At this point, I'll pretend like I never left and get back to our regularly scheduled programming. For the "back issue diving" portion of Back Issue Diving, I'll be highlighting a few random issues I dug up during my last few shopping trips. Little gems scattered amongst the grains of graphic sand that litter the bins at my local Half-Price Books. The quality is all over the place, the eras from which these comics differ wildly, and the only through line is my enviable ability to still get a little jolt from these funnybooks, especially when I don't *quite* know what I'm getting.
Which brings me to Sensational She-Hulk #29, cover dated July 1991. A peppy corner box avatar of the green gal is nestled above an almost too-hot-for-TV ejaculation gag involving She-Hulk and Spidey. I DID get a kick out of the cover, in case you were wondering. The evidence that I haven't matured a day since age 14 mounts ever higher.
Brawny and brainy, Jennifer Walters a.k.a. She-Hulk has always been a comic crush of mine. She's a headstrong career lady that doesn't take guff and her stories always cut to the underbelly of Marvel's costumed histronics. She also inhabits a different flavor of legal drama than one might find in Marvel's other court-based hero, Daredevil. Where Matt Murdock's adventures play out like John Grisham dramas, She-Hulk usually stars in more comedic Ally McBeal-style workplace stories. Of course, being a comic hero, that doesn't prevent her the occasional diversion into deep space or into a supervillain's nest, at which point the fourth wall usually comes crumbling down.
Yep, before Deadpool made it "cool", She-Hulk used to be the one who look to the camera and take the piss out of whatever contrivance she'd found herself shoehorned into.
"Post-John Byrne and Pre-Dan Slott" is a strange place for Shulkie. The series that had started with Byrne at the helm chugged along with various creative teams taking up the reins. This issue in particular comes to us courtesy of writer Louise Simonson and artists Tom Morgan and James Sanders III. At a glance, this is a very 90's comic with the titular protagonist sporting big, big hair and shoulder pads that demand respect. The colors by Glenis Oliver are bodacious as well, inching toward almost neon hues when the blue-garbed villain of the story gloats and pontificates like a wannabe Dr. Doom. I could also use terms like "rad" and "tubular" to describe portions of the visuals, but I'll refrain.
Sensational She-Hulk #29 is about absurdity. It revels in it. It rolls around in it. Louise Simonson puts She-Hulk in very absurd places, both in the courtroom half of the story and in the high-flying "superheroic" half. Walters, denizen of the super hero community and card carrying member of the Avengers, finds herself struggling to dispove the existence of aliens in a court case and dodging the machinations of a shadowy B-list villain who has taken "breaking the fourth wall" to a new extreme. Character cameos and sudden dangers seem to be appearing out of thin air, and all our hero can do is react and brace for the next wave of insanity.
Shulkie is reduced to her skivvies for a portion of the issue, and Simonson's script is self-aware enough to have a little fun with it and the tastelessness of the sequence is nullified by having the protagonist treat her being de-clothed as a pretty common, eye-rolling occurrence.
The villain, Dr. Sanderson, is a classic Marvel megalomaniac crossed with a college professor. His students end up causing more havoc than the good doctor when they get a hold of Sanderson's machinery. As they hurl villains and rogue heroes at She-Hulk, literally plucking them from throughout time and space, they bicker about which version of which character would suit their scenarios better. They come across as bickering nerds, working out their kinks with living action figures.
If there's anything this story lacks, it's genuine menace. She-Hulk, like Deadpool, is often at risk of subverting her world so harshly that the drama is softened. Simonson has plenty of other themes bouncing around, so an honest life-or-death scenario probably would have seemed forced no matter what. Still, beyond the sight gags and dry humor of the courtroom and the ensuing super-battle, there isn't much here. It's a fun and maybe experimental kind of story that almost looks like a prototype for what Dan Slott would do in his run over a decade later.
Issue #29 is actually the third of what is a four-part arc entitled "Beyond the Fourth Wall". I haven't been able to track down the following issue, but the "Next Issue" blurb promises more cameos and confusion thanks to Sanderson's scheming. Pictured for next ish's cover is Hobgoblin, further entrenching this in the time it was published. This particular issue doesn't really shine a light on what the professor is trying to do and why he's messing with Shulkie in the first place, but the general absurdity of every that's happening at once doesn't really allow the reader to pause and ask simple questions like, "What am plot?"
Maybe that's the point of the story. Maybe that's like, the ultimate breaking of the fourth wall, when you like, break the whole story structure, maaan.
Whoa, I just freaked myself out.
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