You wouldn’t like me when I’m angry
The Hulk vs Bruce Banner relationship was originally conceived for Marvel Comics by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby as a mixture of previous ‘horror-but-moral’ tales such as Frankenstein and Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, exploring the two sides of the same coin, paradoxically polarising them as well as blending them.
The Bruce Banner character is a quiet, thoughtful scientist, a little bit awkward and introverted who accidentally creates his alter ego ‘The Hulk,’ an angry ball of extraverted rage. Banner is a serious guy and indeed in order to escape his predicament and to ensure ‘The Hulk’ is contained at one point he disappears, working as a doctor in the slums of Calcutta. But ‘The Hulk’ is only temporarily buried within Banner; he has not been eradicated, because he is part of him.
His creation, ‘The Hulk’ is less thoughtful: “Hulk not think, Hulk SMASH,” and Banner regrets what he has unleashed but even more worrying: “The gamma just unleashed what was already there,” alluding to his violent father and how these traits may be part of him, manifesting themselves in his alter ego.
It is this suggestion, that two polarised sets of characteristics can exist within one individual that partly explains the huge success of the character and we can see that Bruce Banner’s caring, thoughtful, helpful internalised INFJ when angered turns into ‘The Hulk’s’ ESTP, impervious to his environment consumed by rage and violence which is externalised. So we ask: which one are you? And I guess the answer, according to this character is, both!