Issue(s): Hulk #111, Hulk #112, Hulk #113, Hulk #114, Hulk #115
Cover Date: Jan -May 69
Title: "Shanghaied in space!" / "The brute battles on!" / "Where fall the shifting sands?" / "At last I will have my revenge!" / "Lo, the Leader lives"
Credits:
Stan Lee - Writer
Herb Trimpe - Penciler
Dan Adkins - Inker

Review/plot:
The aliens who built the Umbu statue from Hulk #110 head to earth and abduct Banner, scanning his brain.

Banner was with Ka-Zar, but Ka-Zar and Zabu left to find him some herbs to help heal him...

...and when they came back, Banner was gone.

The Hulk helps a group of alien rebels fight off the oppression of a super powerful entity called the Galaxy Master.

Then they send him home but the Hulk turns back into Banner and finds he doesn't have enough oxygen to breathe.

In the next issue, he releases the gamma energy that powers it to turn himself back into the Hulk before he dies. Once back on Earth, the Hulk destroys the ship. A caption says "And so, the lumbering behemoth storms away... totally unaware that he has unthinkingly destroyed the one device in all the world that could have enabled him to control his transformations... at will..!!". Not that the Hulk has ever expressed much of an interest in turning back into Banner.

Meanwhile, the Sandman has discovered that General Ross' missile base has a Space-Warp Ship, which he wants to use to contact Blastaar again. Sandman stumbles upon the Hulk and decides to try and get the Hulk to work for him, first by trying to subdue him (which ends in a stalemate)...

...and then by manipulating by appealing to his hatred for the soldiers on the base. This is quite clever for the Sandman, who i guess has been taking lessons from the Wizard.

Compared to Ditko or Kirby, Trimpe's use of the Sandman isn't very imaginative.

    

While the Hulk attacks the base, the Sandman sneaks in and grabs the ship, but on his way out, Betty gets in his way. The Hulk has second thoughts about teaming up with the Sandman...

..which are reinforced when he sees the Sandman trying to ram Betty and attacks, fanning the Sandman away into pieces and leaving the base before Betty and the General can get to him to explain that they understand that he was helping them.

The Sandman quickly re-forms and is contacted by the Mandarin. In demonstrating his power, the Mandarin glosses over his AWESOME SUPER POWERFUL RINGS and focuses on the fact that he knows karate. Karate?? First of all, the Mandarin is Chinese, not Japanese and part of his thing has always been about his superiority to other cultures. Second of all: SUPER POWERFUL RINGS!!! Oh well. It's enough to convince the Sandman, anyway, so they Team Up.

Meanwhile Banner tries to sneak back onto the missile base to get Betty to help him work on a Hulk cure but he gets caught and turns back into the Hulk when the MPs try to arrest him. Then Sandman and the Mandarin show up and capture the Hulk and Betty. Like all plots involving capturing the Hulk, this one ends in disaster for the bad guys, with Mandarin fleeing and the Sandman getting turned into glass.

Then the army shows up and knocks the Hulk out with a Neutralizer Ray.

Having beaten the Hulk, the army doesn't quite know what to do with him. They try to contact Rick Jones through the Avengers, but their cleaning lady (?!?) says that they aren't available, and refers to a tragedy that is likely the death of Captain America.

Then the Leader shows up out of nowhere, offering to build a permanent prison for the Hulk.

The prison is built out of plastithene, which looks similar to the stuff that the Leader uses to build his humanoids. It seems to do a good job of holding the Hulk, at least long enough to serve as a cliff-hanger for issue #115.

Betty is weepy and annoying throughout these issues and everyone else talks in pure exposition. The art on these stories is just poor.

Quality Rating: D+

Historical Significance Rating: 3 - return of the Leader

Chronological Placement Considerations: The Hulk has been in the Savage Land since the end of Hulk #110 and should not appear anywhere else between then and now. Seems to take place concurrently with Captain America #111-113.

References:

• The Sandman and Blastaar teamed up in Fantastic Four #63.
  
• The Leader was thought to have died after attempting to use the Watcher's Ultimate Machine in Tales Of Suspense #74, but he was revived by one of his androids.
  
• Rick Jones has been working with Captain America since Captain America #110.
  
• Captain America seemingly died in Captain America #111.

Crossover: N/A

Continuity Insert? N

My Reprint: Marvel Super Heroes #65, Marvel Super Heroes #66, Marvel Super Heroes #67, Marvel Super Heroes #68, Marvel Super Heroes #69

Herb Trimpe is evidently going for some Steranko vibes with the page designs, but he just can't pull it off.

i think karate was originaly from China, like most martial arts, but also got adapted in Japan

also i think back in the 60s karate would have been a big deal. it was still pretty unknown in the west before bruce lee and the martial arts explosions. so it would have seemed more impressive and exotic to the audience. i remember reading Ian Flemings "Goldfinger" novel. in that novel he takes several pages to explain what karate is and how it works to the readers. Mainly because his readers (in the 50s) would have had little idea about it. nowadays we tend to forget how exotic these "oriental" arts were back then, since every action hero knows karate these days.

In some of the Mandarin's early appearances in Tales of Suspense, they make a big deal out of his super-powerful hand-to-hand combat abilities, pointing out that he's dangerous enough to chop through Iron Man's armor using his bare hands. So, while I agree with you that, y'know, the rings deserve top billing, it's at least consistent with prior characterization.

The Sandman teams up with people a lot. Mandarin, Sinister Six, Frightful Four, Blastaar the Living Bomb-Burst... I guess he has co-dependency issues.

To answer Kveto in probably more detail than anyone is looking for, while it's probably true that a lot of Asian martial arts share an origin, i think by the 1960s a hyper-nationalist like the Mandarin would not have blurred the distinction between Kung Fu and Karate (I think of the Donnie Yen Ip Man movie, which takes place in the 1930s, for example). As you point out, this is really about the fact that western writers in the 1960s would be unfamiliar enough with Asian martial arts to make that mistake, which, reading today, i find amusing (see also this ad).

That and the fact that the Mandarin even bothers to list martial arts on his resume when he's got those rings, and he's talking to the incredibly powerful Sandman, and he's about to go toe-to-toe with the Hulk.

And James, i think the fact that Sandman has also teamed-up with the Enforcers pretty much proves your co-dependency point.

Probably explains Silver Sable as well.

Aww, I like Happy Herbie's art. In fact, I like it better here than in the previous John Severin-inked issues, because I feel Adkins lets Herb's style come through, where Severin seemed to be imposing his own (fine) touch on the art. This feels "purer", IMO.

So, while the Avengers are out of town, or busy holding Cap's funeral, or whatever, Jarvis subcontracts the grunt-work, is that it? Smooth, Jarv, smooth.

IIRC, Sandman even teamed up with Hydro-Man one time. Which was just sad.

Ka-Zar and Zabu appear at the beginning of issue #111

Thanks, TTB. I've added them as characters, and more importantly, added a scan of Ka-Zar riding Zabu like a pony.

The title "Shanghaied in Space" was taken from a Justice Society story from 1942's 'All-Star Comics':

http://allstarcomics.blogspot.com/2012/05/all-star-comics-13-shanghaied-in-space.html

I like how there's all these mod portraits of the individual Avengers hanging up in the Mansion.

Dan Adkins was the John Entwistle in Herb Trimpe’s band... Every panel popped and even made Betty palatable at times, even though secretly I was hoping for a closed hotel room door where the narrative suggests Hulk is pleasing her in such a manner that she will never whine again in this comic book 🤭