Incredible Hulk Annual 13 - Page 21 - Alan Kupperberg and Gerry Talaoc

This page from Incredible Hulk Annual 13 is a bucket list piece. This comic - by Bill Mantlo, Alan Kupperberg, and Gerry Talaoc – means a lot to me. This is one of the very first comics I remember owning – has to be 1984-1985 based on when I moved houses, I would have been 8-9 years old. I was not a huge comic reader as a kid, certainly came across them and liked them but never really bought my own. But I did love Spider-Man and his Amazing Friends and the Incredible Hulk cartoons on Saturday mornings, with the Stan Lee narration and guest stars from all over the Marvel Universe. Anyway – as far as I can remember, I only owned 2 comics, both cover-less and at the time, I had no idea what an “indicia” was. One of them was an issue of Amazing Spider-Man – still not sure which one, but other than J Jonah Jameson being prominent on that first page, I don’t remember anything about it – I know it was somewhere in the 170s-190s issue wise. But the other one was the Hulk Annual 13. The Hulk was trapped in some weird dimension and ended up in a world where this weird ugly bone creature (Sym) bonds with him and becomes his friend, only to later sacrifice himself so that the Hulk could live. The sacrifice, the friendship, the giving of oneself to help another – I am pretty sure that’s where some of my views on life, on humanity, and my moral compass began. It had a huge impact on me as a kid. Obviously. It was pure joy to acquire one of the original pages for my collection.