The raging Hulk is the iconic one, but there is a part of me that hankers after that slightly more crafty, articulate and nasty one from very early on.

JB was planning on taking the character back in that direction, and I often wonder where the character would be now, if he’d had the chance. That first seed was planted in HULK # 319, with Banner voicing his frustrations about not being able to control the great power thrust upon him by fate, and thinking that there might have been a way from the start to be full control of both his forms.

——

Elektra, as presented in the original Daredevil run, was a normal young woman who was deeply affected by the assassination of her father and ended up becoming a bounty hunter and assassin on the path to avenging her father. 

Elektra, as presented by Miller’s MAN WITHOUT FEAR, was already a thrillseeking sociopath by the time she met Matt in college and was looking for excuses to beat people up. It seemed like the death of her father freed her to be who she always was, rather than her being corrupted by the need for vengeance.

This is an evolution in the origin of characters that plays merry hell with the conventions of the genre. Can there actually be an origin point for characters anymore, or must everyone from now on simply be a more true expression of their already extant, inner selves after a tragedy takes place?

The Hulk and Two-Face MUST have been fractured identities prior to the events which we were previously told made them. After all, dissociative disorders don't work that way (if they work at all.) 

I look forward to seeing tales of the seven-year old Batman skulking about in the shadows of Wayne Manor, peering down at guests from atop the family armoire, and leaping from drapery to drapery in pursuit of fleeing pets. "Bruce, honey?" Martha Wayne calls out, getting ready for a social engagement. "Have you seen Mommy's earring?" 

The half-open closet door behind her swings shut, revealing the boy, shrouded in shadow, who grimly intones, "Fear not, citizen. Your missing item WILL be located if I have to search every room, every corner, every inch of this mansion until it reveals itself. If I must plunge into the Stygian depths of the cave structures below our house, where the demon Bat-God moves arthritically about, stiffly hissing at the stale, dead air, I WILL find this earring of yours, and woe betide those who were fool enough to have taken it!!" He leaps to the top of her dresser and then out of the room through the leaded glass window. "Vengeance, Mother! Vengeance, I tell you, will be ours!!"

Or do we already have this on the CW?