Black Chasm:Monster From The Deep:
The Assassin:
Blind Alley:
Produced by Arthur Korb, written by someone named W.K. Wells who was apparently big enough to get his/her name on the record.Not a bad set of stories, but nothing here is as compelling or memorable as The Hulk: At Bay. Maybe that's because that was taken from an actual Hulk comic, and this LP appears to be all-new stories.
The sleeve art is uncredited, but it looks very Rich Buckler/Dick Giordano to me.
2 comments:
I've been listening to these stories a lot the last month -- my son loves 'em -- and they're obviously inspired by the Bill Bixby tv show.
The climax, of course, is the Hulkout. Hulk here doesn't speak, as on the tv show, but you just have to wait for 'David Benson' to stumble across some sadist's path -- be he Appalachian sheriff, mine manager, fishing boat captain, or quack doctor passing off a tanning booth as a miracle cure-all -- and eventually, there will be blood-curdling screams and sound fx of destruction. And, usually, some description of "...ice cold anger turns to white-hot rage!"
The pace moves much better than the adaptations of actual Marvel comics, most of which seem to have been written by Marv Wolfman -- the worst offender, if you ask me, is "Mark of the Man-Wolf." My son loves Spider-Man, and he loves werewolves, but he can't sit thru Spidey's tortured inner soliloquy against JJJ! Marv Wolfman was an excellent comics writer, but the devices that made him a good writer in that oeuvre really slow down a good action/adventure record for children. The straight-from-the-comics writing in the "The Incredible Hulk: At Bay" just delays a climax which comes after a ridiculously wordy narrator's interjection, and then that particular production team used the lamest sound fx -- you mean to tell me a rumble between the Hulk, the Rhino, and the Abomination sounds like a daycare slapfight?
I love a good "Hulk Smash!" and "Hulk strongest one there is!" as much as anybody. But I've also grown to enjoy a good leather-lunged primal scream from the bottom of a mine shaft, the wreckage of a burning private sanitarium, the rubble of an iron-fisted sheriff's city jail, or up from the roiling sea.
All told, I think I prefer the "Take stick out of Hulk's face or Hulk will break it" Hulk of The Incredible Hulk at Bay!, but I have to say, the guy did a opretty convincing Bill Bixby on this record. Of course, as a kid I watched The Incredible Hulk on Friday nights religiously, and whoever wrote the stories on this record captured the tone of the TV show pretty convincingly.
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