(art credit: Marvel)
One of these days Marvel will get the whole synergy thing right. On my way to catch a screening of the comic book giant?s ?The Incredible Hulk? the other evening, I stopped off at a comics shop to pick up some regular reading. A couple of clerks were struggling to bring a casual customer up to speed on one of the big new developments in the Hulk comics: the intro of a Red Hulk, glaring up at the three of them from a series of ostensibly collectible covers, rendered in all his teeth-gnashing, vein-popping, constipated rage-aholic glory. Trouble is, any mainstream moviegoer obviously thinks of the Hulk as being green. His look is iconic, right? So if those same mainstream moviegoers happen across a comics shop, or even the graphic novel section at Barnes & Noble, are they going to know what the heck to make of a Red Hulk? Or have the patience to sit through a fanboy tutorial? Seems unlikely. The storyline has gotten some play in USA Today and elsewhere, and the core readership has been responding, but sheesh, talk about counterintuitive. (Better still: Red Hulk and Hulk Classic do battle in an issue coming out in a couple of weeks. Try not to let your head explode.)
The comics industry for years has wrestled with how to attract new, younger readers when PlayStations and such always seem to grab their attention first. But the difficulty is invariably compounded by superhero comics? decades of mind-boggling (sometimes mind-numbing) serialization and continuity ? the sort of twisty mythology that sooner or later produces a Red Hulk, or a reincarnated Superman, or a replacement Batman. Back in 2000, Marvel Comics infamously canned its then editor-in-chief because the company?s first X-Men movie had just turned into a surprise hit ? and the X-Men comics were so convoluted and inaccessible, there was barely a sales spike. Several years on, onetime Hollywood doormat Marvel has turned into such a force in the industry, it?s now financing its own movies, and even had the juice to do a ?Hulk? reboot just five years after Ang Lee?s out-of-touch version. But if it was so crucial to get the Hulk right, and depict the character as the icon people know ? again we?ve got to ask how Marvel isn?t just Hulk-red with embarrassment that they seem to be letting business history repeat itself. Or could they be trying to grab the Hellboy audience, too?
