The Incredible Hulk #3/2

The Ringmaster

By Stan Lee, Jack Kirby and Dick Ayers

Villains: The Ringmaster and his Circus of Crime

Guest Appearances: Rick Jones

So, What Happens?

The FBI investigate a small town where all the inhabitants have been left in a hypnotic daze and everything has been ransacked. This is the latest in a run of similar events and in each case a small circus had been passing through.

At the Circus’s next stop the Ringmaster hypnotises his audience with a spinning disk on his hat while the rest of the circus steal everything in sight.

Rick Jones is still in control of the Hulk and, after ordering him to stay in one place goes to visit his Aunt to freshen up.

He follows this up with a visit to the circus but when the Ringmaster hypnotises him he manages to send a mental message to the Hulk who responds by rushing to Rick’s aid.

The Hulk battles the various criminal performers before Rick falls under the Ringmaster’s spell causing the Hulk to stop moving.

With the Hulk in tow and Rick left hypnotised behind the circus moves on to the next town. Rick is awoken by the FBI and pieces together what must have happened. He takes mental control of the Hulk from afar and uses him to trash the circus.

The army arrive to try and capture the Hulk but Rick manages to appear and causes the Hulk to leap out into the desert with him on his back.

So is it any good?:

Not really. That said Kirby has fun showing the Hulk battling elephants and clowns, it is in fact quite a visually inventive issue.

The story starts out fairly creepily, the hypnotised townsfolk are handled well and on the splash at least the circus folk have a real freak show quality that is lost once they start mixing it up with the Hulk.

There are two main problems. Firstly it is a circus of Crime story, and it is a ‘classic’ Circus of crime story as shown in a dozen Marvel cartoons and kids fun books.

They go from town to town hypnotising people and stealing everything. It probably would have read better as the first Circus of Crime story, as I said the battles are quite inventive but it’s impossible at this point for me to really separate it from all of the other appearances I have read.

The Circus of crime had three real phases. Firstly, like this one, there are the early silver age appearances before Marvel got too serious where it was just an excuse for the artist to have fun with the bigtop setting.

Then came the late 60s until the early 1980s where they were kind of established as being a bit lame but turned up a lot in team up comics and fill in issues because they were recognisable, could throw any characters together who happened to go to a circus and had a suitable modus operandi for a one off issue that wouldn’t have any impact on the title as at the end everyone had been hypnotised.

Then came the late 80s onwards when nobody wanted to use them as a legitimate foe and just wrote tongue in cheek or nostalgic stories with them. All of which makes it quite hard to approach any of their early appearances seriously, even if, as in this comic, they are used in a fairly creepy way.

Secondly it’s a story where Rick Jones in effect has a remote control Hulk that he can telepathically call upon to save him from circus related problems. That is at once both silly and a long way from any other incarnation of the Hulk. It does at least get us away from the out of control brutal Hulk of previous stories but not in a particularly good way.

Are there any goofy moments?

Not as many as you would expect given the setting. It goes for quite a creepy vibe and generally manages it. It loses it a bit towards the end with the Hulk battling elephants but it’s still not that silly.

Trivia:

The Ringmaster (Maynard Tiboldt) was eventually revealed to the son of a similar 1940s Captain America villain.

None of the regulars from the Circus of Crime really get speaking roles here, there is a strongman called Bruto and some unnamed clowns and a Human Cannonball but they aren’t particularly similar to later appearances. Wikipedia credits the various Circus of Crime as Lee/Ditko creations and this story doesn’t really have any Ditko connections so I’d say they don’t really appear in their regular forms until later.

Rick Jones Aunt Polly doesn’t really get mentioned much, generally he is shown to have grown up in an orphanage with no close family.

Is it a landmark?:

The Ringmaster has been a surprisingly durable villain so I guess so.