Hulk has a similar problem to Superman in that, as a contrast to how Spider-Man or Batman have really interesting and well-explored rogues galleries, neither of them really have that going on. At most, they have one or two really memorable villains (Abomination and the Leader for Hulk, Brainiac and Luthor for Superman) with it honestly being a diceroll on any other villain, being written well by individual writers.

and this leads to an interesting point, Superman and Hulk are similar in that their best stories don’t center around ‘can they win this fight?’ or ‘how can they possibly stop this evil plan?’ but instead, their stories tend to be a bit more introspective and personal.

Both of them are immensely powerful, and their best stories often don’t delve into if they can win (because the assumption is that they will) but of their own fears or personal traumas and moments of doubt. They lend themselves to stories about the cost of being so strong, or fundamentally alone.

Like say, Hulk is unstoppable. The problem is, sometimes Banner doesn’t WANT to be unstoppable; he’s a profoundly fucked up, miserable bundle of self-hatred and guilt for basically… existing. Even when he doesn’t constantly try to destroy aspects of his own selfhood or shunt all the feelings and parts of himself he thinks are inherently bad onto some other entity so he can pretend that it’s not really him that gets angry or thinks awful things, he’s a mess.

Many Hulk stories are not concerned with whether or not he wins. They’re about him being isolated from everyone, having no one and nothing but his own endless rage. He goes to save the world, and the world instantly turns on him for it. Immortal Hulk offers an interesting take on this; it’s a horror story, but the horror is not in visceral splatter or even the grotesque imagery; the horror is in what the Hulk is willing to do, and how far he’ll take his vindictiveness.

Planet Hulk is a story where there’s no real question if he can beat the Red King. It’s obvious he can; everyone wants him to. The real story focuses on his willingness to do so, after being so brutally betrayed and hurt, and if he is the Sakaarson to unite their world… or if his rage and monstrosity will make him the World Breaker doomed to destroy everything around him.

Many Hulk stories concern themselves with the question of, even if the Hulk wants to be a hero, can he believe that he can be anything other than a monster?

Superman has similar approaches, through from the other point of view. Often his stories ask: sure, Superman COULD execute any villain he wanted, and there’s nothing that could punish him, or stop him. He has the power to do whatever he wants. The question is, he asks: “do i have the right to do that?” In the end, nothing can really hold Superman accountable but Superman himself, and so he grapples with the question of ‘Should I’ all the time.

This ultimately leads to a point; their rogues gallery are less served with being potent threats, and more with what they have to do with their impact on a story, or what they say about our heroes. For example, Abomination is a bully who relishes in his power to do whatever he pleases to whoever he wants: Hulk, for all his power, doesn’t WANT to fight and just wants to be left in peace, even if the world assumes he’s a walking natural disaster out to cause misery. Luthor is most obviously a rich, powerful genius who insists that he is the underdog while Superman (an immigrant in the most extreme of senses, someone in a diaspora from which there is no return; adopted into a family of farmers and spending most of his life doing farmwork) is, for all his power, a working class man. Superman is everything Luthor wants to pretend he himself is, and his existence proves him wrong, and Luthor fixates on him for it.

If there’s a lesson to take from this, besides thoughts on writing fic, it’s this: making your protagonist strong doesn’t invalidate certain stories, but it does mean that sometimes you shouldn’t ask ‘can my hero win this fight’ but instead ask ‘how does my hero feel getting into this fight?’

A commission I’m very grateful for because I wanted to draw this for a long time but didn’t have time since I had a lot of work lately. Bruce and his Hulks

Red Harpy by Mike Hawthorne

This time I didn’t ask for a Sam because I already have one and I’m so in love with how he drew Betty in Immortal Hulk 35. Actually Red Hary quickly became one of my fav character ever.

And Mike is a very nice and talented person (and one of the few persons who’s not bothered by all my shenanigans lmao) so I try to support his work as much as I can and I got this small headshot commission while buying his latest kickstarter. He’s truly one of my fav artists and one of the few people I look up to. We’ve been mutuals for a while but I still freak out everytime he likes my art lol, I really don’t care about following or likes but there’re some people out there who makes me feel so humble and so happy when they aknowledge my work… He’s one of them. Please consider checking his work if you don’t know him yet :

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I know Bruce must be in conflict after Endgame, so marvel, at the very least, I need this Bruce Banner in She-hulk :

Without Professor Hulk, without downloading it for comic relief, I need the sarcastic and dark Bruce Banner from the first Avengers, are you listening to me marvel? There's still time

BRUCE BANNER

" You underestimated me, Hulk. Don't feel bad. Most do. What he put me through, though, as a kid--you don't survive that by being weak.

I'm the strongest there is."

JOE FIXIT

"Bruce ain't here dad. It's Joe. Party's over."

DEVIL HULK

"I know you locked me away for years. I know I scare you. What I do. What I am. But before any of the others... I was there. Protecting you. I'll always protect you...

'Cause I love you, you stupid kid. Somebody had to. Come on home."

BIG GUY | SAVAGE HULK

"Hulk does not smash ... children."

Sometimes Bruce Banner goes a few days without thinking of his mother.

Grief is, for him, not a process. It is a state. It comes and it goes; sometimes it is a distant thing and he can almost pretend that the idea of ‘family’ is a distant thing, an old and tired idea that has scarred over and can’t hurt him anymore.

And then there are the other days.

Sometimes, he knows people wonder why it still hurts him so much, then. Why the grief steals the words from him, or knocks the wind right out of his gut harder than any fist could. He knows they think that because he was just a small child, he should long since have processed it.

He thinks, ‘Everyone says I should get over it already.’ The heat rises inside him, fury pounding harder than his heart, and up the Hulk rises, and their voices drown out a world that seems very stupid indeed.

He still remembers the blood falling on the floor. The crack of her skull against the asphalt. The sound of her breath trailing away.

He remembers knowing, in that moment, what hate really meant. He remembers being small, for too many years doing his hardest to take care of his mother even being so young and not understanding what he was supposed to do… watching her drain away, a bit every year, until in so many ways she was dead long before her body ceased to function.

“Just get over it.” Indeed.

He learned what hate really meant, in those moments.

Now, his fingers curl. His skin is shifting color; perhaps gray, flashing from the inside with pulses of a greener hue.

Bruce remembers that when his father murdered his mother, he did it by smashing her head against the street. And years later, Bruce killed him by smashing his father’s head against his mother’s tombstone.

He smiles there, in the dark. His eyes are a flat shade of gray. Cold as stone, and cruel.

It’s not a very nice smile.

He thinks that a world that allows a man like Brian Banner to live, that ignores the death of a woman like Rebecca Banner, that thinks he should just get over it, all pompous and self-involved and completely unconcerned with the suffering of others until it affected them…

Well. Any world like that deserves the Hulk.

this was my favorite scene from the new immortal hulk issue! i loved it when betty, rick, and hulk all went out for ice cream and nothing bad or horrifying happened at all! :)

concept, Bruce Banner’s focus on social justice in Immortal Hulk being something he is very well known for in-universe

like, he’s well known about being outspoken about this topic and campaigning for it his entire professional life, even more than his scientific accomplishments. he makes some vague references to his mom having set the stage and he’s following in her footsteps

even when he transforms into the Hulk, the Hulk tends to recall this and acts on it, in their unique ways; they are ultimately facets of someone, as Bruce is a facet as well, and they do share some similar views on justice, though their harshness varies.

Savage Hulk, being childlike, doesn’t have the ability to really work out the complexities, but he recognizes that people are being hurt. It’s not fair. Naturally he lashes out whenever he sees it, though he can’t really articulate why or the fine details of the systematic injustices at play.

Joe canonically already has this going on in Immortal Hulk; he explictly is interested in trans rights and equates it to his own desire to be his own person without being constrained by the greater system. possibly you could follow up on this by tweaking him so that rather than being a mob enforcer, he was a detective or freelance ‘problem solver’ who helped out with that sort of thing while being a brutal smartass about it. (Or rather, this being his true vocation. Breaking skulls for the mafia was just his job, if you want to preserve that aspect.)

Green Scar has a… direct way of dealing with this sort of thing; you see people making things worse for other people, you smash the shit out of them and do it so ferociously people will be too afraid to even THINK of trying that. Devil Hulk is similar, to a degree, though he’s more of a big picture guy and probably directs them all to be more thoughtful about the long-term effets so they get a desired result down the road.

Professor is probably closest to an old school Superman personality here, in that he’s absolutely fighting injustice and smashing them good, but he’s very tactical about it. He’s not above outright mocking the authorities about it, either. “Yes, I absolutely flicked that cop into the side of a building. He opened fire on unarmed people, just because he could. What are you going to do, shoot me? Bullets don’t hurt ME. Go on, I dare you.” He’s not too bothered by the wrong people being scared of him, and if other people are afraid of him, well, self sacrifice is part of the game.

Conversely, this all does make the Hulk VERY vulnerable to the one thing he can’t just smash; public perception. It wouldn’t be hard for his enemies, or those in authority (as if there’s a difference!) to portray his actions in the worst possible light, and this means that Hulk’s image, as he’s seen by the public, is his biggest weakness that he has to deal with. That’s the thing that will get the military hounding him; the fear of the authorities that they cannot control or stop the incredible, rampaging, immortal Hulk and so they desperately try to find ways to do just that anyway, out of the certain fear that he will end the comfortable status quo they require to maintain their lifestyle.

Joe Fixit scares Brian Banner.

He sees him, every so often; when Bruce dies, or when he sleeps and some parts of himself come sauntering down to the place below everything. Brian doesn’t know why; maybe to gloat, seeing him and everyone they’ve beaten trapped down here, or to make sure that Brian is stuck there and can’t haunt them anymore.

He should get some kind of satisfaction out of that; he always did. Some part of him reveled in the little winces Rebecca had, when he knew she was thinking something he didn’t want her to. He likes people below him in power cowering in fear, whimpering and twitching at the thought of his disapproval-

But Joe Fixit, the parts of his son that would sooner put Brian in a grave all over again, aren’t like that.

And those stone-gray eyes scare him.

Maybe its just the way the monster looks at him. It’s not hotblooded or intense; not like the Green Scar did, when Brian fought him at the behest of a god of darkness and chaos, not like the primal urge to kill him, mingled in fear, that this Devil personality holds.

Those eyes are grey as stone, colder still. There’s nothing in them but dismissive contempt.

Brian shivers, feeling that gaze move over him; against his breakable throat, along his joints and back, in all the spots that even this spectral memory is vulnerable to.

His son, Brian has always imagined, is a monster. But this thing, wearing a human skin, grinning like a Halloween demon in a bad people mask, is worse than that. They want to kill him, so badly, but won’t…

Joe won’t kill him, he knows.

Joe will hurt him slow, keep him alive for dies. Not out of hate, but spite, and contempt.

Brian has hurt the people he thought he loved, in moments of rage, emotion doing the work of thought, and later came justifications, excuses. The idea of hurting someone, for hours at a time, planning it out, and doing it with nothing more than a calm sense of satisfaction, because you think they deserve it…

Yes. Joe Fixit scares him.

And he sees that awful grin, those horrible grey eyes staring into his own, and he knows that the monster knows he’s afraid.

“Tick tock, ‘Dad’,” He says calmly, staring into his eyes. “There’s always a deeper Hell for you. I’ll make it myself, if I have to. And you’re already dead, so whatever you have waiting… I’ll make sure you never, ever stop paying for what ya did to Ma.”

unfinished hulk things between work

Inspired by the first issue of Immortal Hulk!

Alternate color shift below the cut!

I wasn't sure which one I liked better

ID: sketches of a shrimp and a prawn wearing black turtlenecks, labeled "shrim possible" and "prawn stoppable" in messy green block letters. end ID

rufus is a tardigrade. i dont know

I sketched out some centaur designs based on the 1910s a while back. I admit the research was pretty surface level, but it was still great fun.

good read for teachers.

good read for teachers.

before the poll, a quick definition of terms:

"mutual" - you found this post from a mutual (on their blog or your dash) "following" - you found this post from someone you're following, but who isn't following you "random" - you found this by scrolling through someone's blog, who you don't follow. this includes people following you "For You" - you found this on the For You page "recommended" - you found this in a "Check out these blogs" popup, or a "recommended" post when looking at a different post "other" - you found this post some other way. comment how? "reblog ✅" - you're going to reblog, queue, or schedule this post "reblog ❌" - you're NOT going to reblog, queue, or schedule this post

with that out of the way: