SURVIVING THE HULK

It's been 30 years since my Hulk run! Madness. If there's a character I'd love to revisit one day, it's The Hulk. People often talk about my run being too short. It was 8 issues, which by today's standards isn't actually bad! But it was shorter than it should have been. Here's why:

I wasn't, if I'm honest, quite ready for it all. I started to doubt myself quite a bit at that time, and lost faith in my work. It was incredibly overwhelming. I wasn't sure if I was taking the right approach, or if I was in fact any good, and I got really low. It was the first tiny step towards understanding that I was actually getting clinically depressed – though it would be another five or six years before I realized I needed to actually do something about that! Back then people weren't really talking about depression, and there was still a lot of ignorance and stigma attached, as if it was somehow a weakness or our own fault. There was a strange notion that masculine men shouldn't share that kind of thing, when in fact it shows guts!

So the reality is that it was not actually a happy time working on that book, and sadly Peter didn't really like my work either, which cut the run short ultimately. I was casting about, desperately trying to find a style to define what I did. I was following this series of incredible runs by Todd McFarlane, Dale Keown, and Gary Frank, and I felt deeply inferior to them. I just didn't feel my work was anywhere near their caliber – which was frustrating, because I also thought it should be, and wasn’t sure why I couldn’t get it there - and I think Peter felt that too. We just didn't gel creatively – which was a great shame as I was a big fan of his writing back then. I desperately wanted to please him, but I couldn't, and I also had a sense I wasn't really drawing to my strengths. It was all a big muddle.

My inker at the time, Robin Riggs, used to try to help get me on the right track. He knew I was struggling and beating myself up. He even wrote to the editor suggesting that maybe they could steer the book towards something that suited me better – something in a more sci-fi or fantasy vein – but nothing came of that. It all sort of fell apart and we eventually all parted ways.

I wish I had understood what I was struggling with and been able to articulate it at the time – certainly now I would be much more communicative about my struggles and misgivings. I don’t think it would have taken much, really, to sort it out. But I needed to be able to voice that, and in those days I was – frankly – a bit intimidated by editors, and certainly by Peter! Throughout my life there have been periods when the shyness really kicked in, leaving me tongue-tied and feeling brow-beaten. And back then there was this sense that the right and only thing to do was to just knuckle-down and muscle through. That’s just what you did! It’s ironic that the art should be so vascular and imposing on the page – like the bottled-up frustrations and anger at myself were all exploding through my art, which, in hindsight, is not terribly unlike the character himself!

The Hulk was one of my all-time favorite characters, so to get that book, and then to lose it was a tremendously heavy blow, and the start of a long spiral down towards a very tricky and bleak period for me.

Sometimes the lessons we learn are hard, and take a long time to land. I'm only now beginning to appreciate what happened then, and why. It's still sad because I don't think Peter or my editor had any real understanding at all of what I was going through, and I have no idea at all if it would have made a difference if they had.

But here's to The Hulk! Despite everything, I'm proud to have had my shot at drawing him, and am thrilled to have contributed even a small amount towards that huge legacy.