Rob and I were discussing about the HULK covers on the way into work this morning. Turns out I found out a couple personal preferences about HULK covers in general as far as handling the character goes.
Not very many people have handled the hulk on his covers very well especially when the entire character of the HULK is portrayed. He's usually seen with various other heroes and villains, that end up dwarfing the HULK making him look squatted, shrunk, and in ill proportion. He's as inconsistent in size as Megatron is in gun mode.
Why haven't very many talented artists, beside a couple, been able to maintain a well drawn HULK on their covers without him looking almost insignificant? The only artists we found out that can handle a HULK cover well were a couple of art moguls that were solid from the get go.
Dale Keown, Neal Adams, and Jim Sterenko to name a few 3.
Personally, I think HULK is too big to fit on a cover. The less focus the HULK gets, the stronger the cover for some reason. He needs that touch of enigma, mystery, all the while making the HULK feel HULK-ish without giving us the farm every time we see another book. Look at any HULK comic post-Sterenko and pre-Keown.
Dale's HULK is HULK as far as I'm concerned. The status quo he set for that character, his anatomy / proportion, in the quantities he did it in can't even begin to be rivaled by another HULK artist in my opinion. From the sinew to the density, he made the HULK incredible to look at and a bit frightening.
McFarlane's HULK is the ugliest and that wins it's own special reward.
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Okay, this is mainly a test, but I think I can add a thought about the Hulk. Often fans will discuss who drew definitive versions of characters, and often it comes back to the artist who was drawing the book when we started reading it. For me, that would be Sal Buscema. If you ask me to come up with an image of the Marvel Hulk in my mind, that's it. For a lot of people it's Herb Trimpe, though his Hulk has never quite worked for me. It might be because of the teeth. Jack Kirby's Hulk was definitely smaller than the Hulk is today, but there was a definite beefiness there that has influenced some of the better Hulk drawings along the way. We can probably develop a consensus that Dale Keown's Hulk run is the most beautiful run on that the character has ever seen.
I grew up on the Buscema Hulk, and have a great memory of him hanging off Mt. Rushmore while being simultaneously attacked by Thunderbolt Ross's troops and the Goldbug (the Goldbug?). However, it was Keown's Hulk that finally made the character "click" for me. I thinking about getting a full run of the Keown Hulk issues, but it surprisingly difficult to find the issues I am missing.
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