 #44, where Home Base stuck a miniaturized camera in his eye, which he noticed pretty much immediately because ol’ Samson has astigmatism that wasn’t cured when the rest of him got gamma-powered.
*sigh* I know, I know…stupid. The only consolation I have is that I did not make that up–it was likely Axel Alonso’s innovation.
And I think the gamma-powered hair thing (i.e. the longer Doc Samson’s hair gets, the stronger Doc Samson gets–sorry, cheap shot, I know) has been part of the character since VERY, very early, methinks–he cut it as an experiment once IIRC and found his strength diminished considerably. (Can anyone remember the precise details? This Marvelite’s memories are fast a’fading.)
~Gary
And Deano, if the hair=strength thing is too much of a Biblical allusion, don’t get me started about Ms. Delia “Delilah” Childress…:-D
~G.
The Doc Samson strength/hair thing has been around since the very early days of the character. It has mostly (completely, one could credibly say) been ignored for decades, thankfully. Certainly PAD never brought it up.
Did Doc first show up during the Steve Englehart HULK issues or the Len Wein ones?
I can’t believe that PAD didn’t get a comp copy of the HULK handbook. Does Marvel not give comp copies to its employees anymore?
Y’know, Peter, all you did was just gave them an out to explain away those ferschluggin’ Spider-Clones…
The biblical allusion doesnt bother me as much as the power for him just seems stupid when you consider all the heartache he had sparring with the Hulk could have been solved with just letting his hair grow.Which probably explains why it was ignored.(thank you for PAD and others for forgetting this power)
Byrne had the Doc break his hand on the Hulksters jaw when simply not going to SUPERCUTS would have given him the strength for the knockout punch ……Geesh:)
I wonder what Bruce Jones thinks of that.
I kinda like the hair thing; I’d use it to revamp Doc, put him in a Reed Richard devised helmet which is actually a portal to some pocket 4th dimention in which his hair can grow wild without disturbing him in battle. I’d MAKE him one of the strongest people in the MU. Hëll, with each additional arc, as his hair grows a bit longer, he’d even get additional powers too. By the time he’d get to arc 20, he’d be so dámņ powerful he’d be able to time travel at will, and go chase Kang all over the timeline and kill him in a non-continuity-disruptive way (you know, time travellers do that all the time). next, he’d mow down all the cosmic entities, get all the cosmic toys and become god. At which point we’d have Infinity Roots, where everyone teams up to take Doc down, and in the end (you gotta please the fans) Wolverine (snikkity snikt) and the punisher (commando knife) infiltrate the helmet dimension and win battle over the now self conscious hair, giving Doc a James Dean haircut and a chance at redemption.
I love it – the most powerful being ever in the MU, and the only thing in all the cosmos he’d have to fear is a pair of scissors!
For the record, Doc Samson’s first appearance was Incredible Hulk #141, written by Roy Thomas, art by Herb Trimpe and John Severin.
Unless I’ve missed something, PAD is not an employee of Marvel and has not been for many years. He’s a freelancer. This difference may not seem important to most folks, but it tends to be important to the self-employed.
Can someone tell me what “retcon” means exactly? I kinda get the jist of it when it’s used in a sentence, but, you know… Is it short for something or did it come from another couple of words or whatever?
It’s short for “retroactive continuity.” It’s when a writer introduces an element to explain/alter something that came before.
Example: In Avengers, Hank Pym hit his wife, the Wasp. This caused conflict within the team, they questioned his heroism, etc. Then, later on, it was “revealed” that he had, in fact, been under mental manipulation. The writer did this, of course, to absolve Pym of the blame. Often writers will retcon for the purposes of changing something they don’t like. (Unless, of course, they just ignore continuity outright, or are ignorant of it.)
-Foxtrot258
Now here’s hoping they use it to explain away She-Hulk having sex with the Juggernaut when the Avengers volume hits.
**Call me crazy but Betty Banner should stay dead, and Doc Samson doesnt wear an eyepatch.By the way I happened to scan the Doc Samson entry …his strength is directly proportional to the length of his hair????????**
That would be just my luck. I would gain super powers but their potency would be tied in to the length of my now-rapidly-disappearing hair….
Now here’s hoping they use it to explain away She-Hulk having sex with the Juggernaut when the Avengers volume hits.
Well, yeah, I suppose that’d be kin-uh-GUH?
Hadn’t heard of that one. Where exactly did that happen?
Yeesh.
TWL
It happened in Austen’s Uncanny, right after a very dreadful arc starring Nightcrawler as the son of Mephisto.
Not even that; a cut-rate “mutant from Biblical times who was mistaken for a demon” named Azazel. But there’s plenty of Chuck Austen threads on the Internet, so let’s not hijack this one.
Heh. Fair enough. Just for the record though, I’m far from being an Austen basher. That PARTICULAR arc was bad.
Since we have a time anomaly to “retcon “the absorbing man can we use the same thing to retcon the Better part of Bruce Jones’run on the Hulk???
Return of the monster i enjoyed but the last arc with massive conspiracy,return of Betty,and the recent revelation of who is behind the conspiracy is just asinine and seems like he just pulled story elements out of his ášš.
SPOILER TO FOLLOW ::
The LEADER IS BEHIND THE CONSPIRACY?!?!?!?!?!?!?!
What the …….this isnt even a surprise ,shocking twist!!!He died in PAD ‘s run
was resurrected lamely by either Jenkins or Jones and killed again.Ugh!! Dont get me wrong he is one of my favorite Hulk villains along with the Abomination but come on!!!
By the way what ever happened to Omnibus who was a Leader wannabe?Its just seems the current group on the Hulk have no clue what to do with the character(s).
In issue 75 they use a DNA scanner to monitor the Hulks brain waves????Huh,what did i miss?Doc Samson is a world class tracker??You dollowing the Hulk how hard is he to find??Look for a path of destruction and just follow the damage(Duh)
Speaking of Abomination the SheHulk /Juggernaut thing was pretty bad.I like Austens’work for the most part but the nightcrawler and this incident were lame.
PETER PLEASE HELP SAVE THE HULK!!!!!!!!!!!
just my opinions…i could be wrong:)
meant to say following the Hulk (needed a retcon
of my own there):)
> Now here’s hoping they use it to explain away She-Hulk having sex with the Juggernaut when the Avengers volume hits.
Didn’t She-Hulk scribe Dan Slott dismiss that little….. incident by saying it was part of an alternate reality awhile back?
*Whew* Thanks for introducing this concept, PAD. The current Marvel Universe needs all the help it can get. 😀
–Don aka Ygor
If Marvel starts adopting the policy of “alternate universes” and “time/space anomalies”why have any continuity at all????I mean get a new creative team “the past 48 issues didnt count”alternate reality” let’s just totally ignore the history of the character and write my vision of the character.Besides didnt all the alternate timeline/universes make DC such a mess before the crisis???
Again at some point you would think an editor would step in the creative process to prevent things that need to be explained away later Spider clones anyone?.Also i seem to recall Byrne having a šhìŧ fit(legitimately)when Claremont had Arcade light a match on Dr.Doom’s armor.He ended up “fixing “it in the FF later (it was a Doombot)
but someone should realized Dr .Doom would never have let that happen.
Not to hijack a thread by bringing them up ,but the WILDCARDS series of novels worked because at some point there was an effort made for consistency with the characters.
Okay i have had my rant
Deano 🙂
Well, not to throw water on this, but remember, there was a time warp in the Thor arc that the Absorbing Man appeared in…could they have been refering to that?
Maybe the choking snake issue can be undone.
[b]Deano wrote[/b]
[i]Besides didnt all the alternate timeline/universes make DC such a mess before the crisis???[/i]
No actually. DC had an elegent solution to continuity with Julius Schwartz’ multiverse concept. Differing continuities were simply said to take place on separate Earths. And some stories, such as many of the Brave and the Bold Batman team-ups, were simply relegated to an Earth all their own.
IMHO it was Crisis itelf, and the merging of all Earths into one continuity that made DC “such a mess.”
Duke