Issue(s): Hulk #204, Hulk #205
Cover Date: Oct-Nov 76
Title: "Vicious circle!" / "Do not forsake me!"
Credits:
Len Wein - Writer
Herb Trimpe - Plotter on issue #204
Herb Trimpe / Sal Buscema - Penciler
Joe Staton - Inker

Review/plot:
Issue #204 is an incredibly stupid issue. The army has hired a professor named... Professor Kronus, who has, coincidentally enough, created a time machine. The idea is that they can use it to prevent Banner from ever having become the Hulk.

Jarella is also at the base, currently in a quarantine to ensure that the Earth's pollution doesn't affect her. Bruce makes sure that Jarella is OK with him getting rid of his Hulk half.

And then he goes back in time, letting Rick Jones die so that he doesn't become the Hulk. Accepting the fact that making changes in the past while time traveling actually affects the present (an idea that is disputable in the Marvel Universe, to say the least), this issue does a poor job of examining what a world without Rick Jones or the Hulk would have looked like (although it does show that Bruce and Betty are married). In any event, Professor Kronus suddenly decides that he's a super villain and he attacks...

...restoring Banner's Hulk persona so they can fight. The whole thing turns out to be a dream, maybe. It's awful.

In the next issue, Jarella is out of quarantine and she and Bruce go on a date.

Unfortunately, some anonymous loser reactivates an obscure robot called the Crypto Man.

It hunts down Banner, who turns into the Hulk, and in the fight, Jarella is crushed under some rubble while rescuing a bystander.

The Hulk easily dispatches the robot (and whoever launched him dies as well), and the Hulk returns to rescue Jarella, but it is too late.

Hulk brings her body back to Gamma base, but they tell him that she is dead. Instead of flipping out, the Hulk rationally decides to find Dr. Strange and see if he can help.

Betty and Glenn Talbot are having problems due to the fact that Glenn is unable to recover from his mental manipulation by the Gremlin.

It's cheap and manipulative to have brought Jarella back out of nowhere just to kill her off a few issues later. It's still touching to see the Hulk's reaction to her death, though.

Quality Rating: C-

Historical Significance Rating: 3 - death of Jarella

Chronological Placement Considerations: I have this taking place before Defenders #40, where the Hulk is seemingly reacting to Jarella's death.

References:

• Jasper Whyte's Crypto-Man previously appeared in Thor #174.

Crossover: N/A

Continuity Insert? N

My Reprint: Hulk #33 (vol. 3)

Len Wein later stated that he was going to bring Jarella back but never got the chance to; because she was an alien this was supposedly a dormant state before she metamorphed into something else.

Okay...

I know some people refuse to accept any revelations made in a What If? as being canon.

But What If #23 by Peter Gillis spins out of #205. The divergence point is that Jarella doesn't save the child and therefore doesn't die. So, if that is the point of divergence, that means that everything up until that point has been the same, right?

There's a lot of stuff disclosed in it. In fact, it's the first story I think to explain the actual nature of K'ai and it being a parallel dimension, it's relationship to the Microverse and other similar "dimensions". All of which is properly considered canon now.

But there's further revelations about Jarella's death.

First off, the anonymous person controlling Crypto-Man who remains unrevealed in #205 is revealed to have been a worshiper of the Dark Gods (the same that Psyklop worships). And the child she saved wasn't even real. There's a whole thing with the Dark Gods and some scant revelations about them and stuff. Almost Gruenwald-style tying all the Jarella appearances together: https://66.media.tumblr.com/5bd138fb0e78edfdab178c266d32f751/tumblr_o6pygb39Kt1tms107o1_1280.

As I said, I'm sure people's willingness to accept stuff from What If as canon varies. Personally, I see the back-story/revelations having absolutely no reason why they can't be true. It resolves a few danglers and makes sense of a few things. It does hurt Jarella's death in that her sacrifice was for ultimately for nothing, but it doesn't hurt Jarella's story.

And for those interested, here's the scene explaining K'ai and the similar parallel dimensions:

https://66.media.tumblr.com/b6f8743a13b8f84a75ae0bf21fef3571/tumblr_o6pzbjEhx71tms107o1_1280.jpg
https://65.media.tumblr.com/5e7c5ba0dcc5e5601516c4ea9483a2c4/tumblr_o6pzbjEhx71tms107o2_1280.jpg
https://66.media.tumblr.com/de2088d46b14ca593bffdbb8a931cf4c/tumblr_o6pzbjEhx71tms107o3_1280.jpg
https://65.media.tumblr.com/81c36198968ad56f72a24216eaf9efc9/tumblr_o6pzbjEhx71tms107o4_1280.jpg

(And this was 1980, before the Handbooks which I'm assuming were the first to clarify/adopt this as the proper canon)

(apologies for all the links, but that last page with all the separate worlds is pretty cool)

Man, just look at Sal's panels of an anguished Hulk. I've never seen him so shattered before. They're just so damn good.