Hulk: Gray is a retelling of Hulk’s origin story. So: gamma bomb goes off, Bruce Banner caught in the blast, Ahab-like Ross immediately makes Hulk his white whale, and Hulk smashes army stuff. Hulk was originally gray when he appeared in the comics, hence the subtitle, and then eventually settled into the iconic green shortly afterwards, forevermore.
For whatever reason, Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale made a few of these “Marvel Character: Colour” books 20 or so years ago and, while Hulk: Gray isn’t amazing, it’s a decent retelling of Hulk’s origin and definitely the best of those otherwise bad Marvel colour books.
The framing device is Bruce having an emergency counselling session with his psychiatrist, which goes nowhere so it’s utterly pointless and contrived as a delivery mechanism for Loeb’s signature annoying dual narrative going on throughout. So there’ll be the pointless voiceover in the present glomming onto the origin story, making reading it an unnecessarily confusing experience. It’s the worst writing style that Loeb nearly always deploys in his books, and, because he’s bizarrely popular with general readers, lots of other comics writers adopted his shitty style in other books so that now it’s almost a standard in superhero comics.
I’m not sure why there’s a Lennie from Of Mice and Men-esque scene in here where Hulk pets a rabbit too hard and accidentally kills it. Maybe Loeb sees Banner/Hulk’s relationship like George and Lennie’s and this was his clunky way of showing that? He has this habit of being a less than subtle writer, which I don’t like. At one point Hulk utters “Madder Hulk gets… stronger Hulk gets!” but Hulk has just emerged - how does he know this piece of information? It’s just plonked artlessly into the story like that.
Tim Sale’s art has never looked more epic than it does here. Amazing splash pages and a great sense of scale reappear throughout. His Hulk design is great - reminiscent of Kirby’s original but also with his own spin on it. Fantastic work - Sale’s art definitely elevated the comic for me.
The book does the job of telling Hulk’s origin and setting up the central enduring relationships of the character - his love of Betty, his bitter feud with Thunderbolt Ross, and the emerging conflict between Hulk and Banner. I just wanted a bit more to be here than simply Hulk fighting the army over and over - as it is, it’s not the strongest story for readers who are already familiar with Hulk’s origin.
It’s fine though - even though I knew Hulk’s origin beforehand, Hulk: Gray held the attention, in large part to Sale’s exemplary art, but also Loeb’s keen sense of pacing. The story is too thin for my taste, the writing is shaky at times and certain story elements - the framing device in particular - felt overly contrived and added little to the book. But if you’re simply after a telling of Hulk’s origin, or just want to see some of Tim Sale’s best art, you can’t go wrong with Hulk: Gray.
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