10 Things Marvel Wants You To Forget About The Hulk
You won't like him when he's angry. Or sleepy. Or grey. Or insane...
Hulk. Smash. In those two words, you've basically got everything you need to know about The Incredible Hulk. At his core, he's a very simple character: a big green monster who destroys things, because he's very angry. The added wrinkle is Bruce Banner, the mild-mannered scientist who keeps the Hulk at bay. Except when he gets mad.
Those are the things everybody knows about the Hulk. But such a simple, perfect premise couldn't have existed unchanged for almost fifty years, the character making his first appearance all the way back in 1961. Since then, Marvel Comics have tried all sorts of different ideas with Bruce Banner; some stuck, most of them didn't.
Nowadays The Hulk is best known as Mark Ruffalo, who plays as Bruce Banner in Marvel's multiplex-conquering Avengers films. He's pretty much the iconic Hulk: angry, monstrous, but a nice bumbling scientist in his regular guise. At least that's how they want you to think of the Hulk - in truth that's not even half the story of the jolly green giant.
He's changed a lot in the time between that first appearance and Age Of Ultron, but you'll likely see neither hide nor hair of, say, Bruce Banner's many alien children, his original power set, his mental health struggles or any of the ten things that Marvel wants you to forget about The Hulk.
10. He Was Originally Grey
It's one of those well-known bits of retro comics trivia that the jolly green giant used to be grey. Stan Lee didn't want Bruce Banner's skin tone to belong to any identifiable ethnic group when he Hulked out (a surprisingly progressive decision in the early sixties), which meant that at first Jack Kirby settled on making the character grey.
Unfortunately, the cheap printing presses Marvel used back then mostly rendered The Hulk's as brown, purple, or some other totally inappropriate shade. Hence him beign changed to green. Since then, Marvel have never quite decided on whether they just want to forget that ever happened, or include the grey skin as part of the character's biography.
On occasion he has reverted to the grey skin, notably during a period where Banner regained control of the Hulk's brain so he was a genius, softly-spoken monster. Then again, most reprints of those early Hulk stories have been changed so he was green from the start, and he's never been grey on screen, so just forget about that snafu.