The First Appearance Of The Incredible Hulk (Yep ... He Was Supposed To Be Gray)

Last weekend whilst Mrs. Axinar left me totally unsupervised while she was at a party with her friends, I stumbled across a REALLY neat web site that had scans of some of the first issues of the classic comic books - Action Comics #1, Fantastic Four #1, and of course, The Incredible Hulk #1.

Of course now for the life of me I can't find that site.

What I found quite remarkable is that the scan really picked up why they decided not to go with a gray color for the Hulk. Because of the offset process involved with comic books, there simply weren't enough color dots to get that gray color consistent.

You see - with an offset press you only have cyan, magenta, yellow, and black to deal with. Trying to keep a consistent color that involves all four of those is virtually impossible.

Well, in my trying to re-find that web site, I did find out that Marvel itself has posted a version of The Incredible Hulk #1, and, despite the fact that someone has clearly gone Illustrator-happy with this thing, they DID capture the color that originally came through in the first run of the comic book - a gray-ish blue.

Now on pg. 8 you'll see a page that is supposed to be a night scene where the Hulk looks decidedly green and I supposed that's where they got the idea to change the Hulk's color to green.

The comic book Hulk origin story is quite fascinating to review - for instance you'll notice part of the plot is that The Hulk gets shot in the shoulder, and, although of course the TV story was INCREDIBLY different [[ahem]], they worked the shoulder wound into that story as well.

All in all, quite fascinating ...

Now where in the heck is that web site that had the scans of the original of this thing? ...