Feeding Billy

THE INCREDIBLE HULK — Issue no. 222, January 1978

Book: The Incredible Hulk

Issue No.: 222

Published: January 17, 1978

Title: “Feeding Billy”

Cover Price: 35¢

Format: Digital scan

It just occurred to me that Fantastic Four, being the first Marvel comic book of the Silver Age, should probably be the Marvel comic with the highest issue number as of 1978. But Marvel published issue no. 193 of Fantastic Four in January 1978, while this January 1978 issue of Incredible Hulk is numbered 222. I’ll dig into this more at some point in the future, but I think the short answer is that a few Golden Age books published by Marvel (before it was even called Marvel) survived into the Silver and Bronze Age. Or at least their numbering schemes did. The Incredible Hulk actually got its start as a book called Tales to Astonish, and Tales became Hulk with issue 102. (Thanks, Fandom.com Marvel wiki!)

Anyway, though there’s nothing in this books that states it explicitly, I think this is a fill-in issue, as it’s a one-and-done story featuring a different artist (Jim Starlin) than usual (Sal Buscema penciled most Incredible Hulk books of this era). This is the kind of thing that often gets mentioned on a book’s fan-mail page, but this issue doesn’t have one of those and instead has an extra story page. So this book has eighteen story pages instead of the usual-for-the-time seventeen. If I was reading this book in 1978, it would have been my first Incredible Hulk book, and I wouldn’t be able to look up all this minutiae about it on the internet. But it is 2023, and I find all this minutiae interesting, so I write about it here on Marvel Time Warp.

A bit of hype on the cover of this issue promises an off-beat story, and I think this story qualifies as off-beat. Two kids named Donny and Marie (if you don’t get that “Donny and Marie” is a pop-culture reference, congratulations, you’re young!) live in a cave with their “little” brother Billy, who is actually a radiation-mutated giant cannibalistic monster. Basically Donnie and Marie find people for Billy to “play with” — not quite understanding that’s a euphemism for “eat.”

This isn’t an evil kids story — Billy doesn’t eat people in their presence. Donny and Marie are just victims of circumstance — Billy ate their parents at some point, so Billy is the only family they have. Hulk gets involved when the kids decide Billy would really like a big green “friend” like Hulk. But Hulk gets mad when Billy tries to eat him, and Hulk ends up destroying the cave and Billy. Donny and Marie end up homeless and Billy-less. It’s pretty bleak.

Week Three Wrap-Up

Marvel published twelve 35-cent books the third week of January 1978, plus the 60-cent Crazy magazine. (Marvel also published a few UK-only reprint books this week, but I don’t read those.) Total cover price for the books I read (or at least skimmed, in the case of Crazy) is $4.80. Adjusted for 2023 inflation, that’s about 22 bucks.

Next time — Onto week four of 1978 with Spider-Man’s team-up book!