Reading – The Incredible Hulk: Stalker from the Stars

This past weekend, while at Half-Price Books, I came across a copy of The Incredible Hulk: Stalker from the Stars*, a 1978 paperback novel written by Len Wein, Marv Wolfman, and Joseph Silva. Not one to miss out on the chance to read a late seventies novel staring The Hulk I paid my $1.98 — $0.23 more than the book’s cover price! — and after a little over an hour with the book I can report that it’s a quick and fun read.

Hulk Smash!

Stalker* opens with sidekick Rick Jones (Wikipedia) searching for a doctor who may be able to help Banner. The first thing I realized as I started reading the book was that it was going to be a very simple read; the text isn’t exactly complicated as proven in this short quote:

Once again, the anger had triumphed. Against his will, as always, Bruce Banner had been transformed into the monstrous green Goliath called the Hulk.

Now I’m not trying to put the book down, but anyone seeking this out needs to understand that it’s a superhero novel, written in the late seventies, and aimed directly at young teens. This isn’t at all a bad thing — in fact, after reading this one book I now want the entire series (see Diversions of the Groovy Kind) — but it’s only fair to warn all of you that this is definitely for younger readers.

But it’s a hell of a lot of fun.

Over the course of the book we meet Jones, Banner, Ross, and various others as we watch Bruce Banner get captured, escape, fight an alien from another world, and then end the book with everyone thinking the Banner/HulkSh’mballah, is a very Cthulhu-like entity that has enslaved a small town to North Dakota and is forcing the people of the town to excavate its spaceship. It seems that the alien has been trapped underground for hundreds of years and now, as events bring the Hulk to the town, everything comes together so that the alien can surface just in time to fight the Hulk.

Hulk Like Reading!

Seriously, it’s not the greatest work of fiction we’ve ever encountered but The Incredible Hulk: Stalker from the Stars* is a fun look at the Marvel of the seventies. It’s a fairly simple, straightforward story but it’s fun and just the thing to take you back to a much simpler time.

The Hulk manages to take down choppers and destroy cars without killing a single human; by the time the story has ended we’ve seen lots of destruction and very little death (and all of the casualties are the result of the aliens attacks and not the Hulk’s actions). It’s an almost-innocent story, and makes me think that we could all do a lot worse this week than to read some old comics from that era when Marvel comic books were just starting to work their way into the mainstream.

Recommended, especially if you can find a copy for cover price.