Issue(s): Tales To Astonish #75, Tales To Astonish #76, Tales To Astonish #77 (Hulk stories only)
Cover Date: Jan - Mar 66
Title: "Not all my power can save me!" / "I, against a world!" / "Bruce Banner is the Hulk!"
Credits:
Stan Lee - Writer
Jack Kirby / Gil Kane & Jack Kirby - Penciler
Mike Esposito / John Romita Sr. - Inker

Review/plot: The Hulk is hopping around holding the Watcher's knowledge sphere ("Ultimate Machine") and ranting about how the world is against him. He's still got a few shreds of Banner's personality but they are fading. Even when he's Banner-less, however, he's still talking in complete sentences and in the first person.

Meanwhile General Ross is assigned the task of testing Banner's T-Gun, which was built from Banner's plans but no one knows what it does since Banner is presumed dead. (I'd say i was surprised that the army just lets their scientists go off and do whatever they feel like without supervision, but i just read this article so i know it's true.)

Rick is being held prisoner or more accurately as bait to lure the Hulk back to the missile base (although as one soldier correctly points out, it's not like the army could actually do anything if the Hulk did show up). Apparently the President of the United States has been let in on the secret of the Hulk's secret identity, so Rick is demanding to speak to the president. Naturally he's considered a crackpot. But the Hulk decides to put on the Ultimate Machine at this moment. He can't handle the influx of information, but he does pick up Rick saying that he needs to go to the White House to tell the President. This was actually the work of the Watcher, who is apparently addicted to interfering with the Earth. Every time we see this guy, it's "I'm sworn not to interfere, but just this once....".

Everyone assumes that the Hulk is heading towards the White House to attack it, so they zap him with the T-Gun. This isn't a very smart move. First of all, this is its first usage - General Ross was meant to be testing it, not using it as a last defense for the President. Second, they just got over talking about how they didn't trust Banner and suspected him of being a traitor. They even raised the possibility that the T-Gun might be a giant booby trap. And Talbot has for some time suspected Banner of being in cahoots with the Hulk in some way (man, to get that close to the truth but not be able to figure out that the guy they keep finding wandering around in the desert in a pair of torn purple pants after every Hulk attack is actually the Hulk... it's like a mental block or something). So using a device with an unknown purpose on an ally of the man you suspected to be a traitor isn't in the top ten list of brilliant things to do.

Or at least it wouldn't be something i would do. I must be wrong though, because it works out just fine. The "T" stands for time, and the ray throws the Hulk into the far future.

From people in the present's perspective, he's just been disintegrated. Actually, the next scene involving the army is written very intelligently, with Ross calming down an outraged five star general and making good observations about how the gun worked. For a brief moment it almost feels like i'm reading a modern comic.

Meanwhile the Hulk is dealing with standard "character in the future" comic book plot #1, where everything's a dystopian wasteland and a resistance movement is fighting a powerful tyrant.

The twist is that the Hulk has no interest in helping these losers, which is nice, but in the end he winds up in a fight with the enemy leader anyway, who turns out to be a future version of the Asgardian Executioner*, which is another nice twist that keeps this from feeling too generic.

That's a proto-version of "Hulk is strongest one there is!" above. Issue #76 also contains the first mention of the Hulk smashing. Hat tip to CBR for noticing both.

After an inconclusive fight, the Hulk is spirited back to his own time, although it's not said exactly why (presumably we're supposed to assume it's the affects of the T-Gun wearing off but it will later be implied that it's the work of the Time Variance Authority.

But Rick thinks the Hulk is dead, and he spills the beans to Talbot about the Hulk's alter-ego.

Gil Kane is credited under a pseudonym of "Scott Edward".

*The Executioner will actually 'remember' this encounter the next time he meets the Hulk, so it seems to actually be a time traveling present day Executioner as opposed to a future version.

Quality Rating: C

Historical Significance Rating: 4 - Hulk's identity made public. Early Gil Kane art at Marvel, while he was still mainly at DC and had to use a pseudonym.

Chronological Placement Considerations: N/A

References:

• Rick Jones is once again thinking back to when Banner saved his life in Hulk #1. Actually he does so twice within this arc.

Crossover: N/A

Continuity Insert? N

My Reprint: Hulk annual #4

Could this future world be related to Kang's war-torn 40th (or 41st?) century? I'd like to imagine Stan was being parsimonious about his dystopian futures.

Quite a few Asgardians had demonstrated time-travel powers by this point, including the Enchantress if I remember the Masters' of Evil encounter with Immortus correctly. The Executioner himself says here that he can send the Hulk back to his time. So I think this was always meant to be a time-traveling Skurge, not a future version-- at this point in the MU I don't think we'd seen any future versions or alternate universes; that's something Roy Thomas adds with the Scarlet Centurion's Avengers annual (#2?) story.

Is there any reason the Executioner doesn't have his axe in this story?

He doesn't have or mention his axe and he's uncharacteristically reliant on technology - he's got those cool tripods (which almost suggests Killraven's not-yet-published time period than Kang's, but of course it's just a War of the Worlds nod), which originally had me thinking "future version" although that turned out not to be the case.

We did have the Ranma-Tut/Dr. Doom speculation in FF annual #2 at this point so it's not completely out of the realm of possibility for Stan to be thinking about "future versions".

Wouldn't have minded a Kang/Executioner battle here, in any event.

Did the present-day Executioner have an axe at this point? Odin deprived him of his original one when he exiled him and the Enchantress in AVENGERS #7.

Luke is right. Executioner hadn't been shown with his axe since Avengers #7 (with one exception: the continuity insert Hulk Smash Avengers #1). He has it back without comment in his next appearance in Avengers annual #1 (maybe he went into the future to get it!) and then it disappears again for his early Defenders appearances.

I totally enjoyed that story. Normal grunts have more common sense than the bunch of retards that style themselves 'generals'. Think about it, 'It might be a booby trap, ok let's build it', doesn't matter if it were a complex A-bomb. Then Ross gets some of his own medicine when he gets scolded by a 5 star retard (lol) for not knowing what happened as if he were a nuclear physicist!

Okay, I've always thought that the Executioner fled into the future following the defeat of the Masters of Evil while the Enchantress went to hide out at Zemo's old South American base. This time period as shown by Steve Gerber in the Defenders storyline guest starring the Guardians of the Galaxy falls at some point after 2075 by which the time the Martians were gone and before the peaceful 25th century that Zarkko the Tomorrow Man came from.

I understand why rick told talbot, i just wish he hadnt...

This is one of my favorite TTA Hulk stories. With the T-gun, Banner becomes one of the few men alive to design a working time machine.

I actually took Hulk's fight with Executioner as a victory for Hulk, if mostly a symbolic one, as he drives off Skurge's forces. Skurge refers to it as a defeat in his next Hulk encounter in # 102.

Interesting about the Time Variance Authority and the Guardians of the Galaxy timeline. Where were those reveals made?

For the TVA connection, check out the review of Thor 371-372, the same storyline which introduced that organization.

Cool, thanks for the tip.