The Incredible Hulk #2

The Terror of the Toad Men

By Stan Lee, Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko

Villains: The Toad Men

Guest Appearances: Rick Jones

So, What Happens?

The Hulk is on his nightly rampage.

Shrugging off gunfire, trashing a small town and eventually being led away from civilisation by Rick Jones, the only person he will listen to.

The next day, with the Hulk back as Banner; he and Rick head into the desert with digging tools, intent on creating a prison for the Hulk to spend his nights in.

Meanwhile in orbit the Toad Men are seeking out the most intelligent man on earth to fill them in on Earths defences. Their magnetic sensors decide this means Bruce Banner and they strike Banner and Rick with a ray that leaves them helplessly floating above the ground.

The Toad Men come down and extract their prisoners. They aren’t really interested in Rick and send him back to Earth but they soon have more than they can handle when Banner transforms into the Hulk. He easily deals with the entire alien crew and decides to use the space ship to get his revenge on the Earthly authorities who have tormented him.

The space ship is easily shot down by US missiles and when the military examines the wreckage they find only Banner. And promptly arrest him for treason.

The Toad Men escape and send a signal to the rest of their invasion fleet to continue the assault.

The arrival of a fleet of UFOs spreads panic and prompts a range of disasters, all caused by the Toad Men’s magnetic weapons. The Military are powerless and can’t even keep Banner locked up. When night fall provokes a change into the Hulk he escapes easily, smashing his way through any troops trying to stop him. He kidnaps Betty Ross and tries to take her to Banner’s lab. Far from being calmed down by Rick Jones he instead tries to kill him. However he is knocked over by an earthquake caused by the Toad Men’s magnetic weapons and then transformed back to Banner by the rising sun.

Banner makes sure Betty is Ok and then sets about working on his gamma ray experiments for something that can aid against the Toad Men. He turns to his prototype Gamma Gun and while Rick keeps the oncoming army patrol at bay with a firehose Banner’s invention sends the Toad Men’s invasion fleet back to where they came from.

With the world saved Banner voluntarily locks himself in the underground prison he and Rick had designed.

So is it any good?:

It’s a lovely mix of Kirby and Ditko, with Kirby totally overshadowed by Ditko’s excellent inks. In fact I’d say it is the best Marvel issue that I’ve seen so far, visually. Their Hulk is superb, brutish with a heavily browed face and a palpable attitude.

However the story is weak, despite the thematic strength of the Banner/Hulk idea there is no getting away from the generic alien invasion plot.

It’s not just a genre staple, it’s only a few months since the Skrull invasion in FF 2 and here you have another, visually very similar, alien race coming from nowhere to invade. By the 80s off-beat humour issues of various titles were making a lot of just how often the cosmically insignificant Earth had been invaded. It’s early issues like this that used alien invasions, complete with huge damage and panicking crowds, as a throwaway event and made them seem rather commonplace.

The damage done would of course never be mentioned again and plenty of civilians would continue to act like the existence of aliens was a huge shock to them in future stories.

There are interesting touches, the Hulk capturing the alien ship and deciding to use it for his own attack on his foes in the US Military was unusual and suggests that more recent vengeful Hulk stories have as much or even more of a connection to the original issues than the childlike 70s Hulk that is often seen as the classic version. This anti-hero role and frequent flippings from hero to villain are reminiscent of the 1940s Namor stories and the ease with which he turns on everyone, including threatening Rick for the second issue in a row, are very similar to the early belligerent Thing appearances.

For the second issue in a row it is actually Banner who saves the day, dealing with the Toad Men via his Gamma gun cannon much as he used his intelligence to cure the Gremlin last issue. His nightly transformation into the Hulk is a curse that gets in the way of Banner’s heroic efforts to serve mankind. In later years the Hulk would go runs of issues without changing back to Banner but here he is really the focus.

I don’t even really dislike the Toad Men, I quite like their design. Like the Skrulls it is squat and somewhat comical and they appeared in one of the first Hulk stories I ever read. However it’s not an issue to get excited over.

Are there any goofy moments?

I love the Toad Men’s magnetic Mind-Detector. The panel that features it is a classic of silver age goofiness. And a lot more Ditko than it is Kirby.

Some of the machinery Banner and Rick use on their Hulk prison must have taken some nifty handiwork to put into place. Not to mention appropriation from some military budget somewhere.

Trivia:

The recent Hulk comics have made a little in-joke of ranking the Marvel Universes super geniuses in a top ten. Interesting that in this story Banner is picked as the world’s best. Reed Richards hasn’t really started to be depicted that way yet or I’m sure Stan would have had some cross promotion here to go with Johnny reading an issue of Hulk in FF5

The Toad Men are more correctly called the Tribbitites. They would appear again in the story featuring Glorian and the Shaper of Worlds in Hulk 190-1 before being relegated to comic relief in John Byrne’s She Hulk and as throwaway villains in a few panels of the short lived Defenders v2.

Is it a landmark?:

No, it’s not even the Marvel Universe’s first alien invasion. It is the first issue chronologically of any title that isn’t really any kind of landmark.