Heaven Help Me

While it's true that the Hulk's original "stomping grounds" were in the southwest desert, I never really understood why Marvel would have any reason to keep him there--particularly when it became clear how mobile he was, with his miles-spanning leaping ability. My general impression was that the military detachment where Bruce Banner was on staff was only in the desert in order to coordinate Banner's work on the gamma bomb, where the isolation of a desert environment would be ideally suited for testing it. But when the bomb project was abandoned, General Ross's unit became based there, with Banner even staying on in an official capacity and working on other projects (which I'm assuming were classified):

Yet then the question becomes: why is the Hulk "based" in the desert? Maybe Banner had a reason to stay there, at least as long as his connection to the Hulk remained unknown--but since the desert has proven to be a hostile environment for the Hulk, especially with the military dogging his every step, why would the Hulk be content lumbering among the lizards and scorpions? I mean, a picture is worth a thousand words:

Ross even later lobbies for funding to build a permanent base there, assuming that the Hulk is going to remain in the general area. There's also the problem of how to explain why the foes he comes up against are so keen to make the desert their base of operations, with its near-nonexistent resources.

So while the Hulk occasionally globe-trots and meets up with the likes of Ka-Zar, the Gremlin, SHIELD, Dr. Doom, and the Mandarin, and even adventures in outer space, he'd usually find his way back to the desert, where the military was waiting for him with open arms and "Open fire!" for much of his publication history in the 1970s and '80s. I mostly mention this observation because the desert itself happens to be the focus of another of those tucked-away stories that seemed to pop up in a few Marvel titles in the wake of the large format/new pricing experiment that Marvel quickly abandoned in late 1971. And the tale's writer, Roy Thomas, gives us his own interpretation of why the Hulk considers the desert peaceful:

And if you're thinking that a "small place" is perhaps incompatible with a being called the Hulk, you've caught this story's drift.

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