HARUKU: The Manga
The 4thletter! blog spotlights a rare treat: HARUKU: MONSUTAA KOMIKU, a manga version of the Hulk published in 1970. The strip was written by Kazuo Koike (LONE WOLF AND CUB, and many, many others) with art by
Yoshihiro Morifuji
.
From what I and my lovely assistants managed to figure out of the story, it stars Dr. Araki, survivor of Hiroshima. Both of his parents died in the blast, and he’s come to Nevada to work on the gamma bomb. General Ross, Major Talbot, and Igor retain their names, but Rick Jones has been turned into Ricky Tenda. He’s got a Japanese mom and an American dad. Betty Ross is now Mitsuko, though Dr. Araki calls her Mitchan.
We feel that only seeing a few panels reveals a simple, salient fact: THE HULK WAS MADE FOR MANGA. It may be wishful thinking to hope this would ever come out in the US, but…Marvel! Heed our plea!
05/28/09 at 9:18 am
Interesting how much Koike made his Hulk look like Trimpe’s.
05/28/09 at 9:20 am
Yeah but “SKRUTTCH?” Are the tanks made of squeaky vinyl?
05/28/09 at 9:44 am
Some of those panels are lifted directly from Trimpe
http://www.comicboards.com/app/show.php?rpy=hulk-2009052713253121
I, too, would love to see this published in English, but I think the best we can hope for is a scanlation.
05/28/09 at 11:19 am
I had no idea that some of the panels were swipes. Good catch!
05/28/09 at 12:25 pm
Maybe when Marvel prints this, they can finish reprinting Ryoichi Ikegami’s Spider-Man series….
05/31/09 at 3:20 am
[…] via The Beat […]
05/31/09 at 9:07 pm
All American superhero comics are “made for manga”, and if you look at many comics from the 1970s back, particularly the dynamic output of Jack Kirby, you would see it also.
Just try it. Take an old issue of Fantastic Four (or your Marvel Essential book) and look at a story in there. Do not READ the English word balloons. Just look at the pictures. Can you figure out what the story is about by the end of the comic?
I find that this doesn’t work as well with the more talky comics of the 1970s and afterwards.
Maybe you can make an appeal here but I know that there used to be reprints of DC comics that came out in Japan in the later 1970s in a manga monthly format. They were titled “Superman” and featured a Superman story in the front that was only a few months behind the then-current run of Superman. The first third of the story would be printed in color then in greyscale as the paper pages became newsprint black and white. THen would follow an article or editorial of some sort, then a silver age DC story (usually Superman but not always) printed with pages in both English and Japanese side-by-side for comparison. Then there was a reader fan-art section and then one more DC story but only in Japanese.