MOVIES

One man's search for the credible Hulk

By Mike Sutter
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Thursday, May 08, 2008

In the 1970s, the Hulk was my inner-life avatar.

My brother collected the A-list Marvel franchise characters: Captain America, Iron Man, the X-Men. But my guy was the Hulk. I identified with his persecution complex, his repressed fury. The Hulk was an underdog, a B-lister, too emotional for polite supersociety.

I bought all the comics I could afford on my dollar-a-week allowance, but I was no comics geek. I didn't know who drew the Hulk. I didn't know who wrote the stories. What I did know was this: The Hulk raged across my mental drive-in when I had to pick up after my sister's dog, when the juvenile offender across the street threw crab apples at our car, when the Earth was threatened by Maximus the Mad.

What I also knew was this: Marvel went and switched Hulks in midseries. Dick York became Dick Sargent, and the bewitched green pseudo-Darrin fumbled through a world I never knew.

Granted, there were identity issues from the beginning. The original monster (inset) brought to life in 1962 by comics savant Jack Kirby and Marvel founder Stan Lee was gray instead of green, a pants-ripping man-thing with a tiny thatch of tomato-stem hair. But the Hulk I knew best was the 1968 incarnation, when Marvel resurrected him as a gamma-green doofus sporting tousled hair, perfect teeth and a normal head-to-body-size ratio.

But my Hulk morphed from a brutishly handsome leading man into a cartoonish goon with a little tiny head somewhere along the way. And in a comic-book universe where physical changes could be explained away with artistic brio — space-time accidents, bolts of plasma, Restylane — we simpler-minded Hulk-olytes drifted in an unstable orbit while Marvel shuffled the names in the staff box.

So as "The Incredible Hulk" — a "requel" unrelated to the Ang Lee-ridden 2003 Eric Bana version — gets ready to roll this June with Edward Norton, my trading-faces anxiety builds. Caped Crusader fans, can I get a "holy bait and switch"? For me, Adam West is Batman forever. Not Michael Keaton. Not George Clooney. Not Val Kilmer. Maybe not Christian Bale (I'll let "The Dark Knight" decide that one in July).

And unless the new Hulk movie produces a computer-generated monster more believable than "Alf," I'm left with the TV-show team of Bill Bixby/Lou Ferrigno to carry the Banner/Hulk standard. And that will make me angry. And you wouldn't like me when I'm angry.