u/Effective_Bag_2928

“We’ve got to find that—that HULK!!”

Seems like a throwaway comment, but this unassuming US Army NCO gave Bruce Banner’s alter ego a name that even the green, gamma-irradiated giant uses when referring to himself! (In the third-person, obviously)

I did some digging and discovered this soldier is Richard”Dick” Meadows. He would have been around 30 years old when his unit was sent to hunt the grey behemoth and just a few months away from joining the famous and elite SAS in Britain as part of an exchange program.

Despite giving The Hulk his infamous name, one that is still used today, over 60 years later, he left a lasting legacy himself due to his glittering military career.

He fought in Korea, Vietnam and was involved in the failed Operation Eagle Claw

Finally, as a civilian advisor, he worked with Chuck Norris’ gritty Delta Force unit.

He left this mortal coil in 1995, highly decorated and respected with General Thaddeus E. "Thunderbolt**"** Ross giving a powerful eulogy at his funeral. However, to me, he will always be the man that named The Hulk!

It doesn’t feel like it’s going to come apart but I’ve only ever seen this on old, well read books. Anyone else got a similar issue with this particular epic?

So first off, yes this is clearly an AI pic but it’s one created by the man Scott "Matchmaker" Michaels himself. He loves AI and his Substack (now on hiatus) is full of generated slop while his now deleted Twitter account was similarly strange. I’d never heard of him until The New York Cosmos announced they were returning to the world of soccer via USL 1 and this guy came across as a full on grifter with rabid posts on social media saying he owned the rights to the historic name so it wasn’t going to happen without his say so.

When the internet was young, visionaries/chancers like Rick Schwartz spent money buying up domain names like Candy.com or Whisky.com etc with the goal of selling them on for profit. Michaels seemed to be trying to grab trademarks in a similar way. Snapping up Los Angeles Aztecs, Chicago Sting and Cosmos and styling himself as a champion of the fans, he claimed he was scooping up these legacy names that had lapsed into “bureaucratic limbo" so that he could launch a new, fan-owned professional league in the U.S. called the National Soccer League.

So, now the dust has settled, what do Cosmos fans, old and new, think about the debacle? Where is Michaels now? Did the trademark case get a court date set? Was it all a massive grift?