TALES FROM THE KRYPTONIAN: Siberian Saturday with Sal Buscema's HULK

Saturday, February 14, 2026

Siberian Saturday with Sal Buscema's HULK

Since we already did this year's Valentine's Day special on Tuesday we are free to do something else Today. I spent a lot of time preparing material for future posts this week so I am going to do a quick one where I have already prepared everything. We started out SAL BUSCEMA MONTH with three posts about his ten year run on THE INCREDIBLE HULK ( the second one of which got slapped with a NSFW label for reasons unknown ), did fight the Dire Wraiths with ROM SPACEKNIGHT , attended the wedding of Johnny Storm and Alicia Masters in FANTASTIC FOUR issue 300, witnessed some iconic events in AVENGERS history in two posts and now we return to THE INCREDIBLE HULK with the complete original art - except cover - for issue 259 in which the green goliath helps the Soviet Super Soldiers.

Now russian super heroes at Marvel Comics go back to the cold war era with the first appearance of the Red Guardian - co - created by Roy Thomas and John Buscema - in THE AVENGERS issue 43 which then was published by Williams Comics in issue 42 of DIE RUHMREICHEN RAECHER.

Of course being in big part propaganda the story and the character of Red Guardian - who was created as a counterpart to Amerika's Captain America - caused a lot of controversy in the columns of the letter pages at Williams Verlag which is very understandable in light of the german populace's bad experiences with propaganda during the Third Reich.

And while all the stories by Marvel Comics from that time were clearly done as propaganda I think that you have to cut the writers some slack because they always - at least that has been my impression but I could be wrong about this - painted the communist system in Russia ( which at its inception was not that bad ) as wrong and evil and not so much the people in Russia or the communist countries. A good example for that is the character of Busenwunder Natascha Romanoff a.k.a. Black Widow.

While she was an antagonist for Iron Man and clearly used Clint Barton codename Hawkeye's raging lust for her nefarious schemes it was made clear from the start that she really didn't want to do that and was forced to comply by her evil superiors. Because on the other side Marvel Comics had no problem depicting the russian military and politicians as villains.

Over time the Black Widow became a valued member of the Avengers and a longstanding partner to Daredevil and a female version of the Red Guardian even became a member of Marvel's non team The Defenders .

Anyway, this was supposed to be just a quick done in one post not a full fledged dissertation about anti russian or communist propaganda in american comicbooks but I wanted to give a bit of background on the characters we'll encounter in the 259th issue of THE INCREDIBLE HULK.

They do a good job of recapping the previous issue ( which readers Today lambaste but which was very helpful when I started reading american comicbooks for the first time since you didn't always get all the issues ) with the first appearance of this incarnation of the Soviet Super Soldiers.

There have been several russian super hero teams in Marvel Comics history besides the Soviet Super Soldiers like the Winter Guard or The People's Protectorate but to tell the truth I am not enough of an expert on that matter. And seeing as the introduction is already too long I will just leave you to the expertise of Bill Mantlo to bring you up to speed.