This is "Provide Some Answers," which is a feature where long unresolved plot points are eventually resolved.

Reader Steve B. wrote in to ask, "Why was the hulk drawn with three toes and then five? A sales person in an art gallery said it was because they could not fit five toes on the drawing. Can you help?"

In the context of the comic books themselves, Steve, it is obviously just a mistake by Jack Kirby. Kirby drew SO many pages at the time that he was not always perfect. He would sometimes make mistakes and Stan Lee didn't catch them. A famous one was when the Fantastic Four captured four Skrulls in an issue but at the end of the issue, Kirby only drew three Skrull captives (Lee then tried to explain away the mistake and made it even odder).

Clearly, when looking at the toe progression of the Hulk, we're just talking a mistake.

When Kirby introduced the Hulk in Incredible Hulk #1, he was grey and had five toes...

In the next issue, the Hulk became green, but still had five toes...

All throughout Kirby's run on the book (he did the first five issues), the Hulk had five toes...

When Steve Ditko took over for the final issue, still five toes...

Then, after the book was canceled, the Hulk popped up in Fantastic Four #12 and now Kirby inexplicably was drawing the Hulk with THREE toes...

Again, this is clearly a mistake.

Especially since the next Hulk story was in Avengers #1, and Kirby drew the Hulk with FOUR toes...

The following issue was back to three toes...

but then four toes at the end of the story!

Really demonstrating that this is clearly just Kirby not keeping track of things, the following issue sees the Hulk's toes alternate from four to five in different panels...

After a few more Avengers appearances, the big change in the Hulk's history was when he fought the Avengers and the Fantastic Four in Fantastic Four #26, and Kirby drew the Hulk with five toes...

When the Hulk then got his own feature again in Tales to Astonish, Steve Ditko drew him with five toes....

It has been five toes ever since.

There was never an explanation until many years later, when Al Ewing and Alan Davis had the Hulk be part of a team of Avengers plucked from different time periods in the Ultron Forever event. The Hulk gets his head chopped off, but Ewing cleverly reveals that that is not the end of the Hulk. This is because the Hulk is in a state of flux...

This explains all the weird stuff that happened in the original Hulk series and also explains the Hulk's changing toes.

Thanks for the question, Steve! If anyone else has a suggestion for a comic book plot that got resolved after a few years (I tend to use two years as the minimum, as otherwise, you're probably just in the middle of the actual initial reveal of the storyline, ya know? But I'll allow exceptions where a new writer takes over a storyline and has to resolve the previous writer's unresolved plots), drop me a line at brianc@cbr.com!