In the release of The Incredible Hulk movie on the big screen, we see reminders of the same titled TV series that aired in late 70′s. It is safe to say that these movies, both the Ang Lee 2003 Hulk and Louis Letterier 2008 Hulk, would not have been as successful without the Incredible Hulk TV series paving the way to mainstream adoration for the green goliath.

The TV series, much more so than the comic books, took on a Fugitive storyline where Dr David Banner (played by Bill Bixby) ran from town to town in search of a heal for his affliction. His alter ego, the Hulk, was played by bodybuilder Lou Ferrigno. The lack of particular effects did not hinder the film makers. Instead, to portray a powerful and extraordinary presence amidst humans, the Hulk scenes, exceptionally when there were feats of strength involved, were in slow motion. Maybe cheesy now, but it worked very well back then. Additionaly, the Six Million Dollar Man and the Bionic Woman did incisively the same thing for similar scenes.

Also, not to be forgotten is the Lonely Man theme. This is perchance one of the catchiest TV tunes ever and it surmise Dr. Banner’s plight with a powerful aura of sadness.

Some of the best episodes:

The Hulk Breaks Las Vegas (Season 1, Episode 6). Dr. Banner witnessed a murder undertake of a journalist who he accorded to aid by passing on info to a fellow journalist. It just so take place that the fellow journalist was Jack McGee, the reporter who tracked down Dr. Banner for the truth behind the Hulk.

Incredible Hulk Married (Season 2, Episode 1). In the season opener, Dr. Banner found love the for second time around with a brilliant hypnotherapist, Dr. Caroline Fields (played by Mariette Hartley). She tried to help him, but unfortunately, she had her own life crisis as she was on the terminal stage of neurogical disorder.

Prometheus (Season 4, Episodes 1 & 2). Dr. Banner saved a blind woman in the woods where a meteor crashes. He was caught in mid-transformation to the Hulk as a government group called Prometheus was dispatched to investigate the meteor. After seeing the Hulk, they mistook the Hulk to be an alien from another world and attempted to capture him.

Comic Book Nation Transformation Culture

As American as jazz or rock and roll, comic books have been central in the nation’s ordinary culture since Superman’s 1938 debut in Action Comics #1. Selling in the millions each year for the past six decades, comic books have figured conspicuously in the childhoods of most Americans alive today. In Comic Book Nation, Bradford W. Wright offers an engaging, illuminating, and ofttimes provocative history of the comic book industry within the context of twentieth-century American society.

From Batman’s Depression-era battles versus corrupt local politicians and Captain America’s one-man war versus Nazi Germany to Iron Man’s Cold War exploits in Vietnam and Spider-Man’s confrontations with student protestors and drug use in the early 1970s, comic books have continually reflected the national mood, as Wright’s imaginative reading of thousands of titles from the 1930s to the 1980s makes clear. In each genre—superhero, war, romance, crime, and horror comic books—Wright finds that writers and illustrators used the medium to address a assortment of severe issues, including racism, economic injustice, fascism, the threat of nuclear war, drug abuse, and teenage alienation. At the same time, xenophobic wartime series proved that comic books could be as reactionary as any medium.

Wright’s lively study likewise focuses on the role comic books played in transforming children and adolescents into consumers; the industry’s ingenuous attempts to market their merchandise to legions of young but savvy fans; the attempts of parents, politicians, religious organizations, civic groups, and child psychologists like Dr. Fredric Wertham (whose 1954 book Seduction of the Innocent, a salacious exposé of the medium’s violence and sexual content, led to U.S. Senate hearings) to link juvenile delinquency to comic books and impose censorship on the industry; and the altering economics of comic book publishing over the course of the century. For the paperback edition, Wright has written a new postscript that details industry developments in the late 1990s and the response of comic artists to the disaster of 9/11. Comic Book Nation is at once a severe study of popular culture and an agreeably diverting look at an enduring American art form.

From Publishers WeeklyPow! Bam! Crash! Analysis! According to this perceptive and highly agreeably diverting political and cultural history of comic books, Superman was not just “fighting for the American way”–he was inventing it. Comic books, perchance the central staple of U.S. youth culture, have been rudimentary in both shaping and reflecting the country’s political, social, ethical and even sexual mores ever since Superman made his firstborn aspect on the cover of Action Comics in 1938. Wright, a faculty fellow member at the University of Maryland’s University College, charts how these usual pulp stories (over 100 million comics were printed in 1949) mirrored myriad, oftentimes conflicting, political positions: Superman’s firstborn oppositions were corrupt politicians and slum lords aligned versus the New Deal; ’50s books reflected national anticommunist hysteria as well as mixed messages in regards to the Korean War; violent “crime comics” of the 1950s reflected the decade’s social unrest; Iron Man in the 1960s found his earlier anticommunist politics shaken by the war in Vietnam. Wright explores how the politics of the writers and artists, ordinarily liberals and often Jewish, were reflected in their work, while at the same time they had to conform to often times more conservative cultural standards that ofttimes led to a backlash versus the genre. By the late 1940s, comics were at the center of a full-fledged cultural war; claims that they corrupted youth and caused crime and juvenile delinquency, resulted in congressional hearings and laws that banned the books. Carefully placing comics in their broader social contexts and weighing gravely their critics’ charges, Wright gives rise to an intellectual study not only of comics but of shifting complex mental states toward standard culture, children, violence, patriotism and America itself.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Library JournalAt last, a substantive book studying the effect of comic books on American culture and vice versa. Wright (Univ. of Maryland’s University Coll., European Division) departs from the tired formula of celebrating comics’ golden age in the 1940s or focusing on one company’s experiences. Instead, his exceedingly well-organized book traces the genre’s birth, expansions, and retractions from the 1930s to the present. The arousing and attention holding result highlights an more and more intriguing fundamental interaction among pressing events in American society and what was written and published on colorfully paneled pages. Wright’s style is intellectual but not lecturing, informed but not boorish, and he maintains an admirable remainder amongst minute detail and breezy highlight. Recommended for all public and academic libraries looking to offer a veritably suitable study of comics as percentage of American culture rather than in the popular vacuum. Chris Ryan, New Milford, NJ
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From BooklistThe comics, like jazz, is an American usual art that has been enthusiastically adopted worldwide, and the comics’ brash sibling, the comic book, is even more specifically American. Wright’s readable study traces the history of comic books for the duration of the past six decades and demonstrates the fundamental interaction among politics, social trends, and standard culture in them. Early comic books adopted Depression-era values; hence, Superman’s basi battles were versus greedy capitalists as well as criminal masterminds. In the early 1940s, comic-book heroes fought Nazis and the Japanese and reflected wartime jingoism and racism. After the war, crime and horror comic books came to be apprehensively regarded by a heap of as “harbingers of a degenerate and disturbingly confrontational youth culture,” and there was widespread censorship of the medium. Wright points out that comic books preceded rock ‘n’ roll as an amusement marketed to youngsters rather than parents and therefore were a key in formulating teenagers as consumers. Solid altho seldom revelatory, Wright’s book is more a well-documented comics-industry chronicle than a penetrating social study. Gordon Flagg
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Most helpful customer reviews

19 of 21 people found the following review helpful.
Thorough survey of the business and culture of comic books
By D. Cloyce Smith
In jargon-free, exuberant prose, Bradford Wright has written what may well be the definitive history of comic books. As Wright notes in his introduction, however, since his investigation is also a survey of mass adolescent culture, he properly focuses on “popular” commercial magazines–especially on superhero-themed comics–to the exclusion of newspaper funnies (like Dick Tracy and Li’l Abner), underground comics and graphic novels (such as works by R. Crumb and Daniel Clowes), and cartoon series for children (Archie and the Disney characters).

Painstakingly researched, “Comic Book Nation” is really three books in one. Wright provides both plot outlines and summaries of trends in subject matter, from the launch of Superman to the sinister underworld of the Watchmen. He also places those themes and developments in the larger cultural context, from Depression-era longings and liberalism, through the patriotism induced by World War II and the Cold War, to the anti-crime vigilantism of the Reagan era. Finally, he charts the multiple peaks and valleys experienced by the business itself: its unpredictable sales patterns, the unhappiness of its work force, the rise and fall of the largest publishers, and the takeover of the industry by corporate and licensing interests. Along the way, he examines the 1940s and 1950s backlash against the violent and sexual nature of comic books (which resulted in the Comics Code Authority, an agency of censorship unparalleled in its broad sweep and its power); the heyday of EC Comics, purveyor of classics ranging from “Tales from the Crypt” to “Mad Magazine”; and the brilliant, original creation of “Spider-Man” and the succeeding generation of reluctant, misunderstood heroes.

Wright wisely avoids making aesthetic judgments, and it’s a tribute to his objectivity that readers would have a difficult time figuring out which series rank among the author’s own favorites. Likewise, although Wright’s left-of-center political judgments are on display throughout (and I confess I often found myself in agreement with him), he is consistently even-handed and empathetic when discussing the advocates of censorship (like Fredric Wertham) and the creators of more “patriotic” and even propagandistic comic books (such as Charlton Publications).

Not having read a superhero-themed comic book in years, I admit I was drawn to buy and read this book by Michael Chabon’s “Kavalier and Clay,” and I can confirm that this is a great book for readers of that novel who want to learn more. Although I imagine that some comic book fans (especially young readers) might find Wright’s study long on analysis and short on comics, “Comic Book Nation” is truly a seminal contribution to the field of culture studies.

31 of 41 people found the following review helpful.
Thorough, Up Until the 1990s.
By Matthew J. Wolf-Meyer
The history of comic books has thus far been written tangentially in other studies of comics, and slanted toward the individual theses of the given author’s work; only by splicing histories from a variety of sources could the history of comics be achieved, thus causing an impediment to understand the history of the medium for new scholars approaching the field. Bradford W. Wright’s Comic Book Nation should provide new comic book scholars with an appropriate historical understanding of a complex medium, and while it may prove to be repetitive for readers familiar with the history of comic books, for scholars new to the field, Comic Book Nation is indispensable as a single-volume study. Ron Goulart’s Great History of Comic Books (1986) was marred with inaccuracies; Richard Reynolds’ Superheroes: A Modern Mythology (1992), while theoretically vital to the study of the field, largely eschewed historical analysis; William Savage’s Comic Books and America: 1945-1954 (1990), which Wright acknowledges his debt to, focused too narrowly on an anomalous era of comic book publishing (at the end of the Golden Age typified by the comics published during the Second World War and previous to the Silver Age, embodied by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s work at Marvel Comics), much like Amy Nyberg’s Seal of Approval (1998), which focused on the era of comic book censorship in the 1950s. Wright approaches the whole of comic book history, and while he suffers from lack of analytical depth, he provides future scholars with an indispensable point of analytical departure.
The greatest flaw I find in Wright’s work is that his history largely ignores the developments of post-1960s comic book publishing, wholly excising both DC Comic’s “mature” imprint Vertigo and the conglomeration of capital-minded artists that formed Image Comics in the early 1990s. The vast majority of Comic Book Nation takes place prior to 1960 (179 pages by my count, chapters 1-6), relegating the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s to their own chapters, with the events of the 1990s piggybacking the 1980s in single chapter: Considering the great upheavals that occurred in the 1990s, Wright’s avoidance of these issues mars his attempted history. The British invasion of comics, largely evidenced in the comics released through Vertigo, marked an ideological shift in popularity: Neil Gaiman’s widely acknowledged Sandman series solidified the High Art qualities for comics that Alan Moore had earlier explored in Miracleman, Watchmen, and Swamp Thing (the latter receiving no mention whatsoever); within fandom, Grant Morrison’s Doom Patrol and Animal Man are seen as essential deconstructive approaches to superheroes; Garth Ennis’s Preacher divorced itself from limiting superhero narratives to explore the genre implications of horror and the western while scathingly critiquing American culture (as Ennis’s Hellblazer had done previously); and Warren Ellis’s Transmetropolitan imagined a future America, spoiled by consumerism and bleakly sardonic. All of these titles were widely popular, and Wright mentions none of them. Similarly, the omission of Image Comics belies an ignorance of the growing importance that artists attributed to themselves, priding themselves over the content of the stories or even the iconic heroes that they drew. Spawn, Todd McFarlane’s initial series with Image Comics, was so widely popular as to facilitate an HBO cartoon, a movie, numerous toys, and spin-off series, all based upon the art of the series, which featured dismally written stories. What, it seems fair to ask in a cultural history of comic books, is the cultural implication of prizing artists over writers or the superheroes themselves? Unfortunately, Wright doesn’t ask this question or bother to answer it.
Additionally, Wright makes broad historical claims throughout his study, and while he takes the time to properly cite the comics that he thoroughly summarizes, he rarely, if ever, cites historical texts for informing his critique of history. Claims such as “Yet even DC’s sales dropped significantly after the [CMAA] code (which censored comics), largely due to competition from television” (182) are common occurrences and play with the reader’s understanding of history: Historians might find Wright’s cultural history of comic books more a study of individual comics than the cultural forces that conspired to inform such – and find themselves rather aggravated at Wright’s constant summarization of American history (his sweeping historical claims also include non-comic related events, which, although I question them, have little relation to my studies and are thus more difficult to refute). It would be impossible to claim that the declining popularity in comics was attributed to a single factor, like television, and while Wright explains that comics competed for recreational time that was growing more scarce (cinema, music, and traditional reading materials all struggling for dominance), he fails to make mention of the changes in DC’s editorial policy that effected the content of the comics, making them much more light-hearted than their war time predecessors.
Rather than providing a bibliography for comic book scholars to adopt in their future studies, Wright closes his study with a brief note on his sources which reads more like a list of personal favorites than a proper bibliography; due to the diasporic publishing of such, and their often cryptic titles, a bibliography of published scholarly articles on comic books would helpfully progress the study of comic books and provide interested scholars with sufficient foundational knowledge. Scholars interested in studying comics will greatly benefit from reading Comic Book Nation, but rather than the equivalent of Brian Aldiss’ history of science fiction, Trillion Year Spree, readers will find only a starting point for their own studies rather than an authoritative reference tool.

12 of 15 people found the following review helpful.
Look… Up in the Sky!
By G. Malchiodi
Bought this book and devoured it in three days. Informative for the comic book fan and non-fan alike, though the fan will likely know much of the historical/anecdotal material about the creators and creation of the key superheroic icons.

Wright clearly establishes that the comics were/are very much part of the cultural milieu from which they emerge and he parallels the various shifts in narrative and focus to what was happening in American society at that specific time. I believe he is less successful in establishing the material represented by his sub-title: how youth culture is transformed by the comics rather than how youth culture is reflected by the comics (I came away with more of the reflection aspect after reading this book).

The book does not address the “Image-era” of comics; that is, when the youth of America became swayed by badly written, poorly drawn, highly and gratuitiously violent comics of little substance. Here, I think, is an additional chapter in which the symbiotic (and not always positive) relationship between pop-culture and society should have been addressed… especially since the Image books were a direct, if unexpected, outgrowth of the ultra-violence and star-making power of Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns which Wright does discuss in some depth. The Vertigo line of books also gets short shrift… perhaps because the audience for these is older?

Still and all, as Wright himself states, there are woefully FEW “serious” or “academic” texts about comics. No true fan, especially the perennial fans like myself who outgrow the intended audience of the comics but refuse to let go, should be without this text. Well done.

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Comic Book Nation Transformation Culture Photo

Comic Book Nation Transformation Culture Picture

Comic Book Nation Transformation Culture Photo

Comic Book Nation Transformation Culture Photo

Comic Book Nation Transformation Culture Pic

Comic Book Nation Transformation Culture Picture