Sacrificial violence in Planet Hulk

Abstract

In spite of their increasing popularity, comic books have not yet been sufficiently explored when it comes to academic studies about the violence they contain. Comics derive from pulp fiction, a kind of literature in which the protagonists usually do whatever it takes to reach their goals. The course of development of the genre comprises several phases, from the establishment of a regulatory body of censorship to the creation of different superheroes that follow different moral codes. One of them, Hulk – inspired in The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Lee, 1974, p. 75) –, is a wild giant that breaks out whenever his alter ego, scientist Bruce Banner, grows angry. Hulk has been accepted as a hero ever since his creation, although he is not able to control his own actions, and often gets involved in fights against other heroes. The aim of this work is to analyze Planet Hulk, a story in which Hulk is exiled from Earth, in order to check its relation to René Girard’s ideas about sacrificial violence, and also to understand the ways in which violence is presented to the reader. Under the premise that comics can be taken as a representation of the society from which they derive, we hope to come to conclusions about the relation involving this kind of artistic expression and the reading public that consumes it so as to deal with, absorb, and repress the violence there contained.

Keywords: Comics, Marvel Comics, Planet Hulk, Sacrificial violence, René Girard.