| I’ve been trying to remember how old I was when I first became aware that there was a “She-Hulk.” I’ve got a vague recollection of being at my grandma’s house on some summer afternoon, playing with some neighborhood kids, when one of them produced a comic book featuring the girl version of the big green guy I’d seen on television a few times*. I asked the kid with the book how there was a “She” Hulk. He said that she was the Hulk’s cousin, and that she’d gotten turned into She-Hulk because of a blood transfusion.
For the most part, I wasn’t too interested. I liked the guy on TV, but I was a little too young to care about comics at this point, and really didn’t know what the heck a “blood transfusion” was anyhow. Of course, as the years went on, I came to appreciate what Star Trek taught the geek population at large: green-skinned women are hot. So while I never specifically went out of my way to read She-Hulk-centric material, I always appreciated it when she was around, and grew to enjoy her as a character.
So that brings us up to modern times, when roughly 25 years later, I’m idly wandering around a comic shop while my fiancée shops for some new threads. Well out of the “collecting” era of my life, I don’t really do single issues of anything any more, but I’ll not turn down a graphic novel or collection that catches my eye or looks good. On this particular day, the thing that caught my eye was this:
Okay, I’m sold. I’d quickly learn that this book collected the first six issues of the 2004 She-Hulk series, which I knew nothing about, but the art (Bobillo and Pelletier were the pencillers on the books) looked pretty fun, so on a whim I picked it up to pass the time while standing around “New York and Company” while there was the trying on of many, many pairs of pants.
The whim paid off--as it turns out, She-Hulk: Single Green Female is a witty, fun, and interesting book on many levels. Writer Dan Slott certainly takes the approach to the character in novel direction, and pairs it with pretty quippy dialogue with the same sensibility that Kevin Smith or Joss Whedon might employ. While there are certainly super-hero exploits to be had in this series, the focus is more on the everyday life of Jennifer Walters, attorney at law (She-Hulk’s alter ego, for the uninitiated).
 This treatment of She-Hulk paints her as a young, fun-loving woman who spends most of her time in her big green form, although she has the ability to change back into plain-old Jennifer at will. But problems arise as a result of her free-wheeling fun--in an effort to make her “grow up” a bit, her fellow Avengers kick her out of the Avengers Mansion, and to add insult to injury, Jen is fired from the law firm where she holds down a “day job” as a defense attorney because he boss feels that her exploits as She-Hulk create dangerous conflicts of interest.
Fortunately, she’s rapidly picked up by the top law firm in town, where she’s assigned to work in a very unusual division: “Superhuman Law.” This is where the book’s unusual nature really starts to shine, as it now takes a look at the Marvel Universe that is rarely examined--how exactly DOES society work with all these super-powered types running around all the time? It’s now Jen’s job to practice law where the common conceptions of “societal law” can’t be easily applied. An even more novel twist is that in this universe, the works of Marvel Comics, which exists as a published licensed by the heroes to tell their stories, are legally binding documents. So for example, when Spider-Man sues J. Jonah Jameson for libel--the funniest chapter in this collection by far--every Spider-Man issue in publication is on record for historical reference in the case.
So what we end up with is an amusing “behind the scenes” kind of book that takes a tongue-in-cheek approach to the life of a superhuman woman as she tries to cope with the fact that while she does have fantastic abilities, at the end of the day, she’s still Jennifer Walters, a young attorney who’s convinced she can’t live unless she IS big and green. Next time you’re at your local shop, I suggest picking it up on the strength of the writing--even if you already to think the actual strength is in a big green hottie wearing skimpy clothes.
*Meaning this was probably sometime c. 1980-82, when the TV show was in its later years, and corresponded with the first stand-alone She-Hulk comic series that ran at the same time. I would’ve been three to five years old. |
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