HULK SMASH!
Shaler artist highlights green guy’s greatest hits
This week in 1962, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby of Marvel Comics debuted “The Incredible Hulk.” From its opening panel, “The Hulk” was a cautionary tale about Cold War paranoia, the fallibility of technology and the dangers of scientific hubris.
While the Cuban Missile Crisis would put the world on edge later that year, the Hulk managed to embody the feeling of imminent apocalypse that had lingered over the West since the use of the first atomic weapons against Japan ended World War II.
Many years later, Lee would claim that creating a man who turns into a monster was as much an attempt to create an allpowerful antihero who liked to smash things as it was to update Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein for the atomic age. The subtitle to Shelley’s classic fit the Hulk perfectly: “The Modern Prometheus.”
More than anything, Lee and Kirby wanted a character who took as much pleasure in beating up aliens, super villains and rival heroes as destroying American tanks sent to hassle him in the gamma ray-bombarded deserts of the American Southwest.
When it came to violence, the Hulk was agnostic. He was beyond nationalism or simpleminded heroics. That was a dramatic break with the prevailing superhero ethic of the times.
Because it was difficult to maintain the neutral gray skin tone Lee and Kirby preferred during the printing process, the Hulk’s original drabness gave way to the iconic green complexion we know today.
But even the vagaries of the printing process is emblematic of the character’s transformation over six decades under dozens of writers and artists, said Shaler resident Jim Rugg.
He is the writer, illustrator, letterer, colorist and mastermind behind the newly released “Hulk: Grand Design,” which follows local cartoonists Ed Piskor’s groundbreaking “XMen: Grand Design” in 2017 and Tom Scioli’s “Fantastic Four: Grand Design” in 2019.
As Rugg makes clear, the Hulk phenomenon is just as much about the character’s changing look over the decades as it was about story arcs and the creative teams that brought
the character to life.
“You look at the Hulk and realize he’s one of the biggest characters to come out of the 20th century,” Rugg, 45, said. “Why? What’s the appeal? What makes this character special and have lasting impact?”
“HGD is coming out on the 60th anniversary of the Hulk’s introduction,” he said. “When you think about how many comic books have been published and how many pages that covers, it’s a challenge to read that much material.”
But read them he did — hundreds of Hulk appearances in his own comic and hundreds more in other Marvel titles. He read the complete run of Hulk comics three times, taking meticulous notes on index cards and painstakingly charting story arcs that could fit into his retelling of the Hulk mythos for a new generation.
“HGD” — two 40-page issues set for release in April — isn’t a reboot of the Hulk series. Rugg isn’t adding to the character’s decadeslong narrative with original stories. What he is doing with “Hulk: Grand Design: Monster” and “Hulk: Grand Design: Madness” is archival work in his own inimitable style that brings decades of selected story arcs into chronological order. What makes the final cut is what he considers crucial to both the character’s evolution and popularity.
“I want to make that history accessible to new readers and to folks who have been reading it since the ’60s,” he said. “I want to hit these stories and see if there is one big character arc, an overarching story that you see emerge over decades.”
Rugg approaches the project like a biography that includes comics and outposts in popular culture. So along with artist Herb Trimpe’s multiyear runs as the Hulk’s primary artist in the ’60s and ’70s, he looks at the artist’s iconic Rolling Stone cover, the Japanese manga series in the 1970s and the TV series starring Bill Bixby and Lou Ferrigno as part of the reason why the character’s appeal grew outside the comic community.
“Hulk was a character I connected to as a kid. When I was 6, I had a Hulk cereal bowl and a Hulk cup way before I saw a Hulk comicbook,” he said. “I would read the origin on the back: ‘ The most powerful mortal who ever walked the Earth.’ I would stare at that every morning before school. I just saw the Hulk as a monster.” Rugg wasn’t the typical comic book fan; he was attracted more to the characters’ art/design than their stories. His sensibilities were more like Andy Warhol than Jack Kirby. He read standard superhero comics for years, but his tastes evolved toward alternative/ independent comics and away from the superhero offerings of Marvel and DC.
Rugg’s art accommodated a more independent comic aesthetic that went beyond Spandex and superpowers. When the opportunity to do “HGD” came up because of the success of Piskor and Scioli’s groundbreaking X-Men and Fantastic Four books, Rugg was ready with a pitch for Marvel.
“This was a dream project,” he said, noting that if Marvel had turned his pitch down, there was no backup plan.
“Ed had done his X-Men book and Tom had finished Fantastic Four about the time I started Hulk, so I had seen what they had done. Amazing books, but also books where you could see clearly the editors gave them a lot of freedom to do the thing [they] do,” he said. “I had the same experience, so when I say dream project, it really was.”
“HGD” reflects the cartoonist’s love for experimentation and mixed-media techniques to achieve the look and feel of older comics especially. He uses color pencils, markers, digital processes, ballpoint ink pens, brushes and scans old sources and copies old covers to evoke particular time periods in the Hulk’s history.
“This is not ‘The Dark Knight Returns’ where you’re reinventing the character or adding an adult angst,” he said. “This is a celebration. I went into this knowing it was the 60th anniversary of the character. I hope it’s a coffee table book when it’s collected.
“I hope it’s a book that if you don’t have comics and you’re not a collector, but you love the Hulk, that this is part of your collection.”
On Wednesday, Jim Rugg will sign copies of “Hulk: Grand Design” at Phantom of the Attic in Oakland from 3 to 6 p.m. On Saturday, he will be at New Dimension Comics (Pittsburgh Mills) from noon to 3 p.m. Information: www.jimrugg.com.