About a year ago, Andrea Speed was kind enough to fill in for me on Still on the Shelf. She had suggested a title for the column – “What the &#^$ is Wrong With You?!” Granted, the title was a little more “explicit” than we could use on CX, but I do have to admit, it is how I feel sometimes.

We all see it – heck, almost all of us have participated in it from time to time. Austen-bashing. Who here has done a little of that? It is ok to raise your hands. We have all, at one point, complained about the work of a particular writer on a favorite series of ours. But in the end, the title that said creator is working on still sells extremely well. So the logic goes – in most cases, people hate the product, but continue to buy the book, while fantastic work by another writer continues to get low sales, and often times eventually gets cancelled (HERO, for instance, I am still so irritated by that cancellation), or worse (the fate of the entire CrossGen universe).

So my response is, “What the &#^@ is Wrong With You People?” How can it that almost nobody liked Austen’s take on X-Men, but the title still sold 5 times more copies than your average issue of Captain Marvel? No matter what reason you give, it makes almost no sense at all. If a particular writer is drawing so much scorn for his work, he should not be selling more copies of a comic than someone who is doing outstanding work on another title. At lease, in a perfect world, that is how it would go.

So then, I hear of rumors like the upcoming cancellation of She-Hulk. Is it going to happen? I really don’t know, I haven’t seen anything solid on the matter, but there is a buzz, and it is because of low sales. It is a frustrating and incomprehensible thing to watch happen, especially when you know that books like She-Hulk are so far superior to some of the books that sell over 50,000 copies a month.

So, I decided to bump my schedule a little bit and give some attention to She-Hulk. It really is one of the cleverest books on the market right now, one I think you should all be reading.

Cast of Characters

She-Hulk lived a charmed life, partying it up in the Avengers mansion, dating the sexiest men in the world, working as a lawyer by day and saving the world the rest of the time – things couldn’t be better. Until everything fell apart. She was fired from her job after a case she won was successfully overturned as a mistrial because the jury was unfairly influenced after She-Hulk saved their lives, and she was tossed out of the Avengers mansion because of her lifestyle and her abuse of Avengers privileges, things couldn’t look worse. Then she was given a new opportunity, and hired by Goodman, Lieber, Kurtzberg, & Holliway to work in their new superhuman law department. The catch? She was to be hired as Jennifer Walters, not the larger than life She-Hulk. She accepted, moved out of the Avengers Mansion, and began her new career.

Holden Holliway, senior partner of GLK&H, was the one who brought Jen over to the firm, and has high hopes for her, and her contributions to their new focus. The other two attorneys working with Jen are named Mallory Book, the former beauty pageant winner who is called by some “The face who never lost a case,” and Augustus “Pug” Pugliese, a former bouncer at a nightclub. Book looks down on Jen Walters, distaining her and viewing She-Hulk as little more than someone who can become tall enough to reach the top shelf and lift heavy objects when needed, while Pug rather likes Jen Walters herself, but doesn’t much like her glitzy alter ego, relating much better to the more human Walters.

Thoughts

This series is still very young, and has a great deal of potential ground left to cover. It is a clever concept – and the cases used so far in the story have been most entertaining. So far, we have seen everything from Danger Man, an ordinary worker who was doused with chemicals who sued his company for ruining his life by giving him super powers (his origin scene is a crack-up), all the way up to Spider-Man, who sued J. Jonah Jameson for libel. The different cases Jen works on gives this title a really fun feel, and provides more than enough comic relief to keep any reader happy.

But She-Hulk is about more than the humor. There is a lot going on in terms of character development here, something that can’t be said for a lot of comedy books. The life changes that She-Hulk goes through make for some of the best storylines – dealing with being tossed out of the Avengers Mansion (probably for the best, considering…), being forced to interact on the job as Jen Walters (feeling weak and insecure in that form), and beginning to balance two separate lives – one as a heroine and one as an attorney, something she really never had to deal with before as her identity is public. When I first heard about this title, I honestly didn’t know what to expect, but I was afraid that it would be more of an action title. Thankfully, it is a good character story with the occasional humor and a large dose of “superhuman courtroom action.” There is a lot to offer in She-Hulk to be sure, and there will certainly be something here to appeal to almost any reader.

The cameos in this comic are wide-ranging and something I tend to look forward to. You get everything from Spider-Man himself to more obscure Marvel Universe characters like the Awesome Android – Slott has a wide range of options here, the nature of this title allows for virtually any character to make an appearance. So far, the cameos have been far from cheesy and have added a great deal to the fun-factor of this title.

Another interesting quirk in this title is its use of comics themselves. In She-Hulk’s world, Marvel Comics (printed before 2002) are “legal documents” which are admissible in court. This is explained by the fact that they bear the seal of the Comics Code of America, a Federal Agency. Therefore, the comics are legal documents. Silly, to be sure, but it adds just one more bit of humor to the book.

The art is pretty standard, and nothing really stands out so much that I am qualified to discuss it. We are being spoiled at the moment, Paul Pelletier did a guest stint on the title with issue 5, and I never have cause to balk at his work. Juan Bobillo is the title’s usual artist, and he will be returning to the book soon. He doesn’t have as sharp a style as Pelletier, but his work isn’t bad – he hasn’t given me much cause to complain about the art since the beginning of the title. As usual, though, I am more of a story guy, and the art does its job well enough, so I have no cause for complaint.

Don’t Take My Word For It

“I’ve been a fan of She-Hulk since the Byrne era, so I was a little skeptical of this title, but Dan Slott is winning me over. The book is very funny — although it’s a completely different kind of humor than Byrne did. Plus it’s a clever concept that will give Slott an opportunity to play with a lot of Marvel continuity, especially good at a time when most books seem to abandon continuity altogether. I’m really enjoying this title.” – Blake Petit, author and writer of Everything But Imaginary

Bottom Line

She-Hulk is yet another example of a great comic put out by one of the big two publishers that gets far overshadowed by other, substandard comics that for some reason continue to rake in the sales I don’t really know if the cancellation rumors are true, but She-Hulk sits right in that area where its sales figures are low enough that Marvel might consider the axe. And that would be a crying shame.

It is tough for people to break out of their purchasing habits, I understand this, and I am not totally immune to it myself. A lot of the reasons we buy comics is that we are fans of particular characters. Many comic readers couldn’t care less who is writing or drawing a book, they are more interested in the character themselves. They aren’t out to read a well-written story, per se, they are just interested in what is happening to Wolverine, or who the X-Men are fighting now. But if you are in-tune enough with the art form itself to complain about the writing talents of a particular scribe, I think you owe it to yourself to put your money where your mouth is. Well written titles like this one should not suffer at the expense of books that you think are poor in quality, and it is up to you, the consumer, to support titles like this one with your hard earned money.

The next issue of She-Hulk, #7, is due out next week on September 7th. The first trade should hit shelves in November if you are looking to get caught up on back issues!

Credit Where Credit is Due is

She-Hulk

Written by Dan Slott,
Drawn by Juan Bobillo, with
Inks by Marcelo Sosa,
Colored by Chris Chuckry,
Letters by VC’s Dave Sharpe,
Edited by Tom Brevoort, and
Published by Marvel Comics.

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