Comics Buyer’s Guide Presents: The Hulk
with associate editors Maggie Thompson, Brent Frankenhoff, Jason Winter, and Joyce Greenholdt
Written by John Jackson Miller, Jack Abramowitz, Brent Frankenhoff, Steve Fritz, Glenn Greenberg, Steve Horton, Jim Johnson, Phil Mateer, Nathan Melby, Rob Salkowitz, and Scott Semet
Published 2003
Comics Buyer’s Guide Presents: The Hulk was the second magazine featuring “Retroviews,” a collection of reviews-in-retrospect of comics that had come out years earlier. In full color, the magazine featured more than 750 reviews from our stable of writers for what was, at the time, every issue of the main Hulk series. But to fill out the magazine’s 128 pages, we needed to draw upon The Defenders and several other Hulk-adjacent series:
Incredible Hulk/Tales to Astonish
Hulk/Incredible Hulk (2nd series)
Rampaging Hulk/Hulk!
Defenders (1st and 2nd series)
Hulk Smash
Incredible Hulk: Hercules Unleashed
Incredible Hulk Vs. Venom
The Order
Savage Hulk
Sentry/Hulk
Abominations
Doc Samson
Savage She-Hulk
Hulk 2099
Incredible Hulk: Future Imperfect
The End
We also included a price guide, and every retroview included the cover price at the time plus information on the best CGC copy available.
The work was timed to release near Ang Lee‘s Hulk movie. But while we were production on it, our previous work, Comics Buyer’s Guide to The X-Men, had brought an objection from Marvel. The result was that this edition was produced under paid license — and it was also the end of the line for these special issues. We were made aware of that fact during production, which didn’t make for a fun project to work on. The Hulk movie would go on to underwhelm, in any event.
It wasn’t all for nothing, though, as when Comics Buyer’s Guide transformed from a newspaper into a magazine in 2004, Retroviews became a major part of it.
It was a challenge finding enough Hulk-related issues to fill the special edition. Had we simply added to both issues of Comics Buyer’s Guide Presents a slew of reviews of comics from other publishers, as we eventually included in Comics Buyer’s Guide, the series might have continued without publisher objections. Hindsight is 20/20!
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