Okay, nerds, I need your help and I’m not about to wade through your pages and pages of comic book nerdry to find my answer. So I’m hoping I can lure you into this thread. If you try to answer me, I will not steal your lunch money for a whole week! Nerd amnesty!
Here goes: didn’t The Hulk and Wolverine fight at some point? If so, who won?
Or did anyone win? Do they just punch each other and talk and then each go their own way? Alternatively, was the victory some sort of hand-waving “oh, we need this character to win for whatever dippy story we’re telling, so, uhhh, he won!”? Or was there some rules-based reason for the victory? Like that adamantium absorbs gamma rays or whatevs. Also – this might be a dumb question – is there any way to read/look at the battle online? Are there online repositories of comic book scenes, like watching a movie clip on YouTube?
It’s happened a couple times at least. Wolverine started out as one of Hulk’s enemies way way back in the day, I believe. Basically the answer is your second paragraph, punch, go away, hand wave, whatever. That’s the answer for all comic book hero-vs-hero fights, really.
They did a direct to DVD (video? direct to whatever we call them now) animated version of Wolverine and Hulk fighting, which is what I think charmtrap is linking you to.
The most recent total all out Hulk-vs-Wolverine fight I know if in the comics was “Ultimate Comics Wolverine vs. Hulk” which came out (slowly) in 2005. You can buy it for $11 for Comixology* here, or maybe just get creative with some Googling and it might just turn up somewhere else, maybe.
There have probably been dozens of times since then that they’ve traded punches in some random Avengers/Hulk/X-men stories, but that’s the last time I remember their fight being pitched as the main event. It takes place in the “Ultimate” Marvel universe, so technically not in the main continuity of the rest of the Marvel world, but in that case the Hulk and Wolverine weren’t different from their normal versions in any significant way. If you want a “spoiler”, just do a Google image search for Ultimate Wolverine vs. Hulk and one of the first images will be what became a sort of iconic scene from that series (although it doesn’t give away the end, despite being what you would think is a pretty fatal injury).
*Comixology is basically the standard for buying comics digitally and legitimately online, so you can find bunches of stuff there and read them on your iOS devices (and maybe Android?) too, but it is still all DRM’d up, FYI.
Wolverine’s first appearance was actually in The Incredible Hulk comic. It has been forever since I have read it, but basically Wolverine and the Hulk both fight the wendigo together. Once the wendigo has been dealt with, they fight each other for a while before they are both knocked out by a third party. So nobody really wins.
I am sure there is more info online if you google around for Hulk #181… found a synopsis here:
I have a comic (Ultimate Wolverine vs Hulk) that is a way more violent version of that fight and hulk wins that one. He literally chews up wolverines legs and rips him in half. Of course you can’t kill wolverine so he gets put back together eventually by Nick Fury.
I’m curious, for those in the know, how do you guys figure out what are the “real” story lines and what are offshoots? Why are the Ultimates storylines not cannon? In DC, is the new 52 the real version of things? I know it doesn’t matter, but I’m curious how you all figured it out.
To ramble on a little bit more about their stalemate, Hulk and Wolverine are both up-to-the-writer “infinitely resilient” kinds of characters, so there’s almost never going to be a winner, between them, or any other two “resilient” characters, because it always just ends in a sort of “We could keep doing this forever, couldn’t we?” stalemate where they’re both holding their guts in with one hand and trying to find their other severed arm or whatever, but we know they’ll eventually heal from it and be okay. Lots of characters like this. Thor and Hulk would probably go down the same way.
Whereas Batman might be called an up-to-the-writer “infinitely resourceful” character, his fights with Superman (who’s the resilient type) usually involve finding clever ways to hurt Superman, finding clever ways to avoid more than one or two direct assaults from Superman, and the fight ends when Batman is out of tricks, or when he reveals some final threat of a trick that gets Superman to stop.
I just made up these classifications, but the point is that there are a few different ways to approach these hero brawls, but they almost always end in talking things out, a third party intervening (or ceasing to intervene if that’s why they were fighting in the first place) or that sort of thing, so you can almost never point to a definitive match-up and say “See, if it really came down to it, obviously X would beat Y!”
Anyone could beat anyone as the writer demands, Hulk and Wolverine just fall into the broad hurtable-but-unkillable archetype, so while they’ll play to the Hulk’s strength vs. maybe Wolverine’s speed or martial arts training or something, the fight isn’t going to be as asymmetric as something like a Superman/Batman fight.
That is a pretty iconic image, Wholly! So basically the canon is that they fight until Hulk literally rips Wolverine apart? Wolverine doesn’t die, but he definitely loses. So Hulk wins in Hulk v Wolverine simply because he’s so strong. That’s even the impression I get from that cartoon charmtrap made me watch.
Here’s another stupid question: How does anyone beat the Hulk? In a fight, I mean. I don’t mean appealing to Banner’s reason, or whatever, and sidestepping the fight. When it comes to the actual punching and kicking and whatnot, isn’t Hulk actually the strongest one there is? Can he just not be beat?
-Tom
P.S. Please don’t tell anyone I’m asking these questions.
It’s not that the Ultimates storylines aren’t canon, they’re just set in a different version of the universe from what is commonly referred to as the “normal” Marvel universe. They’ve crossed over at points (and I think are maybe crossing over again, Ultimate might be going away? Not sure, haven’t kept up in the last few months), but the fact that the universes are crossing over is part of the context of the story, so unless that’s specifically what the story is doing, you know that the normal Marvel Peter Parker Spider-Man isn’t going to run into the current Ultimate Universe Miles Spider-Man.
The publishers have changed things over the years though, and DC’s history with different worlds has (to my understanding) been a lot messier. I couldn’t tell you how all that’s going these days.
You can grab that from Comixology, it’s not too bad a read actually. Logan has given up his Wolverine persona in a desolate future US wasteland partly run by the Hulk gang. Takes a trip across the US with a blind Hawkeye and in the process is forced out of retirement.
Anyway, spoilers for the outcome. Don’t click if you don’t like graphic images, or don’t want to know how it ends. Images are NSFW.
I have a five year-old nephew who likes to likes to pose really tough ‘Who would win’ questions such as, “Who would win in a fight? A Bald Eagle or a Great Horned Owl?” (Answer – They are pretty evenly matched and there are documented cases of victories on both sides of this battle.) The best one he ever posed, however was, “Who would win in a fight, Superman or Yoda?”
I can’t even remember exactly what happens in the Ultimate one (which I think is loosely what the cartoon was based on) in the end, but Wolverine lives to keep fighting beyond that first issue where he’s torn in half. They also bring in She-Hulk, and I think they fight until suddenly they’re not fighting any more, but for much different reasons, if you know what I mean.
But now you’re basically asking if god could make a rock big enough god couldn’t move it. All I can do is just point you to other times the Hulk has fought things and show you how he was or wasn’t beaten. I forgot there was another recent story, “Old Man Logan”, which is set ostensibly in the normal Marvel universe, but far in the future. Lots of heroes are dead, Wolverine is wandering the earth, still alive, but beaten psychologically until of course inevitably he finds a reason to fight again. That comes down to an old Wolverine vs. old Hulk fight, where the Hulk basically wins the battle, eats Wolverine, and then Wolverine kills him from the inside out (and steals his baby Hulk and then further in the future wolverine and his adopted hulk baby come back to help the Fantastic Four stop future Sue Storm from destroying everything and how do i even know this i’m ending this post right now
Nobody does, at least in the Hulk’s modern incarnations.
Recently, prior to World War Hulk, Mr. Fantastic (basically the smartest person in the Marvel Universe) shot Hulk into space because they couldn’t cure or kill him, and didn’t want to deal with him (Hulk then became king of Hulk-World, and re-invaded earth. Comics.)
To give you a sense of power levels, when Marvel and DC crossed over, Hulk fought Superman.
Sorry. Got carried away. If you’re, like, working on your spec screenplay for Avengers 2 and just want to know how you could theoretically threaten the Hulk, you could always go with magic, psychic attacks, or just some big cosmic level aliens. There have been big enough cosmic things that Hulk has been captured or contained at various times. Almost inevitably that only lasts until Hulk just gets even angrier, but there are definitely times bigger characters have beaten him in physical combat initially.
That was my reaction as well. Hulk gang? And since when does Hulk speak in complete sentences, or use pronouns? Shouldn’t that be “Hulk eating enemies long time” or something?
Not to mention the question of why Hulk’s insides aren’t as proportionately tough as his outsides.
Like Wholly said, traditionally, the best way to fight Hulk is to use a magic / science hand-wave, like having a psychic trip his Hulk switch off, or using a “anti-gamma serum” or something. I don’t know if that works anymore, though. Cosmic powers work too, because that’s just an arbitrary power level explosion.
Hulk was granted Banner’s intelligence sometime ago, I think Doc Samson gave him psychotherapy or something.
