Hulk Gets Ready to Fight

About this drawing

Hulk fighting stance pages show the green giant everyone knows, but he did not start out green. In his first comic, published in 1962, Hulk was gray. His creators wanted a monster with no particular color, mysterious and scary.

The problem was printing. With the technology of the time, gray came out differently from page to page, sometimes looking almost black and sometimes too light or greenish. So starting with the second issue, they switched him to green, a color that was much easier to print.

That choice became the character's trademark, and today he is known everywhere as the green giant. Even so, gray Hulk returned in some stories as a different version of the character, sneakier and with a wisecracking attitude.

Besides his color, what defines Hulk is his enormous strength. When he squares up like he does on this page, his Avengers teammates know he will protect everyone with all his might. His green color also makes him easy to spot among all the heroes on the team, and it has become so famous that people simply call him the green giant or the jade giant. Few characters are so closely linked to a single color.

• hulk
• avengers
• marvel
• colors