Award-winning author of "Fantasy as you Like It" and "Eight-Bit Heaven," Season 9 finalist in RPG Superstar, author of the young adult fantasy novel Greystone Valley, and super-opinionated nerd dad.
When we last left Bruce Banner, he had been cured of being the Hulk. Yeah…that never actually holds. Banner has actually been cured of the Hulk many times over, but it didn’t get mentioned here because it’s always at most a one- or two-issue fix. This time around is no exception.
With John Byrne come and gone, Al Milgrom would be the next guy in line to start something he couldn’t finish. He left before the story arc he began with Banner’s apparent cure was even finished. That was a symptom of a bigger problem for the Hulk in the 80s: nobody wanted to write the character. Driven into a funk by attempts to cash in on the TV show in a medium that lacked the acting and soundtrack that made the TV show huge, the character had become stagnant. That’s what forced Bill Mantlo to introduce a Banner-controlled Hulk and then a completely mindless Hulk – he had started to run out of ideas for the classic savage Hulk. But since his departure, and since Byrne’s plans to recreate the Hulk his way had been stopped short, the character was basically seen as a dead end. It got bad enough that the book was eventually handed over to some marketing guy named Peter David. And what did Peter David do with the book? Started a twelve-year long stint that turned the Hulk into one of Marvel’s hottest franchises, of course.
The Flash is the latest in a line of movies set in the DC Universe to flop critically, disappoint financially, or both. Despite trying to repeat the success of Spider-Man: No Way Home by giving fans a return of some of their favorite actors, in this case Michael Keaton as Batman, the film has greatly disappointed at the box office, spending a full month to reach the $250 million mark, all but guaranteeing that the film will lose a massive amount of money when all is said and done. It’s symptomatic of broader failures across the DC Cinematic Universe, which tried to replicate what Marvel accomplished with its films but has failed at almost every turn.
There are lots of reasons that these movies didn’t succeed, but I’m going to focus on what I think many critics ignore when they dissect these cinematic misses: the DC movies never took the time to earn the fan buy-in that they think they deserve.
Well, if your liver has recovered from part one, we can continue our drinking game/history lesson on the Hulk.
As of 1964, the Hulk was a popular character without a home. Moreover, he had obviously gone through some changes off-panel. When last readers saw him in his own series, his transformations through the use of Bruce Banner’s gamma gun were becoming more unstable. His appearances in Fantastic Four and Avengers gave no indication that he was still using the gamma gun to transform, yet at the same time he was wandering about during the day, suggesting that his day/night transformation cycle was a thing of the past. When he popped up in Amazing Spider-Man, he was hiding out in a cave, not Banner’s secret lab where he had been during his own series. The truth of the matter was that the Hulk was still being written by Stan Lee, and Lee still didn’t know what he wanted to do with the character. In fact, you could make a pretty good argument that Stan never did figure out how to handle the Hulk. But one thing was for sure: with the character’s popularity still strong, the Hulk needed a book of his own.
Now that Jodie Whitaker’s three-series (plus some specials) run as the Doctor is in the books, there’s plenty of time to look back on her time in the TARDIS as a whole. A lot of attention gets paid to the Timeless Child revelation and the Flux storyline, since those have vast implications that will impact the lore of Doctor Who for years to come. But, for my money, my favorite stretch of Thirteenth Doctor episodes is her very first series, which featured ten standalone episodes and one holiday special.
The relatively unheralded first series of the Thirteenth Doctor’s adventures with brand new companions gave us a continuity-light approach that allowed new viewers to jump into the show. It also brought back a classic series feel, bringing us some tropes that we hadn’t seen since before the Time War. I like this time in the show a lot, and here are some of my favorite things about it.
I’ve been putting this off for a while. Don’t get me wrong; I love the Hulk. He’s my favorite comic book character, and quite possibly my favorite literary character ever. If I ever got the chance, I’d put up with all the bullshit politics, editorial mandates, and fan whining in the comic book industry just to get a shot at writing this character. But actually documenting the number of changes he’s gone through…well, let’s just say that we’re definitely in for a multi-part rant here.
At his core, the Hulk is a simple concept. Inside each of us there dwells a raging fury. When Bruce Banner’s temper boils over, he becomes the embodiment of rage: a 7-foot tall, 1,000-pound force of unfettered fury that can casually knock over a city. Perhaps because the concept is so simple, a lot of different writers have played around with it. The result is something that can best be summed up with what I like to call the Incredible Hulk Drinking Game. The rules are simple: take a shot when, during the Hulk’s history, one of the following happens:
The Hulk changes color,
The Hulk’s transformation pattern changes,
The Hulk changes personality,
And take a bonus shot if this change is not given any explanation in the story.
(Warning: do not actually participate in the Incredible Hulk Drinking Game. You will die of alcohol poisoning.)
Following my early masterpiece The Hundreds of Ghosts in one Honted House!, I wrote two more stories when I hit third grade. One, The Giant Cat, is sadly lost to history, but featured a giant cat and a robot mouse. That’s about all I remember about it, except for the fact that I think it was written on lined paper and stapled together. Lesson learned: always get a good bookbinder.
The other book I wrote that year actually went on display at the school library. Yeah, I was a celebrity back then. I’d walk onto the playground and pick whichever swing I wanted, bullies would duck out of sight when they saw me coming, and teachers lauded me with praise. That book, The Game, survived the years unscathed. To hear it narrated by my wife Sarah, click below. To read the special annotated edition, read on.
I eschewed the use of a pen name here, opting instead for my birth name of Charles Martin. Note that I have not one but two talented illustrators here. Despite that, I specifically remember drawing some of these pages myself. I guess I’m just too modest to take credit for my brilliant talent.
I have a confession to make: I did not know anything about baseball when writing this. The only thing I knew baseball from was Peanuts strips, which exaggerates the scores for humor. Therefore, I thought that 123 to 111 was a realistic baseball score. I also thought that baseball teams had seven people each, apparently. I blame my shoddy editor for not catching these errors.
Also, note the copyright at the bottom of the page. Even when I was 8, I meant business.
I initially planned on making this book very long. I had complained to my illustrator Matthew that book chapters were always too short. When he caught me in my hypocrisy and called me on using only one-page chapters, I told him that I go where the story takes me. Yes, that’s how pretentious I was as a third-grader.
At this point in the story I forgot that baseballs used innings, not quarters. Whatever. American football is the better game anyway.
Ah yes…the Montreal Expose. Maybe if they actually wore uniforms, they could have posed a challenge.
Even I have to admit, this book wasn’t exactly a thrilling piece of prose. It reads more like a warped sports almanac than something with a plot.
Who knew I was into postmodernism at such a young age? Truly, I must have been a prodigy.
I guess it was a strike-shortened series, since there were only 21 games until the World Series.
I kept messing up on the team name. It’s supposed to be the White Sox, which was my favorite baseball team. Why did I like the White Sox? Because I had a Cabbage Patch kid with a White Sox uniform. I pretty much picked all my favorite sports teams based on the merchandise I coincidentally acquired…except for the football Giants, whom my dad brainwashed me to like.
“And 3 ties.” Best closing line since, “This looks like the beginning of a beautiful friendship.” Am I right?
Sorry…double page spreads don’t work out terribly well in the format I’ve chosen.
After such a great story, don’t we need an appendix?
I’m pretty sure this is the part I wrote, added in after the book had already been printed (hence the lack of dot-matrix letters). Apparently, my friend Matthew was a sentient weregorilla, judging by the toes.
Truly, I was a man of many talents. Apparently, I also had the beginnings of a mustache going on.
Again, I didn’t know anything about baseball. That’s why I had to add in “hitter” to the positions. I didn’t know what a batter was.
Poor Geoffrey. He was the only kid in school less cool than I was. I wrote him into the story when we were getting along, then apparently edited in the “bad” descriptor when we were either fighting or when I wanted to gain some cred with the cool kids by making an unmotivated personal attack on the poor boy.
Um…I think this was maybe an aborted title page that got shunted to the back of the book instead? Maybe I was getting paid by the page?
This blurb is so full of blatant lies. I obviously knew nothing about baseball. I also didn’t know anything about basketball or hockey. And at that point in my life, I had never played Nintendo. I just mentioned it because in 1989 everybody was into Super Mario Bros. and they talked about it endlessly in class. I said I liked it to blend in. I also lied during show and tell one day and said I had beaten Super Mario Bros. and had 99 lives at the end of it.
I did play Action Max. You folks probably never heard of Action Max on account of it sucking. It was a video game system I won in a raffle that required the use of a VCR and a light gun. I had one game, and I think there might have been three games total made for the machine. On the bright side, my winning it was the reason my family got a VCR: my dad had stated that if I won, he’d buy a VCR so I could use it, never actually suspecting that I could actually win.
And so that’s The Game. I don’t mind saying that it’s probably my worst novel. It has no description for the characters, no drama, and I had a few critical research failures. However, it does play with your expectations very well; you probably came in here expecting something decent or at least mildly entertaining, and then I bored you to tears with my fanciful tale of gibberish and high numbers. That’s what a good writer does: he plays with your expectations. So even in my worst moment, I still had it, baby!
I have always wanted to be a write, but I have not always been good at writing. But my mother saved as much of my old projects as she could, which is how I still have a copy of one of my first “books,” which I wrote in first grade. The book, The Hundreds of Ghosts in One Honted House! is aptly read by my wife Sarah in the video below. And, if you want my author’s commentary on this seminal work, read on.
Years ago, I went on a rant about Buster Moon and his villainous antics in Sing. At the time, I had no intention of ever seeing Sing 2, as I didn’t need more of that awful koala in my life. But I have children, and I tend to be a permissive parent. Thus, against my will and better judgment, I found myself sitting down for a viewing of Sing 2 as part of a family movie night.
So, Buster Moon has had an entire film to grow and develop as a character. In the sequel, is he still a monster? The long answer follows, but the short answer is: YES.
Babbling Brooks 