There are more things in heaven and earth Horatio Than are dreamt of in your philosophy William Shakespeare Hamlet All we can do is pray that mankind remains eternally vigilant so that whenever the creatures attack we can defeat them Stan Lee Journey Into Mystery 72
PROLOGUE Have you ever tried to smash a big blob of goo with your fist No Of course you haven’t Why would you It’s a silly question You have better things to do like play video games or read comic books But the Hulk couldn’t say the same thing Because right at that moment he quite literally had nothing better to do nothing else he could do than to smash a big green gamma-powered fist into a gigantic oozing mess of goo Hulk smash thundered the jade giant His balled-up hand went flying into a wall of wet glop
It made the Hulk mad this goo or whatever it was It was alive somehow It seemed to think It kept coming after the Hulk It wanted to hurt him Why couldn't the stupid goo just leave Hulk alone He had been fighting like this for what hours now Maybe longer than that The battle began in a remote California desert where Bruce Banner had been working on an important renewable energy project for S.H.I.E.L.D. During a test something strange had happened something attacked the laboratory What it was exactly Banner couldn't say he had never seen anything like it before Given time Banner could have studied it found out exactly what the thing was But all the excitement caused his pulse to race His heart beat faster and faster In a matter of seconds Banner underwent a startling transformation Where once stood a mild mannered scientist there now stood a seven foot tall green man monster that the world called the Hulk
As the Hulk roared he slammed another impossibly huge fist into the mysterious goo that had suddenly disrupted Banner’s experiment The substance flew apart where the Hulk hit it and little clumps of it flew all around him The Hulk snarled turned and saw the various bits of goo slowly flow back to each other coalescing as a whole What was this stuff Whatever it was the goo reared upward and somehow towered over the towering Hulk It seemed to move with a mind all its own Like a tidal wave it flowed toward the Hulk enveloping him completely If you were there in the desert at that precise moment you would have heard the Hulk’s roar muffled through the thick layers of glop The substance stretched over and around the Hulk and started to squeeze his body all over It constricted his rib cage No matter how the Hulk expanded his chest the goo kept on getting tighter and tighter No matter how the Hulk clawed at the substance with his fingers the goo clung to his skin The Hulk wasn’t big on realizing things while he