The Hulk: The Incredible Guide

From Barnes & Noble

Here's everything you need to know about that incredibly big, green muscle man! In the spirit of DK's other Ultimate Guides, this colorful book is loaded with more than 500 images and lots more about the Hulk. Each awesome spread is devoted to one theme -- Bruce Banner, "Hulk Hunters," the Avengers, the Death of Betty Banner, and many others -- with descriptions, historical facts, and side notes providing loads of information. Rounding it all out with a foreword by Hulk creator Stan Lee, a map of Hulk Around the World, and a Gazetteer (a list of different characters' first appearances in the comics), this brawny book is essential for Hulk fans and collectors young and old.

Children's Literature

Stan Lee of Marvel Comics added The Incredible Hulk to his stable of superheroes in 1962. The scenario is a familiar one: mild-mannered Dr. Bruce Banner is accidentally bombarded with gamma rays from one of his Cold War projects, turning him at inconvenient moments into the 900-pound Hulk. As Lee himself admits, his inspiration was a combination of Boris Karloff in Hollywood's Frankenstein and Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The difference in this superhero is attitude: the Hulk has a very nasty temper. Fortunately he generally uses it in defense of the American Way against the evil empire of Russia. So what we've got is a curious piece of social history that could probably stand up to study alongside Mickey Spillane's pulp novels of the same period. DeFalco vaguely suggests this in his study, but overall his mission has been to give a chronological account of the comic book's plot and character progression. This has been achieved in the handsome oversize book brimming with slick, full-color illustrations on every glossy page. The end result is an edition for collectors' shelves. A pity. It also could have been a stunning foray into Cold War history and psychology. 2003, DK Publishing, Ages 10 up.
—Kathleen Karr

School Library Journal

Gr 5 Up-A guide to the comic-book universe surrounding the big green guy. While the book focuses on a number of characters, including the many villains in the Hulk world, it also covers in less detail the history and origin of his character and various incarnations in the comics. The book is designed for browsing and maximum visual interest. The illustrations all come from the DC comics and include a few spreads of particularly spectacular images of the Hulk enraged. At times the text reads like an afterthought. A constant reminder that this is really little more than a piece of a much larger marketing scheme is the large number of characters with the ubiquitous symbol following their names.-Tim Wadham, Maricopa County Library District, Phoenix, AZ Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.