The Incredible Hulk (comic book)/YMMV

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • Alternate Character Interpretation: Re-reading the original Lee-Kirby issues of Hulk from a certain point of view, it can be easy to interpret Banner as being gay, and the Hulk as straight. (Banner's heterosexuality has been firmly established the decades since, but still.) This illuminates the way General Ross keeps calling him a milksop, why Banner seems indifferent to Betty but the Hulk is obsessed with her, and why Banner really hates being transformed into a caricature of he-man heterosexuality.
    • The characters original Lee-Kirby issues can be seen in a rather backwards light compared to more current versions: Bruce Banner is an incredibly selfish man who hides his condition (despite the obvious danger of the Hulk itself and the risk of mutating others) and manipulates a teenaged boy (who means well but is really aiding a dangerous fugitive and whose recklessness resulted in the creation of the Hulk and ruined Banner's life) into helping him. General Ross is absolutely right for hating Banner (because Banner really is a spineless worm) and hunting the Hulk (because the Hulk actually is a violent monster). He is also the only one who tells Rick Jones he should be in school and not hanging around on a military base. And Betty is a teenaged girl who really shouldn't be with Bruce Banner, who seems to be several years older (Ross is right once more).
  • Arch Enemy: The Maestro, always, one-shot character or not. Nightmare, Leader, Abomination, Madman, Tyrannus, Thunderbolt Ross/Red Hulk, and Brian Banner/Devil Hulk all want the position though.'
  • Base Breaker: Considering all the different incarnations of the Hulk, who in Real Life terms would be very different separate types of people, those who first came into contact with a particular aspect of one incarnation recurrently strongly dislike very contradictory versions.
  • Complete Monster: Hiro-Kala, as seen in the "Dark Son" arc in Incredible Hulks.
      • Hiro-Kala fancies himself as the living embodiment of I Did What I Had to Do, sacrificing billions to save trillions. Whether or not he can be believed after turning the whole population of a planet into mindless zombies and sending the children into battle against his father is up for debate.
    • Arguably the Ultimate Marvel version of the Hulk himself qualifies. A terrifying example of The Unfettered, he's eaten several people, flat out killed hundreds more, and is implied to have raped at least one person to death.
    • Some of the behavior by the Abomination and Umar might put them in this category
    • Farnoq Dahn from the "War and Pieces" storyline.
    • Brian Banner.
    • Nightmare. Just... Nightmare. Even for a demon he's one loathsome bastard, for what he did to the Hulk and, especially what he did to Betty. And he did all this just to be a prick.
    • General John Ryker.
  • Magnificent Bastard: The Joe Fixit Hulk loves to fight. Oh, and he loves to fight dirty. Also the Leader during the Ground Zero arc. Recently Bruce Banner himself seems to be doing his best to qualify ... and from the perception of just about everyone good and bad, he's succeeding ... magnificently.
  • Memetic Mutation: Hulk Smash!
    • A good one was during the Civil War , fans would state "I'm with Tony" or "I'm with Steve". A third camp popped up, stating "You're all fucked when the Hulk gets back!", a reference to Hulk's imminent return from the then-ongoing Planet Hulk storyline.
    • "Puny X!", considering Hulk's oft-phrased reference to the humans as "Puny humans!". Gets more popularity from The Avengers with "Puny God."
  • Moral Event Horizon: In the old days Hulk used to be beyond Brainwashed and Crazy whenever he actually turned dangerous, never actually did any harm outside of non-lethal self-defense, and even had Friend to All Living Things incarnations. However, writers gradually turned the character darker and darker, and during World War Hulk, he willingly destroyed the (evacuated) homes of thousands of innocent people. What put a final nail in the Thou Shalt Not Kill, and Jerk Justifications coffin was when he decided that it was okay to commit genocide on a planet populated with Jerkass Woobie Goblin criminals, none of which were nearly powerful enough to be a threat to him, which instantly made him far worse than the Punisher could ever hope to be. And that's was the "best case scenario". He only had the word of Umar (basically the most evil woman in the universe) to go by, and they could have been a few billion children she had kidnapped, deformed, and tortured For the Evulz for all that he knew.
    • Dr. Strange was not more than a few feet away and did not raise a single objection after the Hulk and Umar made it clear what was going on. Though you'd think he would mention his wife Clea and the denizens of the Dark Dimension who are still loyal to her, all of whom are presumably there too.
    • It's also the Dark Dimension(Home to Dormammu and Umar), so Umar would know if they were evil. Umar even explained that they were reincarnated souls of evil people and Complete Monsters.
  • Nightmare Fuel: On those occasions when the Hulk gets seriously angry and destructive and unable to differentiate between friend and foe, it can get a little unsettling. And on the flip side, stories where someone is actually able to beat the crap out of the Hulk himself is a frightening visual when you consider his power level.
    • Issue 377. Doc Samson hypnotizes Bruce to try and reconcile Hulk and Joe Fixit, as their war for control is turning Bruce into a wreck. While inside Bruce's head they find that he is haunted by a horrifying monster that effortlessly defeats both Hulk and Joe. We see the monster beating young Bruce on Christmas morning and murdering Bruce's mother and its made clear that the monster is Brian Banner.
  • Some Anvils Need to Be Dropped: In the early 90s, Peter David had an entire subplot about AIDS that culminated in the Hulk's friend Jim Wilson dying from it. The issue's letter column was devoted to industry professionals talking about their experiences with AIDS.
  • Tear Jerker: Lots of them... Some of the most memorable being the deaths and burials of Jarella and Betty Ross Banner, or Jim Wilson's fatal illness.
  • The Woobie: In some ways Bruce Banner is very unfortunate, given all of the abuse, isolation, and mental illness he has suffered from. On the other hand he is a supergenius almost unkillable immortal, who has had affairs with plenty of beautiful women, so he doesn't really rate particularly high by real-world standards. This actually has precedent since Hulk becomes mindless when separated from Banner. Also, The Hulk never actively attacks innocents and if he did, he wouldn't be as sympathetic.
    • Writer Dan Slott explained the Marvel Civil War with this subject. If Hulk went around killing people then Tony Stark was absolutely right in everything he did. If Hulk didn't kill anybody, Captain America was right. A lot of people should be dying during these big super powered battles (not just from Hulk's rampages) but they don't to keep the content in a (somewhat) family friendly level.
    • Note that this is brutally averted with the Ultimate Marvel version of the Hulk, who's at his best a Sociopathic Hero. At his worst? He drops the "hero" part.
    • Returning to original Hulk, the thing is that the rampage part is mostly a popular myth. He's defended himself from attackers plenty of times (after first raving warnings that they should leave him alone), but just started to attack unrelated populated buildings? No. The few times that has happened, he was either mind-controlled by Nightmare (he never had the chance to kill anybody though), Banner was physically removed from the Hulk (1980s), or in the 2000s case a gamma-bomb blew up in his face and caused him to hallucinate (For those who actually read the Fantastic Four issue, he didn't even hurt anybody though, but that was mostly dumb luck). The memetic false perception has greatly overshadowed fact in this case.
      • Which is actually kind of the point; The Hulk doesn't just go around smashing cities. People in universe thinks he does. He once publicly announced that he just wanted to be left alone, and for every time the military or superheroes attacked him, he tended to smash lots of military equipment, or nearby buildings were caught in the crossfire, which doesn't exactly help his case. People in-universe don't care if he was Brainwashed and Crazy, under More Than Mind Control, physically separated from Banner, or what. All they care about is that buildings have a nasty habit of turning into rubble whenever he's around. The fact that he looks like a monster rather than a hero, is unpredictable, generally an example of Jerk with a Heart of Gold, and other things that are bad for PR are what leads to him getting more flack for property damage than the other heroes.
    • The Planet Hulk storyline pretty much proves that neither the Hulk nor Banner are allowed to have a happy life. He's exiled all the way to another planet, where he manages to overthrow the corrupt government and become a hero and the new king, finally finding a place where he can belong. He even manages to find a wife, and has a child on the way. Then the shuttle that brought him to the planet explodes, killing her and destroying the entire city.
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