Among the many powerful scenes in Avengers: Endgame, the moment where Dr. Bruce Banner (aka Smart Hulk) dons the newly created Stark Infinity Gauntlet and snaps the universe’s population back ranks as one of the most powerful. The act fried Banner’s entire right arm and left him with possible paralysis. In the comics, however, Hulk had a very different reaction to wearing an Infinity Gauntlet.
Or rather, two Infinity Gauntlets. In Marvel Comics’ Ultimate Universe, it turns out that the bad guys created a pair of gauntlets with eight Infinity Gems. And the Hulk was powerful enough to wear both of them and beat his former teammates senseless!
To clarify: the Hulk in this universe is not the same Bruce Banner people know from the MCU movies or the mainstream comics universe. This Banner is a self-pitying scientist who attempted to recreate the Captain America Super Soldier Serum and came up with a way to transform himself into the Hulk instead. To make matters worse, the Hulk Banner turned into is a homicidal maniac who glorifies in killing people!
Banner revealed this when he intentionally transformed into a new, gray version of the Hulk and murdered thousands of people in a handful of minutes. His universe’s version of the Avengers (called The Ultimates) managed to stop him, but Banner’s reign of terror as the Hulk was far from over. Although condemned to death, Banner survived his execution and spent the next several months learning to control his transformations to the point where Hulk/Banner didn’t have a split personality but simply became a more violent version of himself.
While this version of the Hulk actually worked with the Ultimates (albeit reluctantly), eventually he was captured and imprisoned once again. Freed once more, this time by a female version of the time traveling villain Kang, Banner hulked out and gained access to the Infinity Gauntlets. While the gauntlets still didn’t have all the gems, the power they contained was still immense and capable of warping the very laws of physics. Not that any of that mattered to the Hulk. After donning them, he found they gave him a power boost and immediately went after the Ultimates, taking on Captain America, Thor, Iron Man and more all at once. Hulk didn’t even try to use the Infinity Gauntlets’ more exotic powers at first – he was just interested in giving the Ultimates a pounding for all the times they used him and then threw him into prison.
Eventually, he did start using a few of his new powers by casting an illusion to make it look like the Ultimates had beaten him, only to reappear and duplicate himself multiple times. At that moment, Hulk’s benefactors – Kang and an evil version of Reed Richards called The Maker – appeared and confessed that Hulk’s attack was just a way of buying them more time to put their own plan in motion. Taking one of the gauntlets, Reed tortured the Ultimates but let them live to see how he planned to “save the world” by conquering it.
Banner continued aiding Reed, both in the laboratory and in the field by taking on Thor. Although he didn’t continue wearing the gauntlets, he also didn’t seem to suffer any ill effects from wearing them, showing how differently the Infinity Gauntlets function in different comic book universes compared to the MCU films. It’s a dark story, but one that shows how crazy a psychotic Hulk can be when given ultimate power.