NEAR MYTHS: THE THING VS. THE IMMORTAL HULK (2019)

 

Though "TTVTIH" (FF vol 6 #12) doesn't have the symbolic discourse of a mythcomic, it does ring in one of the best takes on that near-mythic question dear to the hearts of Marvelites: "who's stronger, the Hulk or the Thing?"

 

Now, in a technical sense the real question wasn't "who was stronger." If Lee and Kirby had been in any way ambivalent when the two characters first met in FF #12, "The Hulk vs. the Thing" in FF #25 made it abundantly clear that the larger Hulk had the strength advantage. The real question was "what can the Thing, the FF's heavy hitter, do to beat an unbeatable adversary?" Issue #25, which focuses mostly on the Thing and the Hulk, and its second part in #26, which brings in the Avengers as well, is practically a masterclass from Jack Kirby in the depiction of dynamic combat-scenes (even despite the ham-fisted inks of George Bell). During the same period, the Thing often had battles with other powerhouses, such as the Sub-Mariner and the Silver Surfer, and some of these battles were repeated. But without checking I'd guess about 10-15 later artists attempted to exploit the suspense of a Thing-Hulk battle once again. Some of these latter-day battles were adequate, and others mediocre, but none of them even came close to the high standard of Lee and Kirby-- until 2019.

The great cover by Esad Ribic presages what turns out to be an exceptional story built around yet another contest between Orange Guy and Green Guy, drawn by Sean Izaakse and scripted by Dan Slott. And, almost unbelievably, Slott makes a silk purse out of one of Marvel's hoariest "sow-ear" plots: the one where the villainous Puppet Master uses a radioactive puppet to force one hero to attack another hero.

 Now, unlike many writers who resorted to the "Puppet Master plot," Slott set up a special connotation to the villain's actions. The Puppet Master, currently in prison, has become aware that his stepdaughter Alicia intends to marry Ben Grimm, one of the evildoer's worst enemies. So the irate puppet-maker takes control of the Hulk and sics the behemoth on the Thing when the hero is beginning his honeymoon with his new bride. Thus, the villain's motives are much more personal than usual. In addition, in contrast to every other such story I've read, this time the Hulk is aware of being controlled, but he has such a long-standing grudge against the Thing that he somewhat cooperates with Puppet Master. Slott does this, I believe, because when he comes up with a unique way for Ben Grimm to win his battle, the writer wants readers to feel like the hero finally beat his green-skinned nemesis "fair and square"-- that is, with the Hulk largely in control of his faculties, even while being controlled.

And how does Ben win? Well, even though I don't have a large readership, I won't say, on the chance it might compel even one person to check out THE THING VS THE IMMORTAL HULK. And "not revealing the ending" is a courtesy I almost never extend to any other thing I've ever reviewed.

TTVTIH doesn't top THVTT. But it's now a close second.                   

TO BE HULK-KORRECTED

 Useless boomer-kid recollection #337: back in the Silver Age of Comics, a few HULK comics, upon ending on a cliffhanger, would end with the goofy phrase, "To Be Hulk-inued." Hence, my title.

So on the CRIVENS blog, I was talking with Kid on a response-thread about the evolution of the HULK comic in the sixties. I wished I could have found a certain old article by Will Murray, in which he discussed the Hulk's sixties career in detail. But not only did I not remember where it appeared, I was briefly on a listserve with Murray, and when I asked him where he'd done the piece, even HE did not recall. So I did my own quickie history of the period of the Hulk's career in between the cancellation of his own title and his getting a berth in TALES TO ASTONISH.

So HULK 6 is dated March 63. It's roughly 7 months later that Stan and Jack have Hulk join the Avengers. Two months after that, they do a callback to FF#3, where the Torch splits from his group--- but the guys keep things unpredictable. Not does the Hulk not rejoin the super-group, he becomes an ally of a Public Enemy, the Sub-Mariner, in AVENGERS 3. (That by itself might've got the pardon revoked.) But after #3, Hulk-- still more or less "Tough-Guy Hulk"-- doesn't do much of anything. The Avengers supposedly keep looking for him but somehow don't manage to cross paths with Greenie until FF #25-26, starting in April 64. Was Stan thinking about launching the TTA series even back then, which began in Oct 64? In the FF stories, I might argue that Hulk is more obsessive than he is in the "Tough Guy" stories, getting into a massive snit because his kid-partner has supposedly started hanging out with the WWII living legend. SPIDEY 14 follows two months later, which also might be advance publicity for the TTA series. One issue before the Hulk officially gets his own berth, he also fights Giant-Man in Sept 64, suggesting to me that Stan may've thought that even though Greenjeans had been cancelled before, he still couldn't do worse than Gi/Ant-Man. And from here, it looks like Stan's policy of farming the Hulk out in various features built up reader curiosity about him, improving TTA's sales enough to jettison Henry Pym-- who certainly went on to a better class of stories once he rejoined the Avengers than he'd ever had in his own title.

17 December 2025 at 16:51

All the dates are correct, but I'm not sure I was correct about the Hulk-promotion being Stan Lee's idea. ALTER EGO #60 (2020) contains an overview of the career of Timely/Atlas/Marvel publisher Martin Goodman, and in the course of said overview, author Will Murray (him again) paraphrases an unsourced Ditko quote:    

Circa 1964, Steve Ditko recalled Lee telling him that Goodman directed him to revive three underutilized characters, the Hulk, Sub-Mariner, and the old pulp hero Ka-Zar. Lee gave Ditko his choice of which to work on...    

Now, I absolutely believe that Ditko quoted what he recalled Lee saying. That doesn't necessarily mean that Lee was accurately reporting what Goodman had told him, though there would seem to be no obvious reason to prevaricate on the subject of his boss's commands. So Goodman probably said something along those lines.

At the same time, the overview gives evidence that Goodman only intermittently interacted with editor Lee about the operation of Goodman's comics-line, so the statement seems a little anomalous. All we know, as crusty old fans, is that Goodman's bottom line was always whether or not he could make a comic temporarily popular, preferably by following a trend or imitating a show from a more mainstream medium.

So I'll break down the three characters Lee mentioned to Ditko.

What would have prompted Goodman to stump for more Sub-Mariner exposure? By early 1964 Namor had become a regular featured player in FANTASTIC FOUR for about two years and had appeared in various other Marvel comics. Still, I don't get any sense of a huge fannish demand for a new SUB-MARINER comic, and not until 1965 does Namor displace Giant-Man in TTA. It does make one wonder if Stan would have put Namor, rather than Hulk, into TTA had Ditko said he wanted to draw the sea prince.

Why Ka-Zar? Unlike Namor, the jungle man hadn't been anything but a backup feature in Golden Age comics, and even his own pulp had only lasted three issues. But maybe in 1964 Goodman looked around at the still popular Tarzan movies, and at the Dell/Gold Key comics for the character, so the publisher just thought Ka-Zar could coattail on his inspiration. That at least might explain why Ka-Zar started showing up as an occasional guest star in DAREDEVIL-- though the first of the DD appearances didn't occur until late 1965.   

The Hulk is a little odd, though, because his only comic had not sold well. One possible motive might be that Hammer Films was still producing Frankenstein films in the early 1960s, and maybe Goodman thought kids would still buy HULK comics because he looked like the Monster. As I said, Stan almost certainly made the decision to stick the cancelled colossus into the AVENGERS in late 1963, and then to have Greenskin depart the super-group in the second issue. But the only result of Hulk's defection is that he teams up with Sub-Mariner in AVENGERS #3 (dated Jan 64), and when that coalition breaks up, the Hulk wanders off and not much happens to him until the FF issues (dated April 64). 

So if the Hulk's appearances in FF and SPIDER-MAN were meant as advance hype for the TTA series, dated for October of that year, that only gives Lee roughly three months to start pouring on the juice for the Hulk, maybe to make sure that Greenie's second shot at stardom would get every chance to succeed-- which it did. Another alternate explanation for Goodman's Hulk-positivity could just be that AVENGERS #3 sold really well and the publisher wanted to jump on that success. I don't think for a moment that Goodman would have cared about the character for any reason but that of sales potential. But Stan could still have made the decision to take things slow and build up the Hulk's profile in Marvel's best sellers, because he appreciated the Hulk's dramatic potential and thought he could do good, profitable stories with the character.   

The only other nugget from the ALTER EGO piece is a mention that when 1950s Goodman found out about an impending WYATT EARP TV show, he had Lee launch an EARP comic that came out a few months before the show hit the airwaves. This sounds a little counter-intuitive, trying to coattail on a show that hasn't appeared yet. But apparently Goodman did the same thing with Atlas' YELLOW CLAW feature, which also appeared on stands a month or two before the airing of the ADVENTURES OF FU MANCHU teleseries.

CURIOSITIES: PRETENTIOUSNESS, THY NAME IS MARVEL!

 I've been re-reading a fair number of 1970s HULK comics lately, mostly written by Roy Thomas or Steve Englehart. There aren't any great breakthroughs except for (as I critiqued a long time back) the debut of Marvel's "Valkyrie" as a character independent of her creatrix The Enchantress. But I did find myself more attentive now than I was then to weird minutiae-- like the attempts of writers to associate their kids' comics with adult literature. 

In fact, the title of that 1971 Hulk-Valkyrie yarn, "They Shoot Hulks, Don't They?" is a good example of such pretentiousness. The story has nothing to do with either the 1935 Horace McCoy novel or the 1969 Sydney Pollak film, though author Roy Thomas certainly counted on readers to be somewhat aware of the Pollak movie of two years previous. Rather, "Hulks" is a play on a topic raised in a 1970 Tom Wolfe story, "Radical Chic," in which wealthy white people dabbled in "radical" causes in order to seem fashionable. The HULK tale involves similar superficial Richie Riches taking up the "cause" of the Green Goliath, which turns violent when the Enchantress projects the power of The Valkyrie into a young and somewhat obnoxious feminist. I don't know if in 1971 I learned about the Wolfe story in Marvel's own letters-page, but it seems likely. But the references both to Pollak and to Wolfe were all in good fun; I doubt anyone thought them overly pretentious-- unlike the following reference from the very next issue, HULK #143.

Back in 1971 I don't remember thinking anything of Thomas's VERY pretentious reference to William Faulkner for a very logical reason: I hadn't read the novel SANCTUARY then and did not do so until at least the 1990s. But now that I reread this throwaway "apology to Faulkner," my main thought was-- "Really, Roy? Did you want to impress readers who also had not read SANCTUARY all that badly?" Without driving the topic into the ground, there are no similarities between the two "Sanctuaries."   

It would have been far more appropriate to write, "With apologies to Victor Hugo." To the extent 20th-century readers ever thought about the Christian custom of persons seeking "sanctuary" in Catholic churches, most if not all probably would have recalled the expression of said custom in various movie adaptations of Victor Hugo's NOTRE DAME DE PARIS. Not that there's a huge likeness between that novel and the story in HULK #143. Bruce Banner, on the run from the military, accepts the "sanctuary" of diplomatic immunity extended to him by the ever affable Victor Von Doom. The "sanctuary" plays a very tiny role in the two-part story, which is mostly another tale in which a noxious supervillain seeks to co-opt the Jade Giant's power; no better or worse than a hundred like it. 

But still, Roy-- if you were going to make a pretentious literary quote, quote the right author! 

     

MYTHCOMICS: "PYRRHIC VICTORY" (INCREDIBLE HULK #344, 1988)

 

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The first panel of the story "Pyrrhic Victory" explains the well-known phrase via the Plutarch quote that gave rise to the idea of a pointless triumph. Later in the story, the phrase comes up again in the reflections of a military base commander. The commander's forces are getting wiped out by the pawns of the insidious super-villain The Leader, and so "pyrrhic victory" doesn't really apply to the military man's situation. Arguably the phrase might have applicability elsewhere in the story, but the Leader's vile plot is not the main subject of the story. Nor are the actions of his super-powered henchmen, Rock and Redeemer, who apparently take their names from an old Christian hymn. Most of the Leader's actions in "Victory" amount to Peter David and Todd MacFarlane wrapping up the various plot-threads they inherited from former writer Al Milgrom, as I covered in more depth here. Within two more issues for INCREDIBLE HULK, the first phase of David's long tenure on the feature would end-- a phase I might more accurately call the "D/M" collaboration, since I'm convinced that David and MacFarlane were equally important in the history of the Gray Hulk. The two of them weren't the first to create a Gray Hulk, who appeared only in the first issue of the Hulk's debut, nor were they the first to revive that iteration of the character. But together they created the first Gray Hulk anyone in fandom cared about-- and it was because of issues like HULK #344.

But to make the New Gray Hulk interesting, the D/M team borrowed a lot more from the Lee/Kirby creation than just the monster-hero's coloring. The two panels above from INCREDIBLE HULK #1 (1962) show Lee and Kirby trying to cobble together their new myth from many old ones-- the Frankenstein Monster, the moon-cursed Wolf Man, Mister Hyde, and-- purely in terms of the sexual politics of the character-- both King Kong and Beauty and the Beast. Betty Ross is never the least bit attracted to the Hulk as Beauty is to Beast, nor does he want her, since to him she's just a constant reminder of his weakling alter ego. Betty fears Hulk the way Ann Darrow fears the illimitable brute force of Kong, a mythic exaggeration of the discrepancy between male and female power. Betty is more attracted to Banner, a man whose character seems a complete opposite to her gung-ho military father, and a man who breaks down weeping in front of her. Yet even before she's even met the Hulk, who's initially just a presence she's heard described by her father's soldiers, she's seen above intuiting the connection between Banner and the Hulk, and yet also sensing "sadness" in the gruesome gray creature.            

Betty Ross remained in the Hulk's orbit for most of the character's existence up to 1988, and whatever mythic potential she might've possessed quickly devolved as she became just "the girl." But one thing the D/M team evolved independently of any predecessors: the idea of having Betty become pregnant by Bruce Banner. I'm not sure how much David might have borrowed from others regarding the idea that Banner was emotionally stunted thanks to childhood abuse. However, the idea that Betty can't bring herself to share the momentous news of her condition with Banner seems novel.

And so, although Betty doesn't intend to tell the Hulk her news any more than she plans to tell Banner, she feels the need to connect with the emotion-filled brute within the repressed Banner. Such psychodrama would have been impossible with Dumb Green Hulk, but it works perfectly with Cruel Gray Hulk. Again, his main attitude toward Betty Ross is much the same as it is toward his alter ego: both of them have tried to erase him from existence. At her insistence he takes far away from the other support-characters for a private talk, and he chooses to take her to the wintry peak of a mountain, letting her suffer for the sake of the connection she wants. And yet, in the above page, he brings up an incident that Betty did not; that in a previous story, Betty was injured by being in Banner's arms when he made his change to his monster-self. Clearly Hulk doesn't just despise Banner for physical weakness, but also for all the human failings to which his other self is vulnerable. And then there's this extraordinary conclusion...

   

       
   

David may have orchestrated most of this interlude, in which Betty demands that Hulk reveal "Bruce's real love and passion," despite all of the man-monster's blustering. Still, this sequence also shows a quality for which MacFarlane was almost never celebrated: the soulfulness of a brute "tamed" by the one power that even the mightiest man cannot conquer: the woman's power to bring forth new life. 

Sadly, after "Victory" Betty takes a back seat to the D/M team finishing up the Old Order of Things, before MacFarlane left for greener pastures and David orchestrated the second phase of his HULK tenure. There's one interesting moment where Betty tells another perennial support-character, Rick Jones, that she might not have the baby. The A-word is not spoken, and she does not justify her sentiments, though any reader would probably conclude that she had qualms about birthing a child with gamma-genes. But due to the events of #346, the Gray Hulk disappears and later resurfaces in a new life, and much later the pregnancy is terminated, so to speak, so that there was no clear line between the original plot of "Betty is Enciente" and its later developments.

As for the story's title, as I said, it barely if at all applies to the military battle for which it's invoked. But one might say that Betty Ross achieves a "victory" of sorts in that she wins the psychodrama-conflict between her and the Hulk. But that was just one engagement, and since the war proved inconclusive, maybe like the legions of Pyrrhus, she lost almost as much as she won. 

THOUGHTS ON PETER DAVID

 I wasn't sure I'd write anything about Peter David following his passing on May 25 of this year. Though I once saw a fan fulsomely compare David's comics work to that of Steve Gerber, I'd probably see more comparison to Len Wein. With both writers, I read a fair amount of work that I liked, but probably more than I wasn't crazy about. But then, Steve Gerber himself said (and I paraphrase from his JOURNAL interview) that everyone who makes writing his career inevitably turns out some dreck in addition to some good stuff. Every invested reader makes his own estimation as to whether the good stuff outweighs the dreck or vice versa.

This principle inheres even with specialized criticism like mine. A writer who follows certain formulas in order to keep the checks coming may or may not be able to keep up an interesting flow of either correlations, cogitations, or both together. Said writer is more likely to concentrate on the lateral virtues, since those are the factors that draw in committed buyers. From what I know of David's comics-work, he almost always devoted his efforts to what I called "the basic serial," defined thusly here:

The basic serial in most iterations is not meant to possess an overriding structure. Rather only its constituent parts, be they short stories, long arcs, or other forms, usually display the sort of patterns that can be judged in terms of concrescence.     

Yet I must admit that I probably didn't have as thorough a knowledge of David's work as with others who worked on long-term serials. During the 1980s, when David rose to comic-book prominence, I bought none of his long-term serials-- HULK, AQUAMAN or SUPERGIRL-- as they appeared for purchase. I only picked up odd issues from quarter-boxes and later re-read them in correct sequence. So this week I decided to read through the first twenty-something issues of David's famous 12-year run on INCREDIBLE HULK, to gather a better sense of what he'd accomplished and how it differed from what others had been doing, that had resulted in HULK being a low-selling Marvel title.

Before David became the regular scripter, he was preceded by Al Milgrom, who set up two ongoing plot-threads which would also dominate David's first creative phase on the title. One was that Bruce Banner became associated with a SHIELD-sponsored project, The Hulkbusters, as  did his girlfriend Betty Ross and his perpetual foe General Ross-- all devoted to finding ways to counteract the Hulk's outbursts of violence. Another was that during one experiment to cancel the Hulk's power over Banner, a new "Gray Hulk" was born in HULK #324 (1986), somewhat smaller and less strong than Green Hulk. Milgrom clearly meant this Hulk as a callback to the very first issues of the character's debut, where the heroic monster had some brief moments of potential villainy and seemed more werewolf-like, transforming only at night. David collaborated with artist Dwayne Turner on one issue, HULK #327, but Milgrom remained the main writer until issue #330, which concluded with the death of General Ross. That issue debuted the work of the artist who would remain teamed with David during the aforementioned "first phase:" Todd MacFarlane, who had yet to become a top Marvel artist via his tenure on SPIDER-MAN, much less becoming even more generally famous for Image Comics and his feature SPAWN. 

I've never seen either David or MacFarlane go into detail about their pivotal collaboration. Given how the two of them feuded when David started negatively reviewing MacFarlane's Image works in the fan press around 1993, I doubt either of them would have yielded a balanced account of that interaction. But my critical impression is that both of them, though thrown together by circumstance, shared a desire to use Milgrom's Gray Hulk concept to give Banner's alter ego a meaner, more visceral edge. Milgrom may have intended to do something similar himself, but together David and MacFarlane managed to give the HULK title a more unpredictable, horror-movie mood, lasting from #331 to #346, with only one issue drawn by another artist. 

Throughout the first phase, Gray Hulk continued to contend against the Hulkbusters and grisly villains like Half-Life. But in this sequence of stories the dominant evildoer was a new incarnation of The Leader-- who, in keeping with the increased use of violence in 1980s commercial comics, was also no longer playing with kid gloves. Indeed, the first phase culminates with The Leader putting his old enemy through an emotional wringer by threatening to blow up a small town-- which he does, killing five thousand inhabitants just to produce a few gamma-mutants. This end sequence showed some decent myth-content-- not least the way the Leader's private endeavors mirror those of the government's plan to stockpile gamma bombs-- but it didn't meet my criteria for a mythcomic. 

I did find one mythcomic within the David-MacFarlane run, which I'll analyze in a separate essay. All of the Hulkbusters storylines were wrapped up in #346, except for the little matter of Betty Ross's revelation that she was pregnant with Banner's child. Yet, instead of following that plot-thread, David launched a new chapter in Gray Hulk's life. The character walked away from his old rampaging existence and took on the identity of "Mister Fixit," a bodyguard for a Las Vegas casino-owner. This was arguably the most famous development in David's long HULK run, and though I don't remember getting much out of this new phase, I'd have to give the series a re-read for further consideration.  I'm not sure what David had in mind for Betty's pregnancy, but as Wikipedia notes, David's editor dictated that Bruce and Betty would not have a child, and so she lost the infant by miscarriage. Ironically, David had Betty consider abortion of her child, who might or might not have carried gamma-genes, though the "A" word was never directly spoken. I mention David's original notion to spotlight it as one of many attempts to aim a commercial comic not at the vanishing audience of children but at older hardcore fans.

For whatever it might be worth, though I'm not David's biggest fan, I did assign to him one other mythcomic, discussed here. But that was something of a one-off. I appreciate that David vastly improved the reputation of the Incredible Hulk, albeit in what I'm curently calling "ontocosmic" rather than "epicosmic" terms, so I'm glad he did at one good Hulk-myth that ranks with the Lee-and-Kirby origin.                                  

NEAR-MYTHS: "VALHALLA CAN WAIT" (DEFENDERS #66-68, 1978)

 

An online review of DEFENDERS #66 reminded me that it's been a very long time since I first surveyed the early iterations of Marvel Comics' first female powerhouse, The Valkyrie. 

When I began THE ARCHETYPAL ARCHIVE in December 2007, I didn't do many reviews. The first two I later included in my list of mythcomics when I finally committed to that ongoing project, LINUS THE RAIN KING and TO DREAM THE IMPOSSIBLE ADVENTURE. Following that, I devoted a series of posts to the evolution of Marvel's Valkyrie, and, somewhat tangentially, her alleged "creator" The Enchantress. Those posts were:

DAUGHTER OF LOVE AND DEATH-- devoted to the first appearance of the Enchantress and her paramour the Executioner, this analysis also counted as a mythcomic.

FEMALE TROUBLE-- This was about the AVENGERS story in which Valkyrie was supposedly "created" by Enchantress. Not a mythcomic.

WOMEN BEHAVING BADLY-- This talked about the provenance of the two mortal women who became the vessels of the Valkyrie's spirit, Barbara Norris and Samantha Parrington. By my current criteria, none of the Barbara stories are mythcomics, but the HULK story with Samantha, "They Shoot Hulks, Don't They?," does count as such.

KNIGHT MOVES-- And here I discoursed again on both the Enchantress and her involved history with the Black Knight character, and then concludes at last with the events of DEFENDERS #4, in which the persona and power of the Valkyrie was imposed upon the mortal body of Barbara Norris. No mythcomics here.

I noted in the last essay that Valkyrie became "the glue" that held the Defenders group together from then on, for she was a tabula rasa who was not grounded in being anything but a "Scandinavian superhero." I expressed some intention to examine her "gender-kinship with other women," but I never did, and I think it's because this aspect of her character never signified anything but a particular form of "valkyrie-kryptonite." And, having recounted all of my analyses of Early Valkyrie, I can at least comment on the significance of DEFENDERS #66--

--which, perhaps fortunately for me, isn't all that much. The three-part story whose third part has the sporty title "Valhalla Can Wait" receives the cover-copy, "At Last! Valkyrie Enters Asgard!" I'll take the Marvel raconteurs at their word. When I read the story back in the day, I certainly had the impression that this was the first time she'd been in Thor-country. I believe it's also the first time any writer suggested that Valkyrie had an Asgardian body to match the Asgardian spirit that Enchantress had manipulated. However, David Kraft's script for "Valhalla" is extremely rushed. Kraft tells us that somehow the villain Ollerus not only gets hold of Valkyrie's comatose Asgardian form, he manages to transfer the spirit of Barbara-- which has apparently been slumbering in the body controlled by the Valkyrie-persona-- and put Barbara in Val's ACTUAL form.

This could have been a fun bit of body-switching, both in terms of drama, comedy, or both, but Kraft rushes past this potential. He doesn't even do a good job of establishing that Barbara is still something of a madwoman due to her experiences with the Nameless One. Instead, Ollerus focuses on using his phony Val to persuade the Defenders to fight Ollerus' rival Hela for possession of the Asgardian death-realm. 

Ollerus is of course defeated, and the whole "lords-dueling-over-the-death-realm" thing never acquires any mythic significance. If there is a myth here, it might be a myth of exorcism. By story's end Kraft tells us (though we do not see it) that Valkyrie's immortal body with its mortal spirit will join her master in the crappy afterlife of Niffelheim, while Valkyrie will return to Earth with her immortal spirit in Barbara's transformed mortal body. 

And there I believe Kraft leaves things for the remainder of his tenure. Eventually another writer tackles the already complicated Valkyrie-Enchantress narrative and makes it even more complicated, and if time permits I suppose I may eventually delve into this story-line as well. So "Valhalla," despite being very confusing on many points, still earns some status as a near-myth that started a major retcon of the Valkyrie character.

I THINK ICON, I THINK ICON

Icon: in semiotics, a sign characterized by iconicity, the resemblance to what it signifies

Since the early days of this blog I've flirted with many terms for the various presences inhabiting fictional world-scapes. I've called them  focal and non-focal, centric and eccentric, coes and subs, and finally, superordinate and subordinate presences. But I've stuck with the term "presences" since I first started writing about such things, because the term was the best one I could find for all the various fictional figures that can influence the outcome of a narrative: not just human beings but also flora, fauna, environments, imaginary beings both sentient and non-sentient, artifacts created by humans or by similar entities, or even discarnate forces like "The Crazy Ray" of Rene Clair's 1924 film.

But now, before I write the next section of COORDINATING INTERORDINATION, I have to specify a better term than "presences," because "presences" is not good enough to imply the matrix of motives that will cause one authorial will to emulate the products of another authorial will. What I formerly called "presences" I will now call "icons."

Though my above quote from Wikipedia uses the term "icon" as it appears in modern semiotics, I'm not invoking that discipline in any way. I would imagine that when some semiotician decided to import the term into his system, he was roughly thinking about how religious icons were supposed to represent either religious figures or aspects of religious belief, as opposed, say, to figures whose resemblance to what they represented was more abstract.

For the purpose of my discussion of interordination, an icon is any kind of strongly definable entity in a given narrative. Icons are either superordinate, meaning that the action of the narrative centers upon the nature of the subordinate icon, or subordinate, meaning that these icons exist to support and explicate the mythology of the superordinate icon. The superordinate icon is the icon-type which later authors most often seek to copy from earlier authors, whether those earlier authors established an earlier icon as part of a legal franchise or as a figure in informal folklore. When a later author emulates the subordinate icon produced by an earlier author, it's usually because said icon generated some level of special popularity -- the Joker, the Wicked Witch of the West. 

Now, popularity is not strictly necessary. It's possible for even the most minor figures to be adapted for whatever purpose the derivative author wishes to accomplish. For instance, in all likelihood no playgoer watching HAMLET ever gave much thought to the extremely minor characters of Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern. However, in 1966 Tom Stoppard made these toss-off icons into the stars of his absurdist play ROSENKRANTZ AND GUILDENSTERN ARE DEAD, and within that play, these formerly nugatory characters become the stars of the show.

The base rule for an icon to be "strongly definable" is that the icon must either be given a name in the story or must have some characteristic or perform some action for which the icon can be named. For instance, the giant molluscs in the 1957 film THE MONSTER THAT CHALLENGED THE WORLD have no name as such. In Jeff Rovin's ENCYCLOPEDIA OF MONSTERS, he chose to denote the creatures by the action described in the title, even though the title was inaccurate in suggesting the presence of only one monster, so a better description for that assemblage of mutants would be one based on their species and inordinate size: "The Giant Molluscs" or the like. However, icons that really do very little beyond stereotypical actions don't merit iconic titles, so that no one bothered to label "that cop who shot at Spider-Man in that one Romita story" or "the 553rd lion killed by Tarzan." 

In a practical sense, even an unnamed icon must have some special identity on which a critic can hang some distinction. In INCREDIBLE HULK #1 (1962), Lee and Kirby devoted one panel to an anonymous soldier who gives a name to the big green monster who shows up on the soldier's base. Many years later, because the nameless soldier had that distinction, writer Peter David constructed a short, stand-alone story about "the man who named the Hulk" for one of the HULK annuals-- which one, I'm not sure at the moment. In my 2014 essay OBJECTS GIVEN LUSTER, I defined the focal presence of the EC story "The Destruction of the Earth" (WEIRD SCIENCE #14) as the Earth itself, since the story spends most of its time showing how the planet will be annihilated, while in contrast all of the human characters in the story remain bare stereotypes. So if I were making a designation of the story's focal icon, I would concoct a distinctive name for that version of the planet, such as "The Destroyed Earth."

In my next essay it will become evident as to why a more felicitous term was necessary, when I start expounding on the concept of emulation.

NULL-MYTHS: SPIDER-MAN * THE HULK AT THE WINTER OLYMPICS (1980)

 Since I just reviewed CONTEST OF CHAMPIONS, I took a quick first-time look at the Marvel Treasury Edition that preceded it, #25, in which Spider-Man and the Hulk found themselves brought into a conflict centered around the Winter Olympics. 

It's an even more average story than CONTEST, with the same story-concept stemming from Steven Grant, Mark Gruenwald and Bill Mantlo, with Mantlo scripting dialogue and the always dependable Herb Trimpe supplying pencils. The two heroes are largely pawns in a war between two underground-dwelling villains, Queen Kala and the Mole Man, and the story, unlike a lot of the Treasury stories, is firmly in mainstream continuity, following up a story featuring both villains in the pages of the FANTASTIC FOUR. For good measure Mantlo also thrown in another Lee-Kirby creation, the subterranean Lava Men, as well as three real-life Olympic champions turned into super-powered combatants and a handful of mutant characters whom I don't think ever appeared again. So the crossover of Marvel's major down-under characters is the main feature of interest here.

R.I.P. MARIE SEVERIN AND GARY FRIEDRICH

Synchronicity strikes thrice. On August 30 of this year, two comics professionals, best known for  their Silver and Bronze Age works, passed away. Both had endured lingering health problems (a stroke for Marie Severin, Parkinson's for Gary Friedrich).

An additional odd "meaningful coincidence:" Severin and Friedrich had briefly collaborated, principally (if not exclusively) on Marvel's INCREDIBLE HULK feature right around the time that it shifted from the "split-book" TALES TO ASTONISH to its own title, which has continued in one form or another since then.

A third coincidence meaningful only to me: just yesterday, an anonymous commenter on my blog called my attention to an error in this essay, wherein I'd written about a run of SUB-MARINER comics (#9-13, not long after Subby departed the title he'd formerly shared with the Green Goliath). The commenter pointed out that I'd credited John Buscema with the pencil-art on that sequence of stories, when said art was actually produced for two issues by Gene Colan and three by-- Marie Severin.

And finally, though it's in no way a coincidence, my personal acquaintance with the Hulk in his own feature started with that period in which Severin and Friedrich briefly collaborated.

Technically, the last issue of TALES TO ASTONISH, before it was re-titled THE INCREDIBLE HULK, was a collaboration by Severin-- who had already done assorted earlier stories-- and Stan Lee. TALES TO ASTONISH #101 was the first part of a two-part story, and the first part was scribed by Stan Lee, who hurled the bellicose behemoth into the fantasy-otherworld of Thor's Asgard.

So this was my first exposure to the Hulk in his own series, beginning with a killer scene wherein the monster-hero thrashes Heimdall, guardian of Asgard's Rainbow Bridge.

Gary Friedrich picked up scripting-duties for the second part of the mini-epic, which, among other things, involved Bruce Banner being saved from death by two of Marvel's dastardly demigods, the Enchantress and the Executioner.

The Enchantress actually strikes the Hulk dead in this issue, but Odin conveniently brings the monster back to life and sends him home. The sorceress meets the Hulk in numerous stories later on, but she never seems to remember that handy instant-death spell. But I digress.

In HULK #104, Friedrich and Severin collaborated on a kickass battle between Old Jade-Jaws and Spider-Man's foe, the Rhino. The story ends with the villain's apparent death, which I found very impressive at the time. Naturally, the Rhino got better as soon as some writer needed him.

Finally, Severin bid farewell to the feature. at least for several years, in TALES TO ASTONISH #107-108.  This two-part tale pitted Old Greenskin against Iron Man's villain, the Mandarin. Friedrich again wrote, though Severin contributed only layouts for a penciller who would soon become dominantly associated with the Hulk: Herb Trimpe. Here's a panel in which the monster saves Nick Fury from the villain, not so much out of a desire to benefit Fury as to thwart Mandarin.

Today I can't say the Friedrich-Severin HULK stories are any sort of pinnacle in the history of the character. Still, even aside from these issues being my quasi-introduction to the character, I still think they're better-than-average formula entertainment. I'm not even claiming they're the only times the two professionals crossed paths, but these stories were probably the most meaningful to me.

ASSORTED NEAR MYTHS AND ONE NULL MYTH: FIGHTING AMERICAN (1954-55)

In the short run of Simon and Kirby's FIGHTING AMERICAN-- seven issues, published from 1954-55-- one can find a rich harvest of near myths. Only one story in this corpus-- to which I'll devote a separate essay-- brought together its mythic elements with sufficient density to create a mythcomic.

In interviews given long after this run, Joe Simon talked as if the feature came about when he and Kirby sought to show comics-makers of the period how to do an action-packed superhero comic in the tradition of their Captain America, the classic WWII champion whose rights were owned outright by Timely Comics. However, it may have been more of a desperation ploy on their parts, of trying to find something, anything, that would catch on with audiences of the period. The superhero genre had declined in popularity since the post-war years, and not until 1958-- when DC Comics began emphasizing the genre in their line-- did the genre catch fire again.

In addition, Simon and Kirby sought to apply all the rock-em, sock-em storytelling strategies they'd used in the 1940s. But Captain America and other Simon/Kirby productions benefited from existing in an apocalyptic world, where it seemed like the battle between good and evil was taking place as a part of everyday life. The real-life Axis powers provided an enemy of unbridled aggression, and any fictional characters modeled on them could be just as pulpishly violent. And even when Captain America chose to fight other forms of evil, such as vampires and mad scientists, these too could take on the stature of larger-than-life villainy.

Fighting American was positioned to be a Commie-smasher in the same way Captain America was a Nazi-smasher-- but even I suspect that even had the feature premiered at a boom time for superheroes, it simply didn't work to substitute Commies for Nazis. Even allowing for the fact that Simon and Kirby were drawing on superficial images of real Communists for their stories, the years of the Cold War didn't present Russian Communists as great symbols of aggression. (Chinese Communists are not very important in the FIGHTING AMERICAN stories.) Rather, the average American knew Communists primarily as spies and subversives, and so that was how Simon and Kirby treated them. But because of this, Fighting American's villains lacked the formidable qualities of even the lesser villains of Captain America. As if the artists were dimly aware of the problem of making Commies into great villains, by the third issue of the comic, Simon and Kirby began portraying the Commies as goofy ne'er-do-wells, with names like Poison Ivan and Hotsky Trotsky.

Additionally, Simon and Kirby were probably somewhat influenced by the example of Harvey Kurtzman's MAD, one of the few indubitable sales-successes of the early 1950s. The influence isn't so much in content-- Kurtzman was a master satirist, while Simon and Kirby depended more on goony comedy-- as in style. American comics were often produced by Jewish-Americans, including these three artists. But while a few American comics-characters might have oddball accents, like those of Brooklyn or the Wild West, a reader almost never encountered a character who sounded like a New York City Jew. Kurtzman changed that, slipping in yiddische words like "goniff" and "meshugenah" for MAD's largely goyim audience, and occasionally having characters speak in the elliptical fashion favored by many New York Jews of the time. Rarely if ever had Simon and Kirby reproduced the Jewish cadence of speech, but it came to the fore in remarks like this one:

'Get this guy! A real "eager beaver!" If I suddenly yelled "Fighting American," he'd hide under a bed!'-- FIGHTING AMERICAN #7.

To my ears, at least, this is the same mode of speech Jack Kirby used in his problematic scripting for his 1970s work, which gives FIGHTING AMERICAN a certain cachet in terms of Kirby-history.

Yet despite his wearing a gaudy,, star-spangled costume, Fighting American was a very colorless character, and so was his kid-partner, who had so little background that he didn't even possess any other name than "Speedboy." In the 1940s both Captain America and Bucky were at best two-dimensional characters. Yet their creators infused both of them with a passionate hatred toward evil, whether it took the form of a Nazi Bund or a guy dressed in a buttefly-costume. Fighting American and Speedboy were just bland, though the former boasts an origin that had great psychological potential-- only to drop the ball on developing it, so that it became no more than a null-myth.

Captain America was a weakling whom the U.S. government transformed into a muscular superman with a special serum. Simon and Kirby kept the basic idea of the government creating a superman, but threw in a strange, barely acknowledged sibling complex.

Though the story initially focuses on Johnny Flagg, a radio celebrity renowned for attacking American Communists, the real star is Johnny's brother Nelson. Johnny is the typical Simon-Kirby he-man: square-jawed and broad-shouldered, though he was injured during his stint in the armed services, so that he has to walk on crutches. Johnny's radio-colleague Mary, your basic "Lois Lane" figure, openly admires Johnny, and so does his less impressive brother Nelson, though what Nelson doesn't say about his brother is as important as what he does say:

"Johnny was always the pride of the family-- a brilliant student, a prize athlete, and a war hero."


Nelson doesn't say what it means to him to dwell in the shadow of his brother, but he does touch on the irony that his crippled sibling can no longer be a man of action, "depending on his weak little brother to do his leg work." Later Nelson tries to stand up to a bad guy and gets beat down, living the reality of Clark Kent-- until evil Communists kill Johnny, making it possible for Nelson to banish his sibling envy in a macabre manner.

After Johnny is killed, the government, without so much as a by-your-leave, takes possession of his body, and somehow rebuilds the corpse to be "the agent of the future." But they can only bring this super-agent to life by transferring Nelson's mentality into the body of his late brother-- and Nelson, grieving for the brother he loved (even with resentment), quickly agrees.

Thus the weak body of Nelson dies, erased as the weak Steve Rogers was erased-- and yet Nelson lives on, to enjoy the skills and muscular powers of his brother's body. (Mary doesn't stick around much longer, but from then on, she seems to dote less on her co-worker than on his superheroic alter ego) For the remainder of the hero's short career, there's no further acknowledgement that the person everyone sees is not Johnny, but Nelson. As far as Simon and Kirby were concerned, Nelson existed only to bring about a magic-like transformation of weakness into strength. Still, this strategy didn't do a lot for making Fighting American work, even as a two-dimensional character.

However, though in FIGHTING AMERICAN Simon and Kirby never got any further than opening a door leading to dark psychological corridors, later Kirby, in partnership with Lee, would return to the theme with better results. Another weakling-- Bruce Banner, whom Nelson slightly resembles-- would not need to get his power from an envied sibling, but from his own "id," the wellspring of his desire for power and violence. True, early issues of THE INCREDIBLE HULK are all-over-the-place, in which the hero-monster varies between being a brutish villain to a muscular "genie" manipulated by his youthful buddy. But even so, Kirby seems to have grasped, in partnership with Lee, that Bruce Banner's problem had to be front-and-center this time. instead of being swept under the proverbial rug.

NULL-MYTHS: OLD MAN LOGAN (2008)

It was only after watching the 2017 film LOGAN that I learned that it had been based on a graphic novel-- actually a compilation of stories from Marvel's ongoing WOLVERINE title-- and that the writer was none other than one of the worst scripters currently in the business, Mark Millar. This is not entirely a fair opinion, since I've read few of Millar's works since my bad experience with the atrocious WANTED.

However, once I read the Millar GN, I was happily disabused of the idea that anything by Millar could have had quality in its original form. Like the 2008 movie WANTED, the 2017 LOGAN-- directed by James Mangold, who also helmed the respectable 2013 WOLVERINE-- just borrows dribs and drabs from the Millar continuity. In fact, the only things Mangold really takes away from Millar's GN are the ideas that (1) in some future setting, Wolverine has gotten very old and beat-down by coping with everyday life, which is a consequence of the fact that (2) most mutants and superheroes are out of the picture. 

Though LOGAN is far from being a game-changing movie, I can appreciate that Mangold uses some subtlety, refusing to dilute his story by telling the viewer what happened to the heroes. In contrast, Millar's OLD MAN is just Millar regurgitating the same brain-dead concept that informed the WANTED graphic novel: that all the super-villains get together and wipe out most of the heroes, sparing only a few like Hawkeye the Archer and (inevitably) Wolverine. 

As with WANTED, Millar's work is made visually bearable by his collaboration with a good if somewhat slick artist. Conceptually, though, it's just channeling the same old vibe that had begun to get tedious in Alan Moore's work in his "grim and gritty" period: What If the Superheroes, the Ones Who Always Win, Went Down to Dusky Death (and Degradation)? Incidentally, though I've scoffed at Alan Moore's claims that every writer in the business is guilty of ripping off his wonderfully ironic and deeply intellectual concepts, in the case of Millar Moore's ire would be fully justified.

 In OLD MAN Millar trades on the cumulative histories of the standard Marvel heroes for cheap shock-with-no-awe, showing no appreciation for said histories. For instance, Millar knows that Wolverine started out life as an opponent for the Incredible Hulk, so by the rules of fannish consistency, Logan as an old man must once again face the Hulk. But this is a Hulk who, for no stated reason, has become as much of a villain as the Red Skull. He's also become a gross hillbilly who rules his territory in the villain-conquered U.S, alongside a passel of green, gamma-mutated offspring. There had been other attempts to show the Hulk becoming a darker figure-- Peter David's "Maestro" iteration of the character, not to mention a few intimations of Hyde-like nastiness in the character's first appearances. But as far as I can tell, the only reason that Bruce Banner becomes a cannibalistic redneck is because he couldn't find any regular humans to have sex with. So he had sex with his first cousin, the She-Hulk, and-- presto, Instant Hillbilly!

About the only nice thing I can say about this worthless work is that I smiled a little when Hawkeye and Wolverine start tooling around in a rebuilt Spider-Mobile. But it was definitely a smile of short duration.

SOMETIMES HE FEELS LIKE A NUT; OTHER TIMES, HE JUST IS

To David Goyer's suggestion that the She-Hulk was created as an implicit sex-fantasy for all male readers; i.e., " the chick you could fuck if you were Hulk." Stan Lee responded in this Washington Post piece by saying, “Only a nut would even think of that.”

As I detailed in HIGHLIGHTING ANXIETY PT. 2, Goyer's actual comment is lame and smacks of facile attention-whoring-- a verb I find appropriate, given how free Goyer and Craig Mazin with their use of the term "slut." That said, though the specific accusations are all but worthless, they do raise the spectre of unfair sexual representation once more. Note this passage from the "Comic Riffs" section:

So, how about She-Hulk’s tremendous physique, Stan the Man? “As for her looking beautiful and curvy,” Lee tells Comic Riffs, “show me the superheroine who isn’t.”

From a hardcore ultraliberal standpoint, this light-hearted statement would confirm the Goyer allegation that She-Hulk was designed as a "wank fantasy." I don't think Stan Lee would ever admit to having written "wank fantasies," nor that he would ever fully understand modern objections to them. But though I've argued earlier than SHE-HULK was not poised as an especially "sexy" comics feature, there can be no doubt that Stan Lee has edited and created many comic books that fit that bill.

I've previously cited this MY FRIEND IRMA panel as one of the few overt boob-jokes I've found in a commercial comic book of the period.

And of course prior to the Marvel era Stan edited and/or wrote a vast number of "working girl" comics-- none of whom were about the type of "working girls" Goyer and Mazin would've referenced.

And then there were the curvaceous jungle-queens, like the 1950s LORNA THE JUNGLE GIRL, written for the most part by Don Rico.

No one would doubt that all of these female characters are drawn to be ostentatiously sexy-- certainly more so than the 1980s She-Hulk, IMO.  And I for one don't blush to admit that any time a female character was drawn to be ostentatiously sexy, there's a better than even chance that publishers knew that a lot of young horndogs would indeed use such comics for "wank fantasies."

At the same time, overt sexiness was not the only avenue through which young horndogs fulfilled themselves.
I admitted in the previous essay that it's quite possible that the Vosburg-Springer She-Hulk met with approval with some fans, even though the artists did not strive to be extremely titillating. Perhaps the semi-ripped clothing did it for some people-- possibly including the estimable Kurt Busiek-- even though I for one found She-Hulk's attire about as sexy as the Hulk's pants, since it was evident that the clothing was never going to get torn any further, no matter how much physical punishment the character endured.  But there's no accounting for taste, and it's easy to imagine male comics-readers being turned by any number of relatively unexceptional images. As problematic as Frederic Wertham is, his testimony that some readers were turned on by nothing more than high heels seems to be a typical enough phenomenon-- and certainly not one confined to comic books.

Having established that sexual titillation can take place whether or not an image is structured to be titillating, we're back to the Square One established by Goyer. Even if he's wrong, wrong, wrong about the motives behind She-Hulk's creation, there can be no doubt that some comics have been created to be "wank fantasies."

But even when they are created with the conscious intent to have such an appeal-- are they all the same?

Some comics aren't much more than this. Stan Lee features like SHOWGIRLS and MY FRIEND IRMA had occasional moments of snappy dialogue, but I doubt anyone bought the titles for the dialogue.

On the other hand, the example of LORNA THE JUNGLE GIRL presents a different paradigm. I didn't choose the panel above at random; while LORNA certainly is a comic book featuring a pneumatic jungle-princess, it rises above the mediocrity of most jungle-comics with its ongoing gender-humor. LORNA had just one basic gag: the protagonist's boyfriend keeps telling her to quit playing jungle-heroine because women can't hack the adventure-game, and she proves him wrong every time. No one would claim LORNA to be the comics-version of Noel Coward, but there's obviously more than just titillation at work here.

More on these matters in a future essay.

HIGHLIGHTING ANXIETY PT. 2

This article for THE BEAT is my source for the following remarks of film-scripter David Goyer:


Goyer: I have a theory about She-Hulk. Which was created by a man, right? And at the time in particular I think 95% of comic book readers were men and certainly almost all of the comic book writers were men. So the Hulk was this classic male power fantasy. It’s like, most of the people reading comic books were these people like me who were just these little kids getting the s**t kicked out of them every day… And so then they created She-Hulk, right? Who was still smart… I think She-Hulk is the chick that you could f**k if you were Hulk, you know what I’m saying? … She-Hulk was the extension of the male power fantasy. So it’s like if I’m going to be this geek who becomes the Hulk then let’s create a giant green porn star that only the Hulk could f**k.


Now, though I've often caviled against elitist remarks by critics, whose dominant aim is to persuade readers to read "better stuff." Goyer, a sometime comics-fan himself, is no critic, or even much of a thinker, despite his inappropriate use of the word "theory" above. As far as I can tell, his remarks are merely a means of attention-getting, a common enough practice in the world of self-publicizing, the primary object of the podcast in which the remarks were made.  Making inflammatory remarks for publicity's sake, however much they may or may not be the speaker's real beliefs, is a tried-and-true strategy older than the comic-book medium itself.


Goyer's remarks had the usual effect: triggering objections from fans who didn't like what he said, and keeping his name prominent in the blogosphere. One may object, of course, that a scripter who has become a Big Deal in terms of adapting comic books to big-budget movies hardly needs such publicity. So it's possible that on some level Goyer doesn't just want publicity for his own projects; that he wants to castigate certain aspects of the genre by which he's currently making a living, as a means of convincing himself that he is "above" such politically incorrect content as "male sex fantasies."


I hardly need point out the self-serving superficiality of Goyer's "theory." The only significance of Goyer's screed is that it once more points out the seeming desperation of those who would ascribe "negative compensation" as the defining characteristic of whatever they happen not to like.


Happily, one of the posters on THE BEAT defended the remarks of Goyer and others in the podcast, giving me the chance to make this response:

The problem with your interpretation, as with those of Mazin and Goyer, is that you’re assuming that a character like She-Hulk can’t also be a power fantasy for any male readers. only a sex fantasy, which speaks poorly for your view of your own gender, if you are indeed of the XY persuasion.

(I assume from the way you start off your post– “Women love Power Girl,” and so on– you do admit that female heroes, even scantily clad ones, can be power fantasies for women.)

The fact is, though, female heroes are not only sex fantasies for men, any more than male heroes are only power fantasies for their male readers. There are a small number of male heroes, particularly the Hulk, who are not particularly attractive and who may be judged as almost pure power fantasies. But the great multitude of male heroes are also sex fantasies in the sense that they are designed to be thought of as “handsome” or “studly.” The hetero male then identifies with the character getting action because of his hot bod, his chiseled chin, etc.

Conversely, it should be obvious that hetero men can and do identify with female characters in the sense of power-struggles. She-Hulk wins most or all of her fights for the same reasons the Hulk does; nearly nobody wants to see the main character beat down.

Some female characters sell the sexual aspect more aggressively than others. She-Hulk, though, is not a particularly good example of this syndrome. But people will see what they want to see.

By way of supporting my above claim-- that She-Hulk was not automatically grounded in the appeal of "good girl art," I cite the remarks of the character's first regular penciler, Mike Vosburg, on the subject of She-Hulk's attractiveness:

The oddest thing about that book was that [inker] Frank [Springer] drew really beautiful women, I drew really beautiful women, and yet, the She-Hulk was never overly attractive.

I would concur with Vosburg's appraisal, that both he and Springer could draw attractive women very well, but that for whatever reason, the art of the original She-Hulk magazine was not conceived as "good girl art," as evinced by this example:

In stating this I'm not saying that no male-- or female-- reader ever derived sexual pleasure from this iteration of She-Hulk. I'm only saying that the art here is not oriented on "selling" the character's sexuality. I don't think any fan will doubt that when Marvel Comics wanted to sell sex, they generally knew how to sell sex.

So if anything, despite the character's artfully ripped clothing, the original SHE-HULK comic book does seem poised more to offer the character as a "power fantasy" than a "sex fantasy."  Later iterations could, and did, sometimes place more emphasis on She-Hulk as a "FBB," or "female body builder," which may also have offered sexual titillation.  But even in these versions, the titillation-factors would not necessarily exclude the possibility of hetero male readers identifying with the character's struggles with her assorted opponents, as opposed to seeing her as a "giant green porn star that only the Hulk could fuck."


I'll note, though, that this notion of the sex-object's supposed inaccessibility has been expressed in other venues: I recall one poster who was convinced that the beauty of female stars on some STAR TREK show "proved" that the target audience was convinced in advance that they, the Trekkies, had no chance with such women.  Just as with Goyer, this is merely an ad hominem attack on such fans, rather than any sort of sustained analysis of the mechanisms of psychological coping.