Lo... The Leader!

 OR:  "Holy Crud!"


Given the longevity of the mentally mutated menace known as the Leader, and the fact that he's arguably become a staple of Marvel villainy, it's fair to wonder why the man has seldom been allowed to spread his wings beyond the confines of Incredible Hulk and initiate plans against other characters and super-groups. The R&D projects of Tony Stark or Reed Richards, for instance, would surely make for tempting targets; infiltrating S.H.I.E.L.D. would gain him access to any number of intelligence agencies and government resources; a takeover attempt of A.I.M. would not only yield a treasure trove of advanced weaponry and scientific research but could also set up a *ahem* head-to-head (and mind-to-mind) conflict with M.O.D.O.K. (so many acronyms!); and how about vying with the Wizard for control of the Frightful Four?

The point being that the Leader need not stay where he has for the most part, which has mainly been to bedevil the command of Gen. "Thunderbolt" Ross and/or pursue a vendetta against the Hulk and Bruce Banner. And in that respect, the Leader is with us almost from the start, helping to inaugurate the Hulk in the character's second crack at a series of his own--or more accurately, a feature of his own, while sharing one half of the Tales To Astonish title with Giant-Man in separate stories. At first, the Leader is handled by artist Steve Ditko in much the same way as was the Green Goblin--a villain whose identity is kept under wraps for the time being, while conducting his affairs behind the scenes as the, well, leader of a spy ring with designs on effectively taking over the U.S. government.

The Chameleon, of course, is a natural operative for the Leader's network of spies--though he, too, fails in dealing with the Hulk. It's then that, unlike the slow reveal of Norman Osborn as the Goblin, Ditko and writer Stan Lee decide to pull back the curtain on the Leader without delay, at the point when he appears to be forsaking the spy business in favor of going all in with his powerful creation known as the Humanoid.

It's only when he sees the Hulk go up against the Humanoid, however, that the Leader decides to focus his efforts on learning more about the powerful brute, whom he considers to be a potentially dangerous enemy and suspects was created in the same way as himself--by exposure to gamma rays.

Whatever our impressions of the Leader thus far, it becomes apparent that his character has acted as a virtual shot in the arm to stories involving the Hulk, who had not yet been developed beyond the status of a raging behemoth who suddenly appears to attack the threat du jour and whose activities cast suspicion on Bruce Banner. Up until now, the so-far bland supporting characters of these stories have been Gen. Ross, who has orders to continue working with the brilliant Banner as he develops weapons-based technology for the government... Maj. Glenn Talbot, a security officer who believes the worst of Banner; Rick Jones, who's left Captain America and the Avengers to return and protect Banner as best he can... and Betty Ross, Banner's love interest (as well as Talbot's); but as the Leader's profile is raised, and his interests are shifted to getting his hands on whatever Banner happens to be working on, as well as becoming more obsessed with the Hulk as a possibly ally, he begins to receive prominent exposure on issue covers.

Yet for all that, it takes awhile for any characters in the stories to become aware of either the existence or even the name of the Leader--which, granted, is secrecy that any spy aspires to, though in this case that secrecy vanishes for no apparent reason. The moment comes when the Leader sets his eye on Banner's new Absorbatron, a device developed as a defense against nuclear attack and capable of absorbing the force of a nuclear explosion. (Perhaps an improvement on his earlier Project 34, a device which only went as far as shielding an entire city from enemy rockets or missiles through use of electromagnetic waves.) The Leader is successful in capturing the device, but as a bonus he also manages to capture the Hulk in the process--though it's Bruce Banner who awakens in the Leader's base and realizes who's nabbed him, despite neither himself nor the Hulk ever having knowledge of or exposure to anyone named "the Leader."

Ditto for Gen. Ross and Maj. Talbot, who are frantic to recover the Absorbatron but are convinced that it's Banner (in league with the Hulk) who has made off with it, no doubt to deliver to a foreign government. Yet as they close in on the Leader's hidden base, they're unaware that the Hulk has since escaped captivity and dealt with the Leader (and with the Absorbatron)--and so when they arrive, they only find the Hulk, who has been severely weakened by one of the Leader's weapons and succumbs to a soldier's gunfire (presumably while on the verge of changing back to Banner). In a subsequent search, however, Talbot and his men only find the fatally wounded Bruce Banner.

And as the mop-operation continued, we're left to assume that Banner's little S.O.S. made mention of the Leader--because now the villain's name is fully out in the open and being dropped by the troops, as if they've been aware they've been dealing with him all along.

Elsewhere, the Leader has attempted to mend fences with those who were expecting delivery of the Absorbatron, by promising them something of potentially greater value--a more powerful, monstrous Humanoid who would be subject to their control. But it becomes clear that the Leader instead means to sever ties with those he has been working with, and use his creation to seize power for himself. (And at a tidy profit, at that--one billion dollars in 1965 was nothing to sneeze at.)

But the Leader has underestimated the Army's arsenal, as Ross orders the deployment of their "Sunday punch" super-missile against the approaching Humanoid which renders it inoperative on impact. The unexpected development that results from the crisis, however, is that the Hulk agrees to serve the Leader, who has learned of the Watcher's "Ultimate Machine" and enlists the Hulk's aid in retrieving it--but his intention to assimilate the Machine's wealth of universal knowledge backfires, to deadly effect.

Posthumously, however, we discover sometime later that the Leader has been officially named via narrative as the Hulk's arch-villain when the police contact the Pentagon upon discovering his Humanoid creation in storage, which Ross rashly resolves to send against the Hulk--something the Humanoid, for its part, is totally on board with, except for the part about being under Ross's control.

Thus would begin a long association between Ross's command and the Leader, for better or worse (usually worse).

But... wouldn't we need a living Leader for that?

Say no more.

For sanity's sake, we can dispense with the details of a specially prepared Humanoid "nurse" created as a contingency plan, along with a revivor beam that saved the Leader from death, and cut right to the chase (taking place in the Hulk's second solo series): the Leader's offer to Ross to remove the threat of the Hulk. An offer that, shall we say, had a considerable amount of fine print that Ross made clear he wished to remain ignorant of.

Yet we know by now that the Leader specializes in the art of the double-cross.

And yet when the Leader's scheme to start World War III fails, and his duplicity is revealed, even Talbot, who had strongly cautioned against Ross trusting this villain, decides to make the same misjudgment when Betty Ross falls prey to the Sandman and the Leader offers the only hope for stopping the man-monster whom Talbot feels endangered her life. (Never mind the option of hunting down the Sandman, Major.)

But why stop there? In addition to Talbot throwing his principles out the window, why don't we compound his blunder by bringing Ross on board with the agreement with the Leader--and while we're at it, let's rope in the President of the United States to sign off on it, as well, completing this trifecta of idiocy.

Eventually it becomes clear that the Leader only wanted to get his hands on Project Brain-Wave to carry out his own revenge against the Hulk--a plan which would indeed have proven fatal to the brute if successful, despite the objections of the two officers who practically hand-delivered the equipment to the Leader only to come to their senses too late.

Only the initiative of the Hulk's friend, Jim Wilson, saved both the Hulk and Betty Ross that day--the same Jim Wilson who we later find present at the construction site of the new Project Greenskin base in Arizona (soon after clarified as being located in New Mexico), and stumbling onto another, more insidious plot that again involves Gen. Ross, Maj. Talbot and the President. Only when Jim strikes out on his own this time, what he discovers isn't so easy to remedy with just a few crossed wires.

Fortunately, on an army base, help is only a barracks or hallway away, and Jim runs into the one officer who is best able to render assistance--Major Talbot, who under other circumstances might have indeed launched a base-wide hunt for the culprit immediately upon confirming Jim's story, but is literally not himself this evening.

To my knowledge, this is the first we've seen of the Leader being able to shift back to human form (and another's form, at that)--an ability which seems pulled out of left field by writer Gerry Conway*, but which Roger Stern makes use of in a later 1978 story when Gamma Base offers shelter to an amnesiac "John Doe":

*Apparently the Leader returning to his mutated form has become more complicated over time, requiring additional exposure to gamma rays. In Conway's case, given that the Leader's military attire changes, as well, I prefer to believe that Conway was having the Leader simply using the power of his mind to make Jim (and others) believe they were seeing Talbot.

With the Leader finally beginning to show his hand here, we should probably check in on the Hulk, who unfortunately is half a world away after having made his way from, first, Latveria, to Egypt, and then to Israel, before finally catching a plane in Tel Aviv that will hopefully take him back to the States. And as you can imagine, no one catches a plane quite like the Hulk.

So what's the Leader's game here? From what we've seen, it looks like he's returning to his original goal of infiltrating the U.S. government at the highest levels, with android creations being substituted for their real-life counterparts (as we've already seen in the case of Ross and Jim's murderous driver). And with both the President and Vice-President scheduled to arrive for an inspection of Project Greenskin, the Leader is poised to achieve a major part of that goal at a stroke--that is, if he doesn't become distracted by an old vendetta that he seems equally preoccupied with.

Boy, are Nixon and Agnew going to be surprised by that demonstration.

NEXT:

Wait... WHAT??