The Incredible Hulk

Author: Greg Pak

The Hulk has changed so many ways over the last 50+ years. He's one of the greatest of all Marvel's heroes, and he's the perfect example of a Silver Age character. A gamma bomb test leads the meek Dr. Bruce Banner to inherit the mantel of The Hulk! It's a classic Jeckyl & Hyde with an Atomic Age twist. Bruce Banner is reserved, intellectual, and non-emotional. When he transforms into the Hulk, he's a raging, smashing, super-machine who is nigh-indestructible. He's gone through many iterations, through love and loss, through periods of intelligent Hulk, through Mobster Hulk, through other people becoming Hulk, but the basic questions that the series asks are always the same – what would it mean if you were no longer you? What would you do if you were all powerful? Could you control yourself when you lost all intellect? These are big questions, and many writers have taken the challenge and time and again presented an incredible set of answers to those existential questions. Why it's on the list: Even before The Hulk was brought into the Marvel Cinematic Universe, he'd been in the middle of a revival at the hands of writers like Peter David and Greg Pak, and that pushes it into the top 25.