Marvel Reveals Why the Hulk Has So Many Purple Pants

Today, comic book fans finally received an answer to one of the greatest mysteries in the Marvel Universe: why does the Hulk have so many pairs of purple pants?

SPOILERS for The Immortal Hulk #4 by Al Ewing, Joe Bennett, Ruy Jose, and Paul Mounts follow.

Yes, the purple pants. In the earliest days of his publication, the Hulk was more monster than a superhero. Thaddeus “Thunderbolt” Ross would hunt down the hulking green behemoth, who would always, for some reason, be wearing purple pants. It was the closest thing to a superhero costume that the Hulk had in those days.

While writers over the years have toyed with the Hulk concept to make it more heroic, The Immortal Hulk has a different take. It isn’t a big action series where the Hulk is constantly in a state of rage and the military or other heroes have to stop him, nor is it a series where Bruce Banner has enough control over the Hulk to act as a hero himself.

Instead, The Immortal Hulk is a series that treats Hulk like a monster, a boogeyman that comes out at night to punish the wicked in wicked ways. The public believes Bruce Banner and the Hulk are dead, but one reporter from Arizona, Jacqueline McGee, has noticed a pattern of Hulk sightings and is tracking down the story.

To help flesh out her story, McGee has flown in from Canada Bruce Banner’s old college roommate, Walter Langowski. Langowski is better known to the public as Sasquatch, the most monstrous member of the Canadian superhero squad turned cosmic defense team known as Alpha Flight.

McGee asks Langowski to tell her what Banner was like in college. Langowski reveals that even then Banner was a bit intense, with a bit of a temper and some serious eccentricities. For example, there was that time that Banner gave all of his clothes the Goodwill. Banner planned to emulate Albert Einstein by buying ten identical suits so that he’d never have waste time and energy decided what to wear ever again.

While that may seem eccentric enough in and of itself, it was the suit that Banner chose that really confounded Langowski. “Purple?” he asks in the flashback scene.

“It’s called style, Walter,” Banner explains. “If anything, this will only become more fashionable.”

So there you have. The reason the Hulk had so many pairs of purple pants is apparently that Bruce Banner sold literally all of his other clothes and stocked up exclusively on items of purple clothing believing that they represented a timeless sense of fashion.

What do you think of this explanation for why the Hulk had so many purple pants? Let us know in the comments!

The Immortal Hulk #4 is on sale now.