Origin

In the dry red desert of New Mexico, on a day the sky was the color of hammered copper, a quiet man named Dr. Bruce Banner made the most selfless decision of his life.

He did not know, in that single second, that everything would change because of it. He did not think about himself at all. He just ran.

Bruce Banner had spent years building something remarkable and terrible: the Gamma Bomb. It was a weapon that used gamma rays — the most powerful form of light in the universe, invisible to the eye, capable of destroying the smallest living things at the cellular level — and Bruce had designed it, and he understood it, and he was the only person within miles of the test site when a teenager named Rick Jones drove his car right onto the restricted range.

The bomb was about to detonate.

Rick Jones had taken a dare — a foolish, teenage dare — to drive out to the test site, and now he sat in his car in the middle of the blast zone and could not quite believe what he had done.

Bruce saw him from the bunker. He had seconds. Maybe less.

He ran from the bunker, across the cracked desert ground, past the warning signs and the safety barriers, the heat of the afternoon pressing on him from every direction. He reached Rick Jones. He grabbed him. He pushed him into a protective trench, deep enough to shield him from the worst of what was coming.

And then the Gamma Bomb detonated.

Highly charged radioactive particles — gamma radiation, in a quantity and concentration never before experienced by a living human body — swept across the test site. Bruce Banner had no time to run. No time to find cover. The emerald wave hit him and passed through him and changed him, deep down in the code of his cells, in the parts of him that told his body what to be.

Rick Jones climbed out of the trench. The desert was silent. The sky had gone a weird, flat green at the horizon.

Bruce Banner was alive.

That was the part no one could explain.

He lay in the medical facility for two days while the doctors ran tests and shook their heads and ran them again. He should not have been alive. The radiation dose should have been impossible to survive. But Bruce Banner's DNA had something in it — a dormant gene, a capacity buried so deep that no one had known it was there — that had not been destroyed by the gamma radiation.

It had been unlocked.

The first transformation happened that night. Not a gradual thing. A sudden, total, absolute thing.

Bruce Banner vanished and something enormous and gray-skinned and roaring with a rage that had nowhere to go came out of the darkness of the desert. It was huge — seven feet tall, built of muscle that seemed to go on forever, heavy as a truck. It smashed through the wall of the testing facility as though the wall were made of paper. It ran across the desert under the dark sky, crashing through anything in its path, not because it intended to cause harm but because it was lost and alone and immensely, profoundly frightened, though it did not have the words for what it was feeling.

By morning, it was Bruce Banner again. Bruised. Exhausted. Alive.

There would be other transformations. There would be many others. Whenever Bruce's heart rate spiked, whenever fear or anger flooded his system, the change came — and the Hulk came with it. The Hulk was everything Bruce Banner had ever felt that he had learned to keep quiet: the loneliness of being too brilliant for ordinary conversation, the fear of what the world looked like to someone who understood gamma radiation and nuclear physics and what human beings were capable of doing to each other. The Hulk was all of that, out in the open, enormous and green and unable to be ignored.

General Thaddeus "Thunderbolt" Ross — a military man with steel-gray hair and a jaw like a cliff face — decided that the Hulk was a threat to be controlled. He hunted Bruce across the country, across the world, with tanks and helicopters and weapons. He never caught him.

But the Hulk was not evil. Not even close.

The Hulk was a frightened mind in an enormous body, carrying everything Bruce Banner had survived and was still surviving, trying to protect the people it cared about in the only way it knew: by standing between them and the thing that wanted to hurt them.

Rick Jones — the teenager in the desert, the boy who had taken a dare — never forgot what had happened. He knew what Bruce had done for him. He kept that knowledge close for years, a quiet debt, a reason to believe that somewhere inside the green-skinned behemoth that the newspapers called a monster, a good man was still trying.

He was right.

He was absolutely right.