Someone should warn Groot that his planet is going to be destroyed by Duck Dodgers in the 24th and 1/2 century.

If all these characters are duplicates, then why the heck is the price for this annual astronomical? I've been trying to get this comic for awhile. However, it's a huge amount of money because of the appearance of "Groot" (quotation marks for duplicate character).

Claremont's Hulk comics weren't very good. This story actually references his abysmal INCREDIBLE HULK #170.

I place this story between INCREDIBLE HULK #194 and #195. IH #194 takes place amid the expansive wheatfields in "the Great American Heartland." This annual's story occurs in Colorado. IH #195 begins with the Hulk hiding on a train, emerging in Florida, where he remains until he is captured by Ross and Samson in #199, leading directly to #200 (in New Mexico). I think this makes more sense than him leaping from Florida to Colorado and then back again.

I agree about the placement, TheBruce. I will say that sometimes it'll be necessary to bounce back and forth across the country, but in this case this is a very standalone annual so it's an easy move. I've pushed this between Hulk #194-195 and prior to a bunch of other Hulk appearances between those issues.

Diablo was obviously what writers of Lost had read;)

Although cited as such in this annual, the Blip's prior "appearance" in FEAR #2 was actually a reprint of his debut from TALES TO ASTONISH #15. It's amazing to me that all six of these monsters have gone on to have some sort of 21st-century afterlife.

Thanks Matthew. Updated the Reference.

Personal reminiscence: This was one of the first comics I bought on the newsstand, and I loved it. A bunch of my first comics are annuals, I think because they stayed on the racks longer and because in those days I would flip to the back of the book to make sure the story wasn't continued, as I only bought comics when one of my parents took me with them on errands. (Not too much later my parents bought me a bike, which changed everything, of course.) As for the plot (by Len Wein), I never spent my precious allowance on monster comics, when super-heroes were so very much cooler, but I had friends who were less discriminating, so I was aware of the classic monster reprint comics like Fear and Where Monsters Dwell, and the idea that one comic would feature not one but six monsters, and pit them all against the Hulk!, made this irresistible. On top of that, the creative team was clearly having a ball on this one. Sal Buscema's art is very nice, and Chris Claremont, who was still just starting out at this point, just wrote the hell out of it.

Here are the captions from a single panel, one that would have worked just fine without any, in an otherwise run-of-the-mill sequence of Hulk knocking soldiers off their feet by slamming the ground with his fists: "In Copenhagen, at the Royal Danish Seismological institute, scientists will call this 'a minor tremor located somewhere along North America's continental divide,' and will wonder how an earthquake can occur where none occurred before. The soldiers of Harrison's Hardheads (5th Cavalry Regiment, 3rd Armored U.S. Army) could have told them in one word, along with the fact that it may have been a minor tremor in Denmark, but it was something else again in central Colorado." Sort of an Alan-Moorish vibe, before Alan Moore. Or this more classic Marvel, and Claremont, style later in the book: "Oh well, here we go again... and this next stop is definitely not Greenwich Village. It really has been one of those days, hasn't it, Hulk? And it's getting worse..." They don't write 'em like that anymore.

To top it all off, the whole thing was in continuity. I learned that Xemnu was an established enemy of the Hulk, and of the Defenders. Far from being disappointing, to eleven-year-old me, this comic was everything that was great about comics.