TALES TO ASTONISH #61-69 (1964-1965): 1st Leader; Col. Talbot

Thunderbolt Ross finally captures Hulk with the help of new character Colonel Glenn Talbot.

Rick Jones finds out, and Captain America gives him permission to fly to New Mexico and free Hulk.

Yes, Cap tells Rick it’s okay to interfere with a military mission that captured a monster responsible for millions of dollars of destruction.

Rick ends up on the same plane as Chameleon, who is going to NM at the behest of The Leader to see if he can steal the robot Ross and Talbot used to capture Hulk.

This is Leader’s first appearance. It’s worth noting that Leader is a servant of the Communist government in Russia.

Chameleon disguises himself as Bruce Banner (while Hulk is still in chains), but he’s not fooling anyone.

Hulk gets out (by changing into Banner and slipping his bonds), and ends out chasing down Chameleon.

Bruce Banner is put in jail for attempting to steal a nuke (it was really Chameleon).

Rick Jones tells President Johnson that The Hulk is Bruce Banner to try to get the Prez to free Banner from jail. 

Nick Fury enters a plea as well. 

Leader then sends his own “humanoid horde” into the Hulk base, and the chaos gets ratcheted up, and it’s Hulk versus the commie robot squad–Leader’s “Humanoids” robots.  Leader escapes, and Bruce Banner is believed to be dead.

Note: Although this is an eight-issue story, it’s really more like 3 or 4 comics, since this is a split book. I’ve still skipped over some details, but you can see that Hulk works much better as a long-form story than as individual short stories.

Oh, and it’s drawn by Steve Ditko.

But of course, Hulk is just half of each issue. The other halves of these issues are…Not worth your time. In #61 Giant Man and Wasp fight a big android when Egghead escapes from custody.

They also fight some one-off villains.

And Attuma.

Yes, it is completely stupid that in 15 pages Hank Pym fends off an Atlantean invasion.

Then there’s some miscellaneous crime stories, in which the pair even take out a couple hoods in their plain clothes.

In issue #65, Giant-Man gets a new costume with a helmet.  Thankfully, this outfit doesn’t last.

And fights Human Top yet again.

In #66,Hank fixes the TV antenna.

Human Top returns in issues #68-69.  At the end of #69, Hank Pym says he has to quit being Giant-Man because the growing is causing him serious health problems and will eventually kill him. So you have to wade through a ton of crap to get to an issue that matters.

Just bad comics. Bad.

I’m grading these issues based on the Hulk stories, not the F-grade Giant-Man/Wasp ones.

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