New Hulk No Nice Guy

WASHINGTON, July 26 (UPI) -- For more than 40 years, The Incredible Hulk has been the brutish but ultimately well-meaning misunderstood big little boy of children's superhero comics. No more.

It is Issue Five of the new Marvel comic book, "The Ultimates" and the Hulk is running berserk in Manhattan yet again. But this is no sad and simple child.

"According to the sat-pics, he's murdered dozens of people, drunk a truck full of beer and right now looks like he's stealing a pair of pants from a fat corpse," Gen. Nick Fury tells the new super-hero team he has assembled. "You imagine what he's gonna do when he catches that girlfriend of his with Freddie Prinze Jr.?"

No, these ain't your Daddy's comic books, fan boy.

The superheroes seeking to stop the Hulk have been updated in subtle, edgy ways as well. Giant-Man, Dr. Hank Pym, is a manic-depressive genius on Prozac. When he's up, he invents serums that can make him grow to 60 feet tall and shrink his wife to an inch in height. When he's down, he beats her.

But don't cry too much for that little super-heroine. Janet Van Dyne, the Wonderful Wasp can take care of herself. She distracts the rampaging Hulk at a crucial moment by baring her upper body to him.

Even Gen. Fury, a cool black African American officer more like Samuel L. Jackson than Gen. Colin Powell, is shocked. "A double PhD and the only way you can think of to distract The Hulk is with a Mardi Gras special?" he asks. To which the Wasp replies, like any computer literate, upwardly mobile, go-getting Generation X-er would, "Oh, give me a break, Nick! It worked, didn't it?"

Iron Man, billionaire inventor genius Tony Stark has a drinking problem. When asked why he's drinking a vodka and orange early in the morning, he replies that it's a good time for one in Moscow.

The Mighty Thor is now a New Age Guru dedicated to saving the environment and much else. He only agrees to join the team and save New York after President Bush has accepted his demand to double the U.S. foreign aid budget.

Even Captain America has an unfamiliar new edge to him. Thawed out from a block of Arctic ice 57 years after saving Washington from being incinerated by a prototype Nazi intercontinental ballistic missile with a thermonuclear hydrogen bomb on top, he is still a square, nice guy who likes to wear pork pie hats and listen to 40s Sinatra albums when he isn't saving the world. But when he has to subdue Bruce Banner after he's reverted to his measly human form from trashing the city as The Hulk, he first wins his trust then kicks him unconscious with a well-placed Army-issue combat boot to the face.

"The Ultimates" sounds shocking if you come to it cold with only vague, fuzzy memories of what comic books are, or what they should be about. But in many respects it is much more traditional, even reassuring and uplifting.

Virtually all the apparently shocking innovations in this re-imagined launching of 40-year-old familiar characters have long since been explored in their regular comic book titles. Dr. Pym was forced to leave the Avengers group and comic book for years because he did strike his wife and behaved unreliably and treacherously to the group. Eventually, he made amends and even made a successful new start with the Wasp.

Tony Stark aka Iron Man had a terrifying drinking problem for years in the regular comic and had to give up the heroic wearing of his amazing high tech armor to his best friend Jim Rhodes. Ever since, he only drinks Dr. Pepper in the comics and has been a role model example for Alcoholics Anonymous.

And even the Hulk as a cruel and selfish -- and sexy -- monster has been explored at length. The great Peter David had him hide out for years in Las Vegas as a casino enforcer with a six foot, athletic red-headed girlfriend and made him a snazzy dresser in classic cool 40s mobster style. That Hulk was not just nasty and cruel. He was smart and cunning too.

"The Ultimates" is not trying to shock its readers or radically revise the established personalities of its characters. Like its highly successful previous re-launch sister titles, "Ultimate Spiderman" and "Ultimate X-Men", it wants to reach a new core teenage audience by presenting its characters as fresh and contemporary, without the enormous weight of 40 years of continuity more detailed and complex than Church Canon Law, the Talmud or the Mahabharata to catch up on if you want to understand a word of it.

Written with panache and wit by Scotsman Mark Millar and drawn with superlative realism, dramatic energy and narrative flow by the great Bryan Hitch, it succeeds in these aims admirably.

The comic book market today is unimaginably changed from the one of 40 years ago. Ironically, it is more comparably to that of the Golden Age of Comic Books during World War II. Then, GIs in their late teens and early 20s devoured millions of comic books a month with even more relish than kids of the time did. (That explains why, in those far off pre-Comic Code days, scantily dressed super-heroines were in far greater number -- and distress -- than ever since.)

Today, comic book specialty stores are haunted as much by Baby Boom and X-er Fathers in their 30s and 40s as much as by the young children they have in tow. Joel Pollack, proprietor of Big Planet Comics in Bethesda, says that the market is picking up again among children but current teens remain cold to it.

Marvel's new "Ultimate" line of re-launches marks an attempt to draw those absent teens back into the old world of the four color pulps that entranced their parents and grandparents before them. "Ultimate Spiderman" was a huge success and Pollack says "Ultimates" is selling well too.

It deserves to. These may not be your Daddy's comics, fan boy, but he'll lap them up as well.