A Brief introduction
to Marvel Comics
in the Silver Age
Reviews and Analysis by
Pierre Comtois and
Gregorio Montejo
There can be little argument regarding Silver Age Marvel's impact on the comic book world since the inception of Fantastic Four #1 in 1961.
The definition of the super-hero as human being, encumbered with all of the same problems and challenges as ordinary people, stemmed from editor Stan Lee's personal vision and was translated into pictures by artist Jack Kirby. From there, it was the mutually supportive contributions of both men together that combined to reinvent the super-hero genre. But important as the work of these two men was in that creation, artist Steve Ditko, perhaps lacking Lee's facility with language and Kirby's dynamic artistry, nevertheless displayed a certain synthesis of both when he helped to create the single most fallible (and popular) of the Marvel stable of characters.
None of this, however, sprang whole from the brow of any single man, Lee, Kirby or Ditko. On the contrary, we believe it began almost by accident, and developed more or less unconsciously through 1963 until, after a gradual realization of the potentialities inherent in this new twist in super-hero writing, a more deliberate approach began to be taken.
As a result, the whole process, the rise and fall of Silver Age Marvel, can be broken down into four distinct parts:
| | The early, formative years (1961-1962) when characters began to be infused with the humanism that would become the hallmark of Marvel and the first steps were taken that would later reshape Marvel's entire line of books into a single coherent universe, |
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| | ...the years of Conscious Consolidation (1963-1964) when editor Lee set the policy of infusing the new humanism into every character (and creating whole new books such as Daredevil and the X-Men based entirely around the concept) and solidifying the Marvel universe with increasing cross-over events, |
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| | ...the Grandiose years when the consciousness of a deliberate humanism in the Marvel line resulted in comics written and conceptualized for adults as well as children (1965-1969), |
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| | ...and the Twilight years (1970-) after Lee, Kirby and Ditko's creative energies seemed to have spent themselves and a new generation of creators succeeded them, prolonging Marvel's Silver Age in a new guise into the mid-seventies. |
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Here's
the
17th
of our regular
reviews:
on-line
10 June
2000 |
 |
The Incredible Hulk
# 1
May 1962 |
Cover: Jack Kirby and George Roussos
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"The Coming of the Hulk"
Script: Stan Lee
Pencils: Jack Kirby |
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Past reviews
are archived
in the
REVIEW INDEX |
Teasers scrawled at the bottom of pages in the previous month's Fantastic Four were all the warning readers and the world would have of the advent of the second of Marvel's revolutionary new line of super-heroes.
"The Hulk is coming!"
"What is the Hulk?"
"You've never seen anyone like the Hulk!"
"The Hulk is coming!"
"Who is the Hulk??"
Less a super-hero however, than the continuation of the monster stories editor/writer Stan Lee had been featuring in titles such as Tales to Astonish, Tales of Suspense and Strange Tales, the Incredible Hulk was destined to be a rampaging behemoth suffering the agonizing changes, both physical and emotional, thrust upon him by an act of fate.
Perhaps inspired by the resurgent popularity of the Universal Studios' monster movies (which included Frankenstein), the Hulk would nevertheless blaze his own trail of individuality, tapping into a popular understanding of psychology that had been equally before the public eye at least since the 1950s. (cf. review #9: Strange Tales #110).
Expanding the arena for his new ideas about unconventional heroes while at the same time not straying too far from the monster genre already familiar to his readers, Lee came out with The Incredible Hulk barely six months after the debut of the Fantastic Four. In the meantime, he'd both compromised and forged ahead with his more realistic approach to comics storytelling: the FF had abandoned their street clothes in favor of costumes, received a headquarters and got some gadgets. But while acceding to reader demand for such conventions, Lee insisted on keeping his heroes in the real world: the new costumes were strictly functional jumpsuits of the type aircraft workers wore, with no masks, the FF's headquarters was located on the top floors of a midtown skyscraper in New York City and their gadgets included a flying bathtub.
It was this real world that would infringe itself painfully on the life of Bruce Banner to create one of the truly tragic characters to appear in comics.
In the origin story, teenager Rick Jones parks his car on a bet at a nuclear test site somewhere in the American southwest just as Bruce Banner's new gamma bomb is about to be tested. Rushing onto the field to rescue the boy, Banner is himself caught in the blast, resulting in his being transformed into the Hulk, an almost mindless brute of incredible strength who becomes a virtual walking Id. With the Hulk, thought is synonymous with action: when he's hungry he eats; when he's angry, he lashes out; what he wants, he takes (pg. 6, pls. 1-3: "I want to get out!" says the Hulk, knocking down a wall. "Out!"). When he turns into the Hulk, Banner also becomes a truly amoral creature: whatever satisfies the Hulk's whims may be classified as good, whatever keeps the Hulk from satisfying those whims is bad but the Hulk himself does nothing out of vindictiveness or spite. If he reacts, it's almost always because he has perceived himself to have been slighted, wronged, victimized. In later appearances, Lee would give the Hulk what psychologists would call a persecution complex: the whole world was against him, everyone hated him, all of mankind never ceased to hound him.
And to prevent the Hulk strip from becoming just another monster story (the word "hulk" had previously been used as a name for some of the goofy monsters that roamed the Marvel landscape prior to the advent of the super-heroes), Lee provided his leading man with a cast of supporting players including Rick Jones, the teenager whom Banner rescued from the blast that had turned him into the Hulk. Jones would become Banner's constant companion in his early adventures, helping him keep his secret from the likes of General "Thunderbolt" Ross. Ross was the commander of the military base upon which the gamma bomb test had been conducted and held a healthy suspicion of Banner's loyalty to the United States. Ironically, his daughter, Betty Ross, would become enamored of Banner and eventually his chief defender.
Helping Lee to bring the Hulk to life was artist Jack Kirby whose chunky, monster style art was smoother here than in his work on the Fantastic Four. At first drawing the Hulk as merely an over-sized, muscle-bound man (who wasn't all that bad looking besides!), Kirby would eventually grant him the stoop-shouldered posture and brutish, lowering brows that would justify the instinctive fear he aroused in everyone who met him.
As a reader once pointed out, the Hulk was the true existential man for whom the observance of the idle spectator was anathema and the immediacy of action more meaningful than life itself. For the Hulk, the past and the future meant nothing; only the urgency of the needs and desires of the present were important.
But in order to better understand how the psychological isolation of the Id defined the personality of the Hulk, it might be advantageous to step back for a closer look at how the concept of the mind had come to be defined in western thought.
The modern conception of the Self begins with a seemingly irreconcilable split: when Rene Descartes (1596-1650) first expounded his radically subjective theory of cognition with the momentous phrase "Cogito, ergo sum" (I think, therefore I am) and opened the door to the modernist hypothesis of epistemology, he cut the human psyche in half. Although the Mind can meditate upon the movement of matter, the two are utterly separate: Mind is a wholly incorporeal substance while matter is restricted purely to the realm of extension in space.
This extreme form of dualism led to the mind-body problem, the most intractable philosophical enigma of the past three centuries: how do mind and matter interact? Currently, the predominant opinion seeks to explain the problem away by relegating consciousness to an epiphenomenon, merely an aftereffect, of the physical universe.
But despite this dismissive attitude toward Cartesian dualism, Descartes' ideas have yielded some positive advances in human knowledge. For instance, by defining the physical world solely in terms of length, width and depth, it served to set limits on material reality. Because the cosmos could now be described in numerical terms, it could be more precisely dissected, analyzed and manipulated. This result has become the source of all the empirical sciences: man has traded the dominion of spirit for his own dominance over the forces of nature.
This isn't an altogether new development in human history. The story of man's intellectual hubris outstripping his capacity to wield knowledge responsibly, the dangers of power without wisdom, is as old as mankind itself. In primeval tales this danger was portrayed as the wrath of the gods. In the familiar Greek myth of Prometheus, who steals fire from the Olympian deities to give it to the human race, this forbidden element brings unspeakable sorrow upon both the Titan and the beneficiaries of his largesse. The lesson of the fable seems clear, man cannot aspire to godhood without paying a terrible price in return.
With the advent of the 19th century, the intellectual upheaval caused by Descartes' philosophical Meditations (1641) began a vast socio-economic and technological transformation in Western society which, in time, came to be known as the Industrial Revolution. Man was beginning to acquire stunning mastery over the basic forces of nature. Building great machines, erecting immense factories, constructing cyclopean metropolises of steel, all powered by these newly subdued universal energies. Yet, with every increase in his technical know-how, man seemed increasingly disjointed, alienated from his very self.
The culture of the Industrial Revolution reflected the splintered nature of the times. Gothic, a genre born from the chaotic dissolution of older literary and artistic traditions (cf. review #11: Spider-Man #49), provided a strikingly appropriate myth for the dawning Mechanical Age in Mary Shelley's 1816 novel Frankenstein; Or, The Modern Prometheus. Its protagonist, Doctor Victor Frankenstein, symbolizes the promethean hubris of post-Cartesian man. Obsessed with creating life, the primordial prerogative of the Deity, he succeeds in purloining the spark of life. But his method is a grotesquely ironic reversal of the divine attribute. He makes a new man by joining together the limbs of various dead men, revivifies what is rightly deceased, and produces a mocking simulation of life.
Frankenstein's misshapen creation embodies ruptured nature and the shattered promethean psyche. The sutured limbs, which comprise the monstrous compound body, can barely hold its raging spirit. The crude seams that vein the outside of the creature's body mirror the fractured mind within. Yet the monster inspires pathos as well as horror because in some ways the creature is nobler than his creator. Incarnating the alienated grace of modern man, he is a poetic soul trapped in the body of an ogre driven mad by his deformed condition and impelled by a murderous rage to destroy his maker. Ultimately unified in death, Frankenstein and his misbegotten handiwork are two aspects of the same Self, monstrously separated yet joined together in mutual hatred. The mangled, berated Adam kills his warped god, and with his final words, prophesies his coming immolation in the promethean fire which birthed him:
"But soon," he cried with sad and solemn enthusiasm,
"I shall die, and what I now feel be no longer felt.
Soon these burning miseries will be extinct. I shall
ascend my funeral pile triumphantly and exult in the
agony of the torturing flames.
Undoubtedly influenced by Shelley's creation, Lee and Kirby borrowed many of its attributes. But as the fundamental differences between their creation and the popular version of the Frankenstein monster made themselves apparent, Lee began to fiddle with the Hulk's persona. He quickly ended the Hulk's dependency on the cycles of the moon for his frequent metamorphoses, relying instead on the state of the creature's emotions to trigger the change between man and monster. The Hulk's evolving persona (trapped as it was between the rationalism of Banner and the emotionalism of the Hulk), would now owe more to Freud than to Shelley.
It was at the height of the West's industrial expansion, in fin de siècle Vienna, that Sigmund Freud first began to formulate a theoretical psychology, built upon the fragmented foundations of the promethean mind (cf. review #9: Strange Tales #110). Freud postulated a bifurcated psyche composed of a rationalistic function called the Ego and a repository of anarchic, libidinous impulses he termed the Id. This dualistic mentality resulted in an unprecedented command of the material realm but at the terrible price of neurasthenia and psychosis. According to Freud, the construction of civilization is inextricably linked to the repression of anti-social instincts. Man suppresses his innate urges in order to gain control over nature, the inevitable results of which are the various pathological neuroses that plague humanity.
At an equally deep level, the homicidal contest between the creator and the creature, according to Freudian theories, reflects a universal inborn conflict between fathers and sons. Identifying this psychological syndrome with another ancient Greek myth, that of Oedipus, Freud hypothesized a ubiquitous Oedipal complex, which inevitably pits sons against fathers for the affections of the mother. Returning to Shelley's novel and looking at it from this critical perspective, the monster emerges as Victor Frankenstein's antagonistic child. It clarifies the monster's demand for a bride as a projected claim upon Elizabeth, Victor's stepsister and newly-wed wife. Elizabeth is also the creature's surrogate mother, whom he murders in the nuptial chambers before her marriage to the Doctor can be consummated.
By the 1950's, Mary Shelley's Gothic symbol of modern prometheanism, as well as Freud's structural conception of the unconscious, had filtered down into American popular culture. Boris Karloff's interpretation of Frankenstein's monster in a series of atmospheric, black and white motion pictures, embodied the poetic isolation of the creature for generations of movie goers. As noted above, Lee and Kirby were perhaps inspired by this aspect of romantic angst when they developed the character of the Hulk. This aspect of the strip was itself an extension of innovations Lee had introduced earlier in the first of his revived line of super-hero comics, the Fantastic Four. There, Lee presented a group of heroes endowed with superior powers, yet torn apart by internal doubts and anxieties. With the creation of the Hulk, he would intensify his psychological explorations, and forge a mythic narrative identifying the technology of mass destruction with the psychopathology of modern life.
In this first story Banner, a nuclear physicist, can be seen as a Cold War Prometheus, striving to release the apocalyptic fires chained within the atom. As our tale opens, he's about to test a powerful new weapon, the G-Bomb, which promises to release a deadly blast of gamma rays when detonated.
In Civilization And Its Discontents (1929), Freud had devised a "fantastic sounding" conjecture, a new myth for the emerging age of Relativity and Psychoanalysis, which traced the origins of culture to one primeval instant when man first harnessed fire. Supposedly, primitive men could not restrain their urge to urinate on a fire when they encountered it in nature. Freud's improbable fable attempts to establish the phallic nature of these flames, so that civilization itself is founded upon an act of repression. According to this thesis, micturition is sexual, a symbol of male potency, and the curbing of this desire, the first step towards technological mastery.
The first person to renounce this desire and
spare the fire was able to carry it off with
him and subdue it to his own use. By damping
down the fire of his own sexual excitation, he
had tamed the natural force of fire. This great
cultural conquest was thus the reward for his
renunciation of instinct.
Utilizing the various Freudian conceptualizations of the unconscious mind, it is possible to diagnose Banner's Oedipal complex in relation to his promethean neurosis. The phallic characteristics of the G-Bomb are evident (page 2, panel 1), it is the burning, primeval sexual urge, sublimated into a weapon of ravaging thermonuclear fire. Banner is engaged in a contentious battle with base commander General Ross over control of the experimental nuclear device. Freud would describe this as a classic example of Oedipal conflict, with Ross cast as the threatening father figure and Banner projecting his castration anxiety onto the contest for the phallic instrument. The problematic figure of Betty Ross, the General's daughter, completes the Oedipal scheme. She symbolically plays both the maternal and spousal roles, the primal source of rivalry between surrogate father and figurative son.
In a cataclysmic act of betrayal, Banner's fragmented psyche is literally separated into its constituent parts (pg. 4), a condition documented by Freud and other early psychologists as "splitting." Usually induced by severe trauma, patients diagnosed with this condition would often manifest several distinct psychic personas which later came to be designated by the general term "split personalities." Lee, taking a hint from a literary theme in popular use since Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde, employed the unusual mutative properties of the gamma rays to "split" Banner's Id from his Ego. The part of himself that was the Hulk thus became the embodiment of violent impulse and unfettered desire, while in his human form, Banner continued as the personification of rationalistic thought.
The third element in Freud's structure of the psyche is the Superego whose function is to assimilate societal norms of behavior within a person's consciousness. Freud believes that the resulting sense of duty is transmitted from father to son and manifests itself psychically as overbearing feelings of guilt and persecution. General Ross, the incarnation of order, rectitude and honor, is the epitome of the conscientious Superego.
One dramatic sequence (pg.19) exemplifies how these dynamic psychological personalities interact. In the first three panels Betty Ross is safe while she remains within the protective enclosure of the patriarchal "life space" (cf. review #15: Two-Gun Kid #54). In the next three, she moves out into the unbounded wilderness, the natural province of the unrestrained Id. Here she is stalked and confronted by the realization of the liberated libido in the form of the Hulk. In the three panels at the bottom of the page, there is an intimation of ravishment, deferred only by the appearance of Rick Jones as a proxy for Banner's absent Ego. The scene comes to an unexpected climax with the arrival of the Gargoyle, a far more frightening materialization of the tyrannous Superego than General Ross. The Gargoyle, a Soviet scientist, is disfigured by a conception of man that is even more deforming than that of modern prometheanism. His monstrous facade is a metaphor for the perversion of the human spirit under Marxism (cf. review # 16: Fantastic Four #13), where men are alienated as both workers and citizens. Banner does for the Gargoyle what he cannot do for himself, he makes him a healthy, whole man once again. His humanity restored, the Gargoyle dies a human death, destroying his enslavers, and regaining his dignity.
Bruce Banner's psychic deformity meanwhile, is not so easily healed. The cleft that separates Western man's soul from his body, is much older and more fundamental. Freud could only identify the pathology, he could not heal it. The bestial yet Romantic figure of the Hulk prophetically ushers in the decade of libidinous freedom. The 1960's saw the rise of a counter-culture, which discarded the repressive inhibitions of the Superego and embraced the unbridled hedonism of the emancipated Id. In this context, the Hulk becomes a kind of iconic representative for those who fight against the constraints of civilization advocating instead a return to the unfettered realm of pure emotion and unrestrained feelings. He is an autonomous Id shorn of its dark, destructive urges. A savage innocent, he embodies the fable of self-indulgence divorced from guilt or conscience.
Freud views a society unburdened by the repressive dictates of the Superego with great pessimism. Concupiscence is the antagonist of civilization: if man is not to be ruled by guilt, he must be subjugated to his unruly desires. The technocracy of the Cartesian mind gives man god-like powers, but he is increasingly dissatisfied with his godhood: "Future ages will bring with them new and probably unimaginably great advances in this field of civilization and will increase man's likeness to God still more. But in the interest of our investigations, we will not forget that present-day man does not feel happy in his Godlike character."
On July 16, 1945, at 5:30 a.m., the first nuclear explosion was detonated in the desert wastes of Alamogordo, New Mexico. J. Robert Oppenheimer, director of the Los Alamos laboratory, where the atom bomb was developed, upon seeing the atomic flash light up the early morning darkness, was reminded of several lines from the Bhagavad Gita, the sacred Hindu scripture:
If the radiance of a thousand suns
were to burst in the sky,
that would be like
the splendor of the Mighty One--
Yet, when the black mushroom cloud ascended above ground zero, he recalled another quote from the same text,
I am become Death, the shatterer of worlds.
Bruce Banner/the Hulk, like the legendary Prometheus, has stolen the divine fire only to be consumed by its majestic power, and by its terrible beauty.
With the creation of the Hulk, Lee had come up with the perfect vehicle for his new ideas of what it actually would be like to have super powers in the real world and took a giant step forward in turning his stable of super-heroes from colorful but empty suits to metaphors of a modern world's anxieties and passions. Unfortunately, Lee's nascent plans proved too ambitious, the blurred line between hero and villain, between restraint and licentiousness, didn't catch on with readers until later in the decade and the Hulk book was soon canceled. But only for a while... |
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