Marvel's spy agency SHIELD once tried to rehabilitate the Hulk with a trick straight out of The Boys, by using comic books! In The Boys comic, created by Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson, a character known as the Legend (a pastiche of Stan Lee) used comic books to help create an inaccurately favorable public image for badly behaved "heroes," and SHIELD once tried a similar tactic with The Hulk.
If any character needs help with his public image, it’s the Hulk. A brutish force of nature that is almost impossible to kill, he leaves a trail of destruction and chaos everywhere he goes. The public at large tends to fear him, and some of his fellow heroes, concerned over the threat Hulk posed, even once launched him into space. When legendary writer/artist John Byrne and superstar artist Ron Garney took over the character in 1999 with Hulk vol. 1 #1, they decided to have a little bit of fun with this concept.
In a back-up story in the issue titled “Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About the Hulk (But Were Afraid to Ask)” Nick Fury is seen briefing two men, whose identity readers do not immediately learn. Fury brings them up to speed on the Hulk’s history, starting from the Gamma test to the monster’s time with the Avengers and up through the present day. Fury tells the two men about the Hulk’s various enemies and allies, including She-Hulk and Doc Samson. Fury then tells them that the Hulk is now responsible for 368 deaths (in the issue’s main story) and that Banner will not defend himself. Fury wants the two men, who when revealed bear a strong resemblance to John Byrne and Ron Garney, to use their comic book to help the Hulk’s public image, telling them “maybe we can save Banner’s scrawny neck… in spite of himself.”
Comic book creators writing and drawing themselves into their stories is nothing new—Stan Lee and Jack Kirby did it, and Grant Morrison did it well during his Animal Man run, so Byrne and Garney are continuing a long comic book tradition. The sequence is a nice, fourth-wall breaking moment that makes readers look at the series in a new light. It also is a good primer for new Hulk fans who may be turned off by coming into the series without a primer. While the story is mostly humorous, it's interesting that SHIELD once had such a positive relationship with superheroes. Following Fury stepping down at the conclusion of 2004's Secret War, other SHIELD heads weren't so accommodating, leading to a contentious relationship between the heroes and spies which reached a crescendo in Civil War, when the department began taking down rogue heroes.
In The Boys, the Legend used comic books to manipulate the public’s perception of super-heroes, and that is what Nick Fury and SHIELD are doing here, although with much better intentions. The plotline was never followed up on, but it's canon in Marvel Comics that the comics themselves exist as loosely fictionalized accounts of the real heroes, suggesting this is actually something of a prequel to Byrne and Garney starting their successful Hulk run. Of course, this opens up the possibility that the Marvel Universe is every bit as dark as that of The Boys, and that the Hulk's reputation is so bad that even his own propaganda can't pretend otherwise - a disturbing thought for fans of the Green Goliath.