The Marvel Cinematic Universe has made Bruce Banner/The Hulk into just one more of the Avengers. His most recent MCU appearances, "Avengers: Endgame" and "She-Hulk," have ditched the man and monster dichotomy altogether; the Hulk is now just a green and buff Bruce.

For all his personal faults, Joss Whedon was the last writer/director to explore the Hulk's tragedy in his two "Avengers" films. The nascent team's climactic argument in "The Avengers," when Banner silences the room by revealing he "got low, so he put a bullet in [his] mouth, and the other guy spit it out" has real dramatic gravitas.

However, the MCU has altogether elided where that tragedy begins. In the comics, Dr. Bruce Banner was already a troubled man before the gamma bomb explosion that changed his life. Banner's father Brian was a nuclear psychist convinced his own radiation exposure turned his son into a monster.