10 Hulk Fates Worse Than Death
Marvel's jade giant has seen some pretty awful things since the 1960s...
One of the greatest characters to come out of the Marvel Age of Comics was the Incredible Hulk. Stan Lee and Jack Kirby were great at creating characters with problems, and boy, does the Hulk have more than enough issues to deal with.
On the one hand, he’s an uber-powerful being capable of great feats of strength, while on the other, he’s a brilliant scientist looking for a way to reverse his condition. Together, they are Bruce Banner and the Hulk, but if the comics have taught us anything, the two characters are two sides of the same coin.
Because the Hulk is so engrained with radiation in his stories and lore, there are plenty of bad guys (and good guys) who have succumbed to the horrific fate of gamma radiation poisoning. Some folks got superpowers, while others had their talents significantly enhanced.
Whatever fate befell a character though, many times, it was clearly a fate worse than death.
That’s one of the core elements of the Incredible Hulk himself, and for pretty much everyone associated with the character, they too suffer horrific fates. The fates listed here may seem better than death at first, but given time, few could argue that death wouldn’t be a welcome release to these gamma-influenced outcomes.
10. Finally Being Alone... - Hulk: The End
Back in the early aughts, Marvel dropped a few books subtitled "The End" to see what the world might look like at the end of a particular hero's journey. One of the best from that series was Hulk: The End, which detailed the last story that was/would be told about the Hulk.
For the Hulk, he was shown to be the last living human on the planet, as everyone else had died out following a nuclear holocaust. The Hulk survived that ordeal, but he was the only one left in a desolate world. Well, he and Bruce Banner, of course.
In this world, Banner moved back to the Hulk's subconscious and rarely took the place of the Hulk, only doing so when he needed to heal. The Hulk dealt with gigantic cockroaches that would eat his body, leading to his regeneration, but the Hulk is otherwise dominant between the two.
Eventually, Banner suffers a heart attack and dies while the Hulk is in control of his body. Knowing a transformation would result in his death, the Hulk finally succeeds in getting what he always wanted: he was finally alone. This results in the realization that "Hulk...strongest one there is. Hulk...only one there is...Hulk feels...cold."