La Zona Muerta

Whomever coined those deathless lyrics should have had an appointment with a gamma bomb.

I’ve been thinking about and drawing the Hulk a lot lately. Dunno why… the current comic is a big turn off to me (especially after coming off of The Immortal Hulk, my favorite Hulk comics since the days of Greg Pak), I don’t care about the movies particularly… but ol’ Jade Jaws will probably always be in my permanent pantheon no matter what injustices are heaped upon his misshapen form.

I like trying to capture really primal Hulk drawings, to try to match up against the greats who have worked on him over the years. Despite a couple of the drawings I’ve aped here, I don’t really like it when Hulk is drawn with a billion muscles and a tiny pinhead; I like him smaller and leaner, more Kirby than not (altho’ there’s no Kirby work shown here). My platonic ideal of the Green Goliath is probably somewhere along the lines of what John Buscema did here for the cover of Fantastic Four #112:

Huge and bestial, but not a body builder.

One cat who doesn’t get talked about a lot even though he was one half of the chefs behind the Mr. Fixit era (maybe my favorite time frame for Hulk) is Jeff Purves. I have no idea what happened to this fella; he did about a year on Hulk and vanished, not only from Marvel but, as far as I know, the industry. Maybe he figured out that comics will break your heart a lot faster than some other folks did? Here’s my attempt at his cover from Hulk #354:

The overwrought coloring is my fault, not Purves’. Sometimes I get carried away.

One of the very best Hulk artists of all time was Sal Buscema, who did Hulk for a zillion years, and through a lot of periods of upheaval. Here, I believe from the final page of Incredible Hulk #299, Bruce Banner has committed psychic suicide (!! Don’t worry, he eventually gets better), leaving a rampaging, mindless Hulk that the Avengers (and I don’t mean some goofy ass Avengers where it’s a bunch of people with no powers, I mean guys like Iron Man and Thor) can’t stop… leaving Doctor Strange to banish him from Earth (not the last time they will try that particular trick):

He’s so ape like, here! Pretty scary. This page also featured Doctor Strange, but I made the editorial decision to leave him on the cutting room floor when I colored this. Sorry, Doc. I also decided to go with a weird, almost anemic green to indicate that something was not okay with Lettuce Lips.

Speaking of the Mighty Thor, Thor and Hulk collided yet again in a fill in issue VERY ably covered by Ron Frenz and Al Milgrom. This is a Hulk a little too big and muscley for my tastes, but obviously it’s not far off my tastes or I wouldn’t have decided to swipe it:

Sadly, the issue itself, which is guest scripted by Stan Lee and features art from a very young Erik Larsen and inks by Vinnie “sure, you hate his inks but editors sure didn’t” Colletta probably doesn’t quite live up to the cover image but, that’s life in the comic biz.

Here’s a quick Hulk I did when I first got my iPad to prove to myself that I could still draw (the jury is still out):

And, since this blog is usually about one thing more than it is about other things, here’s another drawing of a Hulk… but the computer keeps glitching for some reason. Hmmm.

Funny how that happens.

Anyway, long may the Hulk’s freak flag fly. One of the mostunmessupable characters in comicdom; they can add new dumb layer to new dumb layer but eventually he comes back to “you wouldn’t like me when I’m angry,” (of course, let’s forget that it took YEARS for them to codify that in the comics themselves, but I digress) which is a pretty darn good jumping off point for comic book mayhem.