Hulk (comics) - Powers, Appearance, and Abilities

Powers, Appearance, and Abilities

The Hulk possesses the potential for limitless physical strength depending directly on his emotional state, particularly his anger. This has been reflected in the repeated comment, "The madder Hulk gets, the stronger Hulk gets." After probing, the entity Beyonder once claimed that the Hulk's potential strength had "no finite element inside." His durability, regeneration, and endurance also increase in proportion to his temper. Greg Pak described the Worldbreaker Hulk shown during World War Hulk as having a level of physical power where "Hulk was stronger than any mortal—and most immortals—who ever walked the Earth."

The Hulk's level of strength is normally limited by Banner's subconscious influence. When Hulk allowed Jean Grey to psionically "shut Banner off", he reached a scale of power on which he managed to overpower and destroy the physical form of the villain Onslaught.

The Hulk is resistant to most forms of injury or damage. The extent varies between interpretations, but he has withstood the equivalent of solar temperatures, nuclear explosions, and planet-shattering impacts. Despite his remarkable resiliency, continuous barrages of high-caliber gunfire can hinder his movement to some degree, and this has been consistently portrayed outside the comic books, in both live-action films and animation—in The Avengers film, he is able to momentarily withstand a sustained barrage of fire from a fighter aircraft. He has been shown to have both regenerative and adaptive healing abilities, including growing tissues to allow him to breathe underwater, surviving unprotected in space for extended periods, and when injured, healing from most wounds within seconds. As an effect, he has an extremely prolonged lifespan.

The Hulk's powerful legs allow him to leap into lower Earth orbit or across continents, and he has displayed sufficient superhuman speed to match Thor, and Sentry.

He also possesses less commonly described powers, including abilities allowing him to "home in" to his place of origin in New Mexico, resist psychic control, or unwilling transformation; grow stronger from radiation or dark magic; and to see and interact with astral forms. Some of these abilities were in later years explained as being related; his ability to home in on the New Mexico bomb site was due to his latent ability to sense astral forms and ghosts, since the bomb site was also the place where the Maestro's skeleton was and Maestro's spirit was calling out to him in order to absorb his radiation. The Hulk is also able to generate omnidirectional "worldbreaker" bursts of kinetic energy that completely shook the United States & could potentially destroy the world or the planet he is standing on .

In the early days of the first Hulk comic series, "massive" doses of gamma rays (such as from the explosion of a hand-held nuclear grenade) would cause the Hulk to transform back to Bruce Banner, although this ability was written out of the character by the 1970s.

As Bruce Banner, he is considered one of the greatest minds on Earth. He has developed expertise in the fields of biology, chemistry, engineering, and physiology, and holds a Ph.D. in nuclear physics. He possesses "a mind so brilliant it cannot be measured on any known intelligence test." Bruce Banner also makes use of his intelligence to create highly advanced technology labelled as "Bannertech", which is on par with technological development from Tony Stark or Doctor Doom. The most common Bannertech Bruce uses is a force field able to shrug off blows from Hulk-level entities, along with a teleporter, which can be used to transport an unknown number of people. Bannertech is also used by Amadeus Cho, as well as the Hulk persona itself.

In The Science of Superheroes, Lois Grest and Robert Weinberg examined Hulk’s powers, explaining the scientific flaws in them. Most notably, they point out that the level of gamma radiation Banner is exposed to at the initial blast would induce radiation sickness and kill him, or if not, create significant cancer risks for Banner, because hard radiation strips cells of their ability to function. They go on to offer up an alternate origin, in which a Hulk might be created by biological experimentation with adrenal glands and GFP.

Charles Q. Choi from LiveScience.com further explains that unlike the Hulk, gamma rays are not green; existing as they do beyond the visible spectrum, gamma rays have no color at all that we can describe. He also explains that gamma rays are so powerful (the most powerful form of electromagnetic radiation and 10,000 times more powerful than visible light) that they can even convert energy into matter - a possible explanation for the increased mass that Bruce Banner takes on during transformations. "Just as the Incredible Hulk 'is the strongest one there is,' as he says himself, so too are gamma ray bursts the most powerful explosions known."