Originally published September 17, 1999, in Comics Buyer’s Guide #1348
Happenstance vs. Conspiracies. Fate vs. Machinations. The Incredible Hulk Annual vs. Incredible Hulk #1. Save the first two for later, let’s look at the third.
Now, let’s be candid: You all know that I feel more of an emotional attachment to the Hulk than most other characters. And certainly John Byrne’s publicly expressed sentiments that my being forced from the title might be viewed as proof that “there is a God” didn’t exactly endear him to me. So the following is not exactly… how shall we say it… unbiased. Then again, it’s an opinion column, so what else is new? To say nothing of the fact that the title is burning up a considerable amount of bandwidth on the computer boards, so there must be something worth discussing here unmotivated by personal history.
In the Hulk ’99 Annual, we pay homage to the brand spanking new vision of the Hulk which is intended to serve John during his next decade or so on the book. From soup to nuts, changes are made to update and, presumably, improve on a story which has stood up with no complaints that I’m aware of for the last thirty-five years.
Betty is no longer allowed to be a young, relatively naive woman who is fascinated by the highly educated and sophisticated Banner. Indeed, the emotional attachment between the two, one a worldly intellectual scientist, the other a sheltered army brat who is making her first, tentative steps out from under her domineering father’s control—the emotional heart of the story—is MIA. Instead she is a scientist, savvy and tough, “Betty” in name only.
Likewise the weapon being tested is a gamma bomb in name only—in misnomer, actually. We are told, “It is the firing mechanism of a gamma laser, not a true explosive device.” Oh. “Bruce Banner, caught in the heart of the detonation of a firing mechanism of a gamma laser…” Yeah, that sounds better.
As for Rick Jones and Bruce Banner themselves—well, remember how back in the 1950s people were concerned about being Commie dupes? No longer. Rick and Bruce are, in fact, newly minted Skrull dupes. The Reds are out, the Greens are in. Igor the spy is now Igor the shape-shifted Skrull, as much of a participant in, and developer of, the gamma bomb—device—whatever—as Banner is. (Although admittedly, whenever you have an assistant named Igor on a fictional science project, you just know it’ll end in tears.) Rick Jones is no longer the cocky, harmonica-playing teen who snuck onto the army base on a dare, but instead is manipulated by a Skrull to prove his bravery in a way that provides almost no risk to himself (so he thinks). Plus, in the most X-Files-ish moment of the book, Bruce admits to Rick that he is privy to a massive Skrull plot which is “Something many men have worked hard to keep the world from knowing about… something you should be happy to remain ignorant about.” I daresay we all would, except the caption promises a “soul-shattering limited series” on that very topic later this year. Of course, for all we know, the series will be so spectacular that our souls will indeed be shattered. But did the Hulk’s origin have to be shattered as well?
Well, apparently when John’s running the show, yes, it does. Because to judge from both this and the Spider-Man reboot, John absolutely despises coincidence.
It couldn’t be that the burglar who broke into the Parker’s house just so happened to be the same guy who Spidey let pass earlier that evening. It had to be that the burglar had been drawn to Peter’s house after Uncle Ben purchased a computer, and saw Spider-Man emerge from the house, and one thing led to another to the point where Ben’s death was not an unhappy turn of events, but in fact virtually pre-destined from the moment the story began. Likewise, it couldn’t be that Rick Jones just so happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, and Bruce had the poor judgment to have a spy on staff who didn’t bother to stop the detonation. In the world of John Byrne, coincidence, happenstance, and bottom line crappy luck are simply no longer permissible in the stories of people’s lives. Instead, earthbound (or alien earthbound) forces must be put meticulously into place so that the outcome is predestined, not by fate, but by actions directly attributable to evil forces that the heroes know nothing about until it’s too late. Right. And Barry Allen was hit by a lightning bolt sent by Mopee.
However, it may very well be that John is on to something here. After all, too much contrivance winds up producing bad fiction. The thing is, fans get very passionate when comic book origins are tampered with, because such tampering inevitably has ramifications for all the issues down the line.
This tends to drive fans nuts. This would be okay if it were a DC book because then you could just shout, “Continuity” to which the reply would be “Hypertime!” which is the fannish equivalent of “Marco! Polo!” But Marvel doesn’t have Hypertime as its convenient catch-all. The closest equivalent it ever had was Roy Thomas. You’ve heard of the Anti-Monitor? Roy’s the Anti-Hypertime, actually capable of pulling diverse and contradictory origins together in a deft “I meant to do that” fashion. Can’t dovetail Marvel’s origins with the cold war anymore? Screw this revisionist Skrull stuff: Unleash Roy Thomas, aided and abetted by Peter Sanderson, and watch ’em go.
But what to do with John? The answer is easy: Marvel should pick up the license for Classics Illustrated and put him in charge of the line.
It’s the perfect venue. Fans may get exorcised by changes to comic origins, but by and large, they won’t give a dámņ about classic works of literature. If Hollywood can give happy endings to The Scarlet Letter and Les Miserables, John can certainly be allowed to work his magic on those nasty, coincidence-heavy classics and have them make sense to an entirely new readership who, chances are, never read them in the first place.
Just imagine:
Marvel Classics Illustrated Presents: Romeo and Juliet. If Friar Laurence’s missive to Romeo informing him of Juliet’s faked death had gotten to Romeo in time, the play would have ended happily. Bad luck? Star-crossed lovers? Like hëll: In the MCI version, there is actually an evil organization which makes certain that key pieces of information are withheld from powerful individuals so that everyone actually comes to a bad end, thus enabling the cabal to secure its own power and accomplish its own diabolical plans. Members of the organization can be identified by the fact that they’re named after a city. In Romeo and Juliet, it is in fact the diabolical County Paris who makes sure that the message does not get to Romeo. We also see their evil machinations in King Lear where vital information is withheld until the damage is done. Who withholds that info? The Duke of Albany. Albany. Paris. Coincidence? I think not.
Marvel Classics Illustrated Presents: Les Miserables. How in the hëll does Javert keep running into Jean Valjean? After all, Jean Valjean lives his entire life without finding out what happened to his sister, or bumping into her so much as once. Yet happenstance crosses Javert’s and Valjean’s path repeatedly. Why so? As it turns out, Valjean’s sister is, in fact, behind it all. Angry because her brother was so incompetent that he couldn’t even steal a loaf of bread without getting nailed for it, thus leaving her and her kids hungry, Valjean’s sister sets up a vast spy network developed solely to keep tabs on her idiot brother. As soon as she receives any word on his whereabouts, she arranges matters so that Javert is sure to find him once again.
Marvel Classics Illustrated Presents: Oliver Twist. So there’s Oliver on his first excursion with the Artful Dodger, and Oliver Just So Happens to be wrongfully accused of stealing from a gentleman who Just So Happens to be his grandfather. What are the odds, I ask you? Slim-to-none, certainly. No, we now learn that the entire situation was in fact planned by a little remembered member of Fagin’s band who accompanied the Dodger and Oliver on the unfortunate excursion. His name? Charley Bates. His reason? Anger over his name. Everyone else has cool names like “Dodger” and “Twist.” What’s he got? Charley Bates, whom Dickens refers to repeatedly as “Master Bates.” (Don’t yell at me, it’s in the book.) Angered over the blows fate has dealt him, Charley Bates remains in the background. As his name would imply, he is a master manipulator, determined to bring down Bill Sikes and Fagin just out of sheer hostility. He makes sure to put everyone in the right place at the right time, bringing both Sikes and Fagin to their unfortunate end. (No, Fagin doesn’t go dancing away with the Dodger as in the movie; in the book, the charmingly titled chapter, “The Jew’s Last Night Alive” should give you some clue as to his original fate.)
More titles improved in accordance with the new Marvel vision, as well as the greatest conspiracy theory of all, next week.
(Peter David, writer of stuff, can be written to at Second Age, Inc., PO Box 239, Bayport, NY 11705.)
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Refresh my memory: how long did did this Byrne run on the Hulk last?
Assuming that wasn’t a rhetorical question, bengrimm, seven monthly issues (plus the Annual talked about here). Which is slightly better than the last time he took over the title in ’85. Then he wrote six monthly issues plus an annual.
No, it was not a rhetorical question. If I had asked “Is the Hulk strong enough to lift John Byrne’s ego?”, now that would have been a rhetorical question. Does anyone know if that story is true about him wanting to have his name listed as one of the creators of Superman?
I like coincidence, as I like salt. In moderation. And for the record, I don’t like retooling origins. I’ve seen it done over, and over with the X-men franchise, and I think it sucks. There’s something to be said for pushing forward, warts and all.
I like the Hulk. One issue of the Hulk was among the stack of comics left discarded under the sink in the convalescent hospital where I first discovered superheroes. I don’t remember the author or the storyline or the date–I was too busy enjoying the characters. I like strong female characters, but even then I did not think they all had to be academics, or warriors to be strong. Betty could be herself, be an ordinary person, and still be interesting in her own right. Banner *needs* someone ordinary, ‘normal’ to ground him and to provide a contrast to show just how far from normal he is, carrying the burden of his transformation.
I understand the point being made about coincidence versus conspiracy but bringing Byrne into it by name, the example of Romeo and Juliet does weaken the force of your argument. Makes it come across as mere ad hominem. I know that writing, like science, is *not* a sort of intellectual brotherhood, where all debate is done in a gentlemanly fashion. It is intensely personal by it’s very nature. I just think your point about the character of the Hulk, and about coincidence in fiction would have been better made without the mention of Mr. Byrne.
Updating origins work only if you do minor tweaks as the decades go by. My favorite example is how the Fantastic Four have been updated over the decades.
In FF #1, they were trying to beat the Russians to space. In one update from the last couple decades, they were going to Mars. It’s essentially the same origin, but with a more modern telling.
With that being said, I think your average reader is smart enough to understand that these classic origins were written in the 60s!
I think the reason that certain superheroes have endured for so many decades is that their origin stories are relatively straightforward, if somewhat naive by today’s standards. Some of them can withstand a bit of tweaking- taking Tony Stark and Iron Man from Vietnam to Afghanistan in particular worked very well- but once you go back and pulling these origins apart, many of them lose the resonance that made them work. That as far as I’m concerned, is why do many re-boots last for a finite period of time before the character goes back to its original roots and the book back to its original numbering. As for John Byrne, I got pretty dámņ tired of his coming on to a book accompanied by great fanfare and promises to take the character back to its origins (translation: how Byrne planned to write it) only to have him lose interest after a year or less. The notable exception is Fantastic Four, but even there, he was doing HIS Galactus story, HIS Inhumans story and so forth. While I enjoyed much of his run on FF, it did get tedious sometimes to see him picking over the bones of old Lee and Kirby stories to create his ‘new’ take on the characters.
Worst case of meddling with a character’s origin EVER: Andrew Vacchs wrote a Batman story – published in both comic and prose novel format.
He told us that actually, Bruce’s parents were killed by a hit man sent by an international ring of wealthy pederasts be cause Martha Wayne – who was an “investigative sociologist”, whatever that was supposed to mean – was about to reveal their evil doings…
I didn’t think that the meddling was that bad. The comics, at that point, had retconned the origin from a random mugging to an ordered hit from a criminal that Thomas Wayne had testified against (and worn an early Batman costume against.) As for me, I was glad to see a story that said Bruce had inherited important traits from both his parents. Personally, I prefer that the murderer be a random criminal; I prefer that Batman’s motivation is fighting crime itself, not fighting a specific criminal. Anyway, I’m a fan of Vachss’s work in general, and that book was one of my introductions to his work. If I recall though, he hated how much DC edited it and changed it. (I think at that time they wouldn’t allow Batman to kill or have sex in the novel. Personally, I think that if they had that big a problem with it, they should have just slapped an elseworld’s logo on it.)
I wasn’t following Batman that closely at that point; i didn’t know that.
The thing about the original origin that i like is sort of like what you said:
…but from the other end – that it could have been any random person who walked down that alley; it just happened to be the Waynes.
Both versions of the origin are in “The Greatest Batman Stories Ever Told.” Highly recommended. I hadn’t thought about it from the other end before-that it could have been anyone, it just happened to be the Waynes. One of the things I always liked about Batman and similar heroes is that they made choices in determining who’d they’d be and how, instead of gettings powers in a random accident. (Granted, I’ve also loved Spidey, and similar heroes; I think that what Spidey and Batman and similar heroes share is a “you don’t choose a lot of what happens to you, but that doesn’t determine who are as much as how you choose to respond to it.”) I realize though, that there seems to be a certain amount of destiny and fate instead of free will in Batman’s origin-that he just *happened* to have the body and brains best suited for becoming the world’s greatest detective instead of having asthma or nearsightedness etc., and that he happened to be lucky enough to be born to super rich parents. On a related note-one of the things that impressed me the most about Greg Rucka’s new Batwoman was that I was predisposed against a Batwoman, Batgirl, and/or Robin at the time, but he made me like and believe in the character, that she would make similar choices based on her background. I didn’t, however, like the religion of crime and its predestined roles for Batwoman, her long lost sister, and the new Question.
One other thing I forgot to mention was that “what if it happens to someone else” aspect was tackled in Paul Dini and Alex Ross’ “Batman: War On Crime”
I wonder what Byrne thinks of the assassinations of JFK and Archduke Francis Ferdinand, both of which involve (or allegedly involve) coincidences.
For people who have trouble with coincidences that are “too great,” I always use these two example from history:
One of the first persons of her tribe that Sacagawea encountered as she helped Lewis and Clark navigate the west, was Cameahwait, her brother (or cousin, depending on how you interpret the native American word for the term). This was a good distance for what Sacagawea considered “home.”
John Adams and Thomas Jefferson died the same day. That day was July 4. And, it was July 4, 1826, the 50th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration on Independence.
And what about that famous headline Booth Saves Lincoln.
Robert Todd Lincoln’s life was saved by Edwin Booth. A few months later Edwin Booth’s brother would kill Robert Todd Lincoln’s father.
I’ve run across claims that among Adams and Jefferson’s last words, each gave thanks that (he believed) the other still lived.
The sources I’ve read say that Jefferson’s last words were ‘Is it the fourth?’, and that Adams’s were ‘Thomas Jefferson still lives’. So I guess it’s partly true.
Jefferson, by the way, had been hovering at death’s door for weeks. Supposedly, it was only his desire to see the 50th anniversary that kept him hanging on. But Adams was healthy and active right up until he collapsed that morning. He was 92, and held the record as the longest-living US president until he was finally surpassed by Reagan, and then by Ford.
They first altered the Hulk’s origin with the 1970s TV show, which Marvel either couldn’t prevent or didn’t object to. I found the TV show origin underwhelming, but it was adopted and continued in the films. The Ultimate universe Hulk happened when he was trying to rediscover the super soldier serum which created Captain America. Again, no nuclear explosion.
I always found the origin of the Hulk from being caught in a nuclear explosion to be symbolic of the dangers of the atomic age, and those dangers haven’t gone away. The lab accident origin isn’t very dramatic at all. They didn’t even try to make it as dramatic as the Doctor Solar/Doctor Manhattan lab accidents which were very dramatic. Not so the modern Hulk origin where he might just as well have spilled a test tube on himself for all the drama that was involved.
If you have ever seen a movie called “The Amazing Colossal Man,” it has many parallels to the Hulk’s origin. It may even be that Stan and Jack drew inspiration from it. I believe it came out in 1958.
What always bothered me was that they didn’t use the gamma bomb for the origin of the Hulk movie with Eric Bana. Not trying to start any political dialogues/diatribes here, but considering how G.W. Bush was declaring our nuclear treaties null and void, it would’ve been a perfect time for testing of a new bomb.
All they need to do is change it from a gamma bomb test to a gamma reactor test, keep the sabotage, keep the explosion, keep the saving of Rick. Just one word is different.
I like coincidence. It’s something that we’ve all encountered. Talk about someone you haven’t seen and run into them in the store. Joke about something breaking down and something breaks down. Coincidence happens and it can often be so strange that it seems unreal.
The thing that John started doing, and that many fans seem to want is something I can’t stand. Nothing is coincidence and everything has to be explained. There has to be a reason for everything. Everything has to be explained and accounted for.
By the time they’re done explaining, justifying, and linking all the things that never needed explaining, justifying, and linking, it all just seems too contrived.
I just attended a panel at Windycon this afternoon about novel writing. The moderator told us that she’s been told repeatedly by editors that in real life, stuff happens, but in a book there better be a reason for it or the reader feels cheated.
Cracked.com has some awesome articles on historical coincidences. I’m sure their search engine will turn up some of them, but here is one:
http://www.cracked.com/article_17298_6-random-coincidences-that-created-modern-world.html
I love the take on Les Miserables. I’ve been re-reading the book, and the coincidences are just astonishing.
Things like Cosette starting to give up on Marius and catching a glimpse of a soldier, who just happens to be Marius’ cousin. The Thenardiers’ younger sons are taken in by a former servant of Marius’ grandfather, then get lost and picked up by Gavroche.
My favorite is probably the point at which one of Thenardier’s associates decides to mug some random guy who turns out to be Jean Valjean, on the street outside Marius’ friend’s house, while Gavroche is watching from the bushes.
There actually is a part in the novel where Eponine is manipulating various groups of people. The question is, should that be worked into Valjean’s sister’s spy network? Or is she an opposing force? Hmm…