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Herb Trimpe's Moody Vehemence

Herb Trimpe, once of Incredible Hulk fame, entered the long list of casualties of Marvel's downsizing of talent in a casual dismissal that seemed to sneer at some thirty years of service the man put in for the company. In some ways, it resembles the 1980s ouster of Curt Swan from the Superman titles he had penciled since the 1950s.

By the end of his tenure, Trimpe no longer enjoyed the esteem he held in the high days of his Hulk work. His style had changed over the years; styles of inking had brought about an industry standard that ill-suited his work; and he had attempted to introduce faddish stylistic elements into his work, including the grotesque anatomical exaggerations - Brobdignagian pectorals and bosoms - in a misguided attempt to create a more current style.

While many younger fans may not recognize in his later work all the power he could bring out of a page, his days in the company of Marvel's greatest Silver Age inkers showed an amazing run of powerful, tone-heavy work.

Mood and Style

Granted, his work had its limitations. Most of what he put on paper disappeared without the right inker, but Sam Grainger, John Severin, Marie Severin, Frank Giacoia, and Sal Buscema all understood how to bring out the dark, surreal moodiness of Trimpe's pencils, and his editors had the sense to pair him with such talents for a significant and memorable period of The Incredible Hulk.

By the late sixties, the period where Trimpe came from running stat cameras to penciling chores, Marvel had infused into its house style a sinister psychedelic undertone, most strongly expressed in Jim Steranko's work but also reflected in some of the more receptive younger talent. Early Barry (Windsor-)Smith held a dark surrealism; and Trimpe, when in the right mood, could bring out a mixture of retro-fifties gloom that combined with nightmarish science fiction elements in a combination foreign to subsequent comics.

Cinematic Technique

Trimpe furthermore brought to the page an EC-influenced style of tone-setting closeups; and a vibrancy in action in his better work that made for loud pages, vehement in their portrayals of action or emotion. In short, his work had the key ingredients of Marvel Silver Age success: His pencil would scream a story in a manner that hinted of the ever-present Kirby influence, that whispered the nightmarish surrealism brought by Jim Steranko; but that remained idiosyncratically Trimpelike.

Examine the accompanying sample of work with a helpless Bruce Banner looking for some way to banish the giant Kirbylike monster setting off seismographs in the vicinity. This layout screams tension; drags the eye through the impending crisis; and forces the blood pressure up. Few pieces of comics work could compel quite so thoroughly as this; these panels roar and make readers roar with them.

Trimpe credits no specific early stylistic influence, although he owns up to an affinity for the EC comics of his early years. To view these samples, one does see touches that suggest the EC storytelling of Jack Davis (known these days more for his many years of humor work) in some ways, and the tense touches of Wally Wood in handling fear. Underneath, however, his work did not obviously reflect any style but his own, as revealed through the talented inkers of the late sixties and early seventies.

Miscellaneous Touches

Trimpe's Hulk demonstrated a number of touches that later comics would erroneously disregard as unnecessary or fail to recognize at all in the overstated conventions of the later medium. Like older peers, Trimpe could infuse anger into a face without the hysteria and insanity that commonly pollute the faces of even the most benign of contemporary superhero depictions. In Trimpe's day, however, any artist worth the drool on his chin understood a wider set of moods. "Stoic" and "utterly berserk" only defined points on a continuum that connected them.

If Trimpe's fight scenes lacked the drama of those of a Kirby, Buscema, or Steranko, the violence in scenes where the Hulk beset inanimate objects possessed enough explosive movement that the sound effects detailed therein only represented redundant touches; the loudness of such scenes would carry without onomatopoea. Nor did the writers of the period ignore this; this age's Hulk vented a great deal of rage on walls, devices, and robots, and other things that he could beat to a powder with both impunity and the approval of the Comics Code Authority.

In his prime, Trimpe could make the Hulk's tantrum against a table or desk seem more violent than a modern depiction of violence by a later generation of antiheroes; without the joy and feeling for the mayhem, an artist depicting the Punisher machine gunning a roomful of gangsters appears rather clinical and insubstantial in comparison.

Trimpe could also bring a great feel to the tortured ranting soliloquys of the megalomaniacal brood of first-string villains that vied monthly for control of our world (or larger domains). Furthermore, in this specimen, we see a busy background of strange technology reminiscent of the high period of "Kirbytech."

These panels don't lie indifferently on the page; they don't sleep on the page; and they reflect a period when comics tried harder. Faces showed both the anger of their bearers and the attempt to control the temper that drove the anger, a tense portrayal that demonstrated deeper feeling and an artistic understanding of mood a level above the idiot rage polluting almost every page of some later, unsubtle works by lesser or shallower pencils.

Energy crackled in those days in forms that came straight from the foreheads of pencilers, who did not have today's megablockbusters as inspirations and could not base energy discharges on computer or animated simulations in other media. If sometimes the blasts, zaps, force fields, and aurae of that day sometimes contained formulaic elements (like the inevitable Kirby-Buscema black ink droplets), these depictions at least showed the detachment such phenomena enjoyed from mundane reality. The artists of that age invented the idiom of energy discharge that subsequently evolved into today's richer vocabulary of smoky, flaming. sparking, or fluid emissions of violent or palpable force.

Late Trimpe

Although Trimpe continued to do work for Marvel until the great purge of talent in the 1990s cost him his position, his later work did not reflect those things so potent in the height of his Incredible Hulk work. Even during the late stage of his hundred-issue run on the title, after Marvel's standards slouched in the mid-seventies after the great exodus of talent, Trimpe's work did not appear in as vital a form as two or three years previously.

Much of this decline results from his dependence upon the right inks for his works. The sample immediately above represents a piece where Trimpe's framing and shapes certainly reflect is early works, but Jack Abel's hard, tight inking deprives the piece of much of the dark moodiness that allowed Trimpe's pencils much of their earlier power.

So, sadly, Trimpe did not appear at his strongest, regardless of his own performance, in his work in which he introduced the overly-hyped antihero Wolverine. Perhaps if Marvel could have assigned the likes of a Severin sibling to this piece, it would belong as one piece to the heroic phase of Trimpe's pencils.

Certainly the medium still contains many talents capable of bringing out the strong points of Trimpe's work, should he ever care to resume the thankless duties of a comics penciler in the future. Trimpe must still enjoy some considerable soreness at his ill-treatment, suggesting the unlikeliness of such an event; and the talent of many of his best inkers, where they still perform in the field, led many to begin or resume penciling chores somewhere in the industry, and the best likely inkers might better employ their talents as pencilers.

Nonetheless, it's hard not to miss his work, even if one considers the incarnation of the Hulk Trimpe depicted somewhat dated. The strength of his work allowed readers to ignore the horrible purple pants and the ridiculous faux-deficient grammar of Hulk's dialogue. In a very real way, Trimpe carried a concept so heroically that his work drowned out the annoying baggage that accompanied it.