The Hulk is one of the most well-known heroes from the Marvel Universe. The big giant differs from other heroes not only through his abilities but also through his design. His trademark is the color green, but originally he was supposed to look different.
How did the Hulk come to be? The first solo adventure of Hulk appeared in 1962 in Incredible Hulk No. 1. This story was already about Bruce Banner, who became the well-known monster due to an accident. He was created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby.
According to Stan Lee (via YouTube), major inspirations for the character were Frankenstein and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. He explained that Frankenstein’s monster was never the villain of the films. Stan Lee wanted to create a monster that was one of the good ones, but no one knew it.
The fact that Banner can transform back is taken from the story Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Since the Hulk was presented differently than other heroes, Stan Lee needed to rethink. Originally, the Hulk even had a different color than green, but that had to change.
The Hulk was not green at the beginning
How was the appearance of the Hulk created? Basically, heroes at that time had costumes because children, the target audience, responded to that. However, Stan Lee couldn’t think of a logical reason for the Hulk to wear a costume. To stand out, Stan Lee gave the Hulk a different skin color.
In the first issue, Stan Lee made the Hulk gray, not green at all. According to him, gray would make the Hulk look scary. But directly in the first issue, Stan Lee noticed a problem: the printers had an issue with the gray tones.
The gray of the Hulk varied from page to page. Sometimes the gray was too dark, sometimes too light. To solve the problem, they simply changed the Hulk’s skin color to green.
With the color green, the printer had no more problems, and he could give the Hulk new subtitles like the green Goliath
or Jolly-Green-Giant
.
How is Hulk’s color explained in the universe? Bruce Banner transformed into the Hulk after being exposed to a large amount of gamma radiation. Gamma rays are usually depicted as green in the comics.
Later, many colors were used
The Hulk mythos later experimented with many colors. While green remained the trademark, also used by She-Hulk, gray returned throughout the comics. With Joe Fixit, another persona of Bruce Banner emerged, who was gray. Joe Fixit is a gangster who is smarter than the regular Hulk but works for nasty organizations.
The red Hulk is known at least through Captain America: Brave New World. There he is the character Thaddeus Ross, portrayed by Harrison Ford in the latest installment. In addition, there was also an orange, blue, yellow, silver, white, black, and purple Hulk (via Screen Rant).
Bruce Banner was not the only Hulk in the Marvel Universe. Among others, there were his cousin Jen Walters (She-Hulk) and Amadeus Cho.
The Hulk is still one of the most popular Marvel characters and members of the Avengers. In the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the Hulk has only received one film so far, and that was in 2008. MyMMO editor Nikolas Hernes thinks that’s a shame because the character has a lot of potential: I still cannot forgive Marvel after 16 years for how they squandered one of the most exciting heroes
