Comic Review – Steve Englehart – The Hulk – Spawn Of The Flesh-Eater

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1973. Marvel Comics – Spoiler alerts I was delighted to find a copy of this one, as my memory of it influenced my own writings a great deal after first reading it at the age of eleven. It is the comic that introduced me to The Wendigo, a creature from North American /Canadian mythology. It has made appearances in some of my own work in very different treatments than it received in Marvel. In its debut, Hulk, lost in the Canadian wilderness, finds himself mistaken for another monster when a girl thinks the human meat eating Wendigo has abducted her brother. Hulk offers to save her brother only to find that he is the Wendigo. He has resorted to cannibalism which allows the demon to possess a man. Hulk tries to appeal to the man inside the creature but realizes that the human has been totally lost to the monster – an echo of his own condition in the struggle to turn back into Bruce Banner. The Wendigo would return many times, in Hulk and X-Men encounters, but the impact of this particular comic on my own creativity is immense and it was just as fascinating to rediscover it over forty years on. Arthur Chappell