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 Previous: The K7RA Solar Update |  Next: The Amateur Radio Crossword Puzzler |
By Stan Horzepa, WA1LOU
Contributing Editor
August 1, 2003
This week, discover how teenaged Amateur Radio operators kept track of the Incredible Hulk and inadvertently helped to form a team of superheros.
When you were a kid, did you ever wish that your old man had a glamorous job like a Major League baseball player? Or a movie star? Well, maybe not something so glamorous, but at least a job that benefited you directly and increased your esteem among your peers. For example, a job like the operator of the roller coaster at the local amusement park or the driver of an ice cream truck?
I was lucky. My dad worked in a factory, but not just any old factory. He worked in a comic book factory. The Eastern Color Printing Company, to be exact, the company that invented the comic book way back in 1933.
When I was a kid, my old man brought home a bundle of comic books for my sister and I every evening. She preferred Dennis the Menace and Millie the Model, whereas I preferred the horror and science fiction titles, although I did get a kick out of some of Dennis the Menace's adventures, too.
In the late summer of 1961, Dad brought home a new kind of comic book: a "Marvel" comic book featuring the first appearance of the Fantastic Four. After reading and rereading and still rereading Fantastic Four No. 1, I lost interest in the horror and science fiction titles and began looking forward to the exploits of the Fantastic Four and later Marvel superheroes (or anti-superheroes) like Spiderman, Hulk, Submariner, Captain America, Thor, Iron Man, etc.
 Amateur Radio has made appearances in the fictional world of comic books, including the wild and wooly world of the Incredible Hulk |
The Hulk was one of my favorites and in The Incredible Hulk #6, Hulk's sidekick, Rick Jones, decided that he needed a way to keep track of the Hulk as he rampaged across North America. To accomplish this, Rick organized a group of teenaged ham radio operators, who used the ham bands to exchange information about the whereabouts of His Hulkiness. The group was known as the "Teen Brigade" and they appeared in later Hulk comic books, too. Their misdirected radio signals were also instrumental in putting together the superhero team that became known as "The Avengers" (in Avengers No. 1).
After my comic book reference to Thor, the Nordic god of thunder and lightning, in the last installment of Surfin', I was motivated to see if there was much of a connection between comic books and ham radio. Of course, most of us are familiar with the Archie ham radio comic book sponsored by the ARRL, but I wondered if there were any other ham radio forays into the comic book world.
Searching the Internet did not come up with much. As best as I can tell, the Teen Brigade represents ham radio's most famous venture into the world of comic books. You can read all about the Teen Brigade at the Hulk No. 6 and Avengers No. 1 Web sites. I also found a comic book reference to the Phantom using ham radio in the jungle on the Web site of Sandeep Baruah, VU2MUE, formerlyVU2MSY.
That is all I could find on the subject. If you are aware of any other ham radio comic book connections, please let me know and I will pass along the information here in an update to this column.
Until next time, keep on surfin'.
Editor's note:
Stan Horzepa, WA1LOU, resides in downtown Wolcott, Connecticut, and has been a QST writer for over 25 years. Since getting
his ticket in 1969, Stan has sampled nearly every entrée in the Amateur Radio
menu (including a stint as Connecticut Section Manager), but he keeps coming
back to his favorite preoccupations: VHF and packet radio. As a result, he runs
a 2-meter APRS digipeater and weather station (WA1LOU-15) from his mountaintop
location in central Connecticut. Stan, a long time advocate of using computers
with Amateur Radio, wrote programs to dupe contests and calculate antenna
bearings way back in 1978. Today, he is on the board of directors of Tucson
Amateur Packet Radio (TAPR) and uses his Mac to surf the Internet searching for
that perfect ham radio Web page. To contact Stan, send e-mail to wa1lou@arrl.net.
| Previous: The K7RA Solar Update | Next: The Amateur Radio Crossword Puzzler |
