Welcome to Comic Book Legends Revealed! This is the six hundred and forty-first week where we examine comic book legends and whether they are true or false.
As we’ve been doing it for some time now, one legend today, one tomorrow and one Sunday.
Let’s begin!
COMIC LEGEND:
Marvel insisted on the Hulk fathering a child without actually having sex with the mother.
STATUS:
True
Lyra, the All-New Savage She-Hulk, is an interesting Marvel Comics character…
She is the daughter of the Hulk and an alternate future version of Thundra. She actually gets WEAKER the angrier she gets, so she actually has to meditate to become calm to fully access her strength.
She was first introduced in a one-shot comic book called Hulk: Raging Thunder by Jeff Parker, Mitchell Breitweiser and Moose Baumann back in 2008.
The concept of the comic is that in the future, Thundra’s race of all female warriors is dying out (you know, all female and all that), so Thundra goes back in time and finds the Hulk and after a fight to prove to her that Hulk is who she thinks he is, she scrapes some DNA from him…
and uses it in in the future to get herself pregnant, ultimately giving birth to their daughter, who interestingly enough would go without a name not only here but in another story before the All-New Savage She-Hulk miniseries where she finally was named by Fred Van Lente.
However, as you might imagine, it sure seems kind of odd that Thundra would go through all of that effort just for some DNA scrapes and sure enough, Jeff Parker originally wanted Thundra to actually have SEX with the Hulk. Failing that, he wanted to at least IMPLY that they had sex. Instead, the DNA scrape thing was pushed and that’s what we went with.
Amusingly enough, Lyra, for a time, was ALSO trying to collect DNA from the present, only she was doing it in the way that you would expect, by trying to have sex with people of the past.
It’s odd, because the Hulk has HAD sex in comics before, so I don’t get what the problem was in this specific instance.
Check out some legends from Legends Revealed:
Did Black Widow Nearly Have Her Own Movie Before Iron Man or Thor?
Were There “Back-Up” Mothers on How I Met Your Mother?
Did Pretty in Pink Originally End With Andie and Duckie Together?
Did Richard Rodgers Keep The Melody for “Edelweiss” From Being Used for a Hymn?
Check back Saturday for part 2 of this week’s legends!
And remember, if you have a legend that you’re curious about, drop me a line at either brianc@cbr.com or cronb01@aol.com!