Meet the She-Hulk

A friend of mine sent me a link to an article about a breast-cancer campaign in Mozambique starring female comic-book heroes: Superheroines Give Self Exams In Breast Cancer Awareness Campaign.  That led to a bit of back-and-forth about one of the featured characters, the She-Hulk, who happens to be one of my favorite comic characters.  So I reckoned I'd pass along a few words about the Savage, Sensational She-Hulk, aka Shulkie, the Jade Giantess, and the Jolly Green Glamazon.

She-Hulk's an interesting character, one of my favorites in all comic-dom.  She was the last superhero created by Stan Lee at Marvel. She was not created out of a burst of energy or late-1970s women's equality, but instead to preempt the copyright for a female version of the Hulk because the Incredible Hulk TV show had proven to be so popular.  (Marvel feared the TV production company might come up with their own female version of the Hulk for which Marvel wouldn't have a license.)

She-Hulk is Bruce Banner's cousin Jennifer Walters, who's an attorney and gained her powers from an emergency blood transfusion from Bruce.  Unlike the Hulk she usually keeps her intelligence when she's green & hulky. She's also interesting in that her inner conflict between herself and her superhero identity is that she generally has a lot more fun being She-Hulk than being an attorney. Her attorney-dom comes into play pretty often, though.  She's undoubtedly the top lawyer superhero in all the land.  Somehow the fact that an attorney superhero was created out of a copyright pre-emption move fits just about right. And despite the dubious legal motivations for her creations, she's turned out to be one of the more interesting comic book characters of the last thirty years.

Her first comic was Savage She-Hulk (1980-1982) which had a decent 25-issue run in the early 80s, mostly battling gangsters in Los Angeles.  It was a pretty straightforward comic, and though it didn't feature some of the clever narrative devices of later incarnations, it was enough to launch She-Hulk as a legitimate hero in the Marvel Universe.  After Savage She-Hulk ended its run in 1982, Shulkie popped up in a lot of the team books, especially Avengers, where she's been a member on-and-off since the early 80s, and the Fantastic Four, where she took over for the Thing for a few years in the mid-80s.

In 1989 she got her own book again, and the 60-issue run of Sensational She-Hulk (1989-94) was a genuinely ground-breaking comic.  John Byrne wrote and drew many of the issues.  In this book She-Hulk often broke the fourth wall, addressed the audience directly, and was very aware that she was in fact a comic-book character.  This was fairly unprecedented in superhero comic books, and served as a genuinely clever plot device at times. When Sensational She-Hulk ended its run five years later, it had become the longest running series for a Marvel female superhero to date.

She-Hulk also had a pretty good solo run in her own She-Hulk comic that ran in two volumes (Vol. 1, 2004-2005 and Vol. 2, 2006-2007) in the mid-2000s. For much of that run she was an attorney at a law firm that dealt with the legal havoc wreaked by various superheroes and supervillains. After a superhero mishap left her disbarred she took work as a bounty hunter.  That run only lasted a few years, and was best for the first 30 or so issues when Dan Slott was writing it and filled it chock-full of Marvel-Universe in-jokes.

That was before Slott got promoted to write Amazing Spider-Man.  Aside from the general sales challenges that comic books starring women superheroes often had, that seems to me to have been one of the biggest problems in sustaining a She-Hulk comic book.  When somebody talented took over and had a good run, they got promoted to the bigger titles. The flip side is the good thing about She-Hulk. Because she's a second-tier character, writers and artists can take chances with her that they wouldn't take with a marquis character like Spider-Man.  So you tend to get a pretty uneven assortment of brilliance and dreck that mostly just serves as an excuse for artists to draw some panels of green cheesecake. (Not, mind you, that there's anything wrong with a nice slab of green cheesecake! I just prefer my cheesecake with the clever writing and plotting that's been the hallmark of the best of the She-Hulk books.)

And that, my friends, is more than you ever wanted to know about She-Hulk.