Home Columns Classic Comic Compendium Classic Comic Compendium: INCREDIBLE HULK #427 & 428 feature stunning LIAM SHARP...

Classic Comic Compendium: INCREDIBLE HULK #427 & 428 feature stunning LIAM SHARP art

Sharp's stint on the book was brief by excellent.

d. emerson eddy

12/15/2025 11:00 am

One of the constants of Peter David‘s tenure on the Incredible Hulk, over the decade plus he guided the character, was change. It’s kind of a given when you’re working on a title for that long that you’d switch things up a bit to keep yourself and the audience on your toes and interested. From throwing in deep character changes like the Mr. Fixit personality to leading an organization of half-gods in the Pantheon. Likely keeping his artistic collaborators interested too, working in characters and themes that keep them involved.

After the fall of the latter organization, the book went through one of those shifts when artist Liam Sharp came aboard. Becoming a kind of oblique horror title as Bruce and Betty were forced to essentially go underground again. Sadly it didn’t last long, with Sharp only on the title for eight issues, but it remains one of my favourite periods during David’s run.

“It’s like Faye Wray wanting to live low-profile with King Kong! Sooner or later, the airplanes show up!”

After an epilogue issue to the “Fall of the Pantheon” arc and Sharp’s first full issue that reconstituted an intelligent Hulk personality, the new status quo for the book fully began in a two-part story in Incredible Hulk #427 & 428 from David, Sharp, Robin Riggs, Glynis Oliver, and Richard Starkings & Comicraft. It built up the new setting for “Bob and Betsy Danner” in a new town, hiding from everyone, but finding it not as simple when a child is found murdered, another goes missing, and weird cops are on their tail.

I’m drawn to monster heroes. Big misunderstood creatures that are often put-upon but are trying to do the right thing. Like Swamp Thing. Or the Hulk. Finding that the real monsters are often the ordinary people around them. So, this two-parter bringing in Man-Thing was right up my alley. And the artwork was incredible. It was really what pulled me in again to the series as I wasn’t a regular reader of the book then at the time (the crossover with X-Factor was the last I’d read the book, but it had fallen off my monthly pulls at that point). I know I had seen Sharp’s work before on at least Death’s Head II, but this was where I really noticed it.

Sharp and inker Robin Riggs really seemed to be their all into this. The detail, scope, and presentation were off the scale. Sharp’s Hulk was massive, impossibly muscled, and imposing. Tossed into the darker compositions of this town, of the swamp, and of Man-Thing, it was enthralling. I suppose the influence was probably Simon Bisley, but there’s an inventiveness in shifts in style and presentation in these issues that also remind me of Frank Frazetta, Sam Kieth, and Bill Sienkiewicz. A hint of the experimentation that Sharp would regularly bring to his work over the years. The darkness beautifully enriched by colours from Glynis Oliver.

“I wonder…am I that different from that sick creature?”

I know that there were creative differences between David and Sharp and that his time on the Incredible Hulk was a bit of a sore spot for Sharp. I completely understand where he’s coming from. Still, those eight issues he was aboard were amazing. The artwork never anything less than stunning. To me personally, Incredible Hulk #427 & 428 from David, Sharp, Riggs, Oliver, and Starkings & Comicraft hit a perfect balance of humour, mystery, and horror and hint at what could have been. There was more weirdness in the issues that came after and a phenomenal Abomination story that concluded Sharp’s run, tapping into some of the backwoods horror that always made Swamp Thing work.

And we did eventually get a Man-Thing series from Sharp and JM DeMatteis that was wonderful in its own right, but I always wonder what a full on horror Hulk from Sharp himself could have looked like.

Incredible Hulk #427