The following was originally posted on NewYorkPress.com:

The big movie news at the beginning of this week arrived with the announcement that Louis Leterrier (who helmed the popular sci fi Transporter movies and the Jet Li action flick Unleashed) will direct Edward Norton as the not-so-jolly green giant in Marvel Studio's The Incredible Hulk. Universal plans to release the big budget project in the summer of 2008. It's one of those odd situations where a studio confronts the fact that they fucked up a popular franchise and now seems to be trying to do penance for its sins, hoping that commercial viability still beats at the heart of the material.

Ang Lee survived the 2003 disaster of Hulk with his Oscar win for Brokeback Mountain, but the movie itself was shunned by pretty much every intended audience. When Joel Schumacher made those terribly hokey Batman movies in the late Nineties, Warner Bros. took years to confront the problem and get a better project together. The new Hulk project, however, sort of feels like too much too soon. The failure of Lee's project still lingers in the memories of many people who sincerely hoped for a better realization of a classic character. Response to casting Norton in the lead role has ranged from ecstatic to chagrined, with very little middle ground. I could go either way; actually, the Hulk is one of the most malleable of classic comic book characters. The psychological implications of a creature whose sole reason for existing is inner rage opens up innumerable storytelling possibilities. As an example, check out this sampling of "The Incorrigible Hulk," written by"Hate!" comics scribe Peter Bagge. If you're not familiar with Bagge's work, I highly suggest checking out the years worth of "Hate" comics available at most comic book outlets. He's not your typical superhero scribe--but his take on the Hulk, commissioned a few years ago by Marvel and still unpublished, makes you wonder if exploring the social ramifications of the character might be a better direction than millions of dollars worth of CGI. Wishful thinking, I know.

For more on Bagge and this comic, check out this interview from UGO.com:

UGO: Will the Hulk comic you did ever come out?

PETER: I don’t know. My editor at Marvel keeps asking me not to whine too much about it because there is still a chance it might come out. It all has to do with corporate politics.

UGO: Did it have anything to do with the Hulk movie?

PETER: No, let’s back up a bit. About three or four years ago, a few guys were put in charge of Marvel when they were in really bad shape. They figured they had nothing to lose so they asked some people who don’t normally do superhero comics to do them. They went kind of nuts, which is great, but if you ask me they didn’t go nuts enough. Since then, Marvel has huge a string of huge blockbusters recently, especially Spider-Man. Now the company is worth a fortune, which has next to nothing to do with the comics. But what the comics sell is peanuts compared to the movies and the merchandising. Some new board members, who are trying to protect their investment, very carefully manage their more valuable brands. When the editors asked me to do Spider-Man, they were thinking the exact opposite because people who wouldn’t normally buy it would buy it. But now the new people running it don’t want Peter Bagge f**king around with their characters. My vision of the Hulk doesn’t match with theirs.

UGO: I interviewed Kyle Baker a few years ago after he had done this story of Superman as a baby and all these crazy things happened to the baby. They never reprinted until the Bizarro book. When I asked him about it, he said he doesn’t care about the story because he doesn’t own it. “They could buy the story from me and toss it in the trash.”

PETER: I’m not quite that cynical.

UGO: You?

PETER: To a degree, I agree with that. If it winds up never in print I won’t be devastated like I would with something that was my own. But if this was my own thing I wouldn’t be in this situation. It’s because we don’t own the right to these characters, we don’t know when or if it will ever see print. Of course, working on it as much as I did, I spent six months on it, I hate to see all that labor wasted because I thought it came out pretty good.

UGO: Is the Hulk story like your Spider-Man one?

PETER: I think it’s a little bit lighter. I tried to make it more action-packed with splash panels because I thought that Spider-Man was pretty verbose. The Hulk is about Bruce Banner with his dual personality, and I commented on how everybody can do that now to a smaller degree with modern medicine like with Valium and Viagra. Everybody is trying to control or alter their personality.

Wanna talk about this bit of news? Start a discussion over at the boards.