Two of She-Hulk's Recent Cameos

[informationgeek]

I don't know what Marvel is playing at with this new approach to She-Hulk. I really don't understand.



The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl #41...










And from Jessica Jones #3...









Why is She-Hulk just a dumb, fan fiction parody of the Hulk at this point? What happened to all the charm, intelligence, lawyering, uniqueness? Why is her only traits just being an idiot or Thor's girlfriend? Thompson and North's takes were just not that good, but the problem all harkens back to Aaron's take on Avengers with Jen. It just hasn't been good and so far, it's been kind of regressive in areas.

Comments

[crabby_lioness]

There's really no excuse for this.

[mazway_75]

The entire damn POINT of the character was that she wasn't like the Hulk. That she was smart and effective and loved being this green-skinned powerhouse. This is...I just don't get it.

[remial]

well, if the current Hulk is pretty goddamn smart (according to Banner, smarter than he is) and She Hulk is not like the Hulk, that could be why she isn't as smart as she once was.

Personally I liked it when she knew when the 4th wall was there. SHE was subtle about it, Deadpool is as subtle as a brick to the face.

[thehood]

Except she was like this when she was first introduced, so i wouldn't say it's "the entire point". She-Hulk has gone through several changes over the years, just like her cousin Bruce.

[flint_marko]

She actually wasn't. She was more serious and angry, but she was still intelligent and capable of speaking normally. She hasn't gone through as many changes/personalities as the Hulk has.

[thehood]

But she has still gone through more than few changes herself, she has lost controlled, the Grey She-hulk from the 90s, the recent Grey She-hulk with the grey scars, the few times she gotten so angry she goes savage.

And Hulk spoke spoken normally when he was first introduced too. It's the current version we are seeing in Immortal Hulk.

[flint_marko]

A lot of those changes were basically blips, and not actual lasting changes to the status quo. Like the Grey She-Hulk from the 1990s only lasted an issue. Up until CWII, she's had one persona for most of her history.

It's not really comparable to Bruce's Hulk, whose had numerous personas.

We've had the Grey Hulk/Joe Fixit, the Savage Hulk, the Professor/Merged Hulk, the Green Scar, Doc Green, etc. I also think the Immortal Hulk is a new persona, and not the original Grey Hulk.

https://marvel.fandom.com/wiki/Bruce_Banner_(Earth-616)#Incarnations

[lordultimus]

I think this is one of those things that creators love and fans hate.

[joetuss]

I'm pretty sure the creators love it, because they know we hate it.

[tcampbell1000]

It is very much not fair to pin this on Kelly and Ryan.

IIRC, Jason Aaron pushed to go with this version of She-Hulk in Avengers, and since Avengers is the flagship comic and She-Hulk doesn't currently have one of her own, he got to make that call... even though a month or two earlier, we'd just finished a big story where the sassy, smart, emotionally healthy Jen had been restored. It might've been editorial and not Aaron, but it certainly started in Avengers.

Everyone else (whether they like this idea or not) is just following suit and trying to be consistent with the current status quo. I'd do the same in their place, even if I'm not particularly taken with this version of the character either.

[informationgeek]

Oh I know that and I'm not fully blaming them for this. It's just it feels these cameos were very aggressively bad, even more exaggerated than what is going on in Avengers.

I do feel Avengers is the big problem for this current state, but with this post, I just wanted to show how bad it has gotten for the character beyond just the team book.

[thehood]

It seems like you are blaming them since you are singling them out and ignoring her other recent Cameos.

And again, speech aside, she wasn't all that dumb in Squirrel Girl.

It really comes off like you are blaming them for what Aaron is doing.

[informationgeek]

You're right. It does come off hostile and immature. As such, I have updated the text. I gotta be better about this.

[beyondthefringe]

And of course everyone is always a little exaggerated in Squirrel Girl anyway, when they guest-star. Just look at how this comic treats Spider-Man, Iron Man, Galactus, or Kraven. I wouldn't take anyone's depiction in Squirrel Girl as strictly 100% canonical, until it's referenced again in the MU proper.

[thehood]

In fact, other books tend to ignore how nice Kraven's portrayed in this book.

[lordultimus]

They could just not use the character. It's not like in, say, Dead Man Logan, where the scenario of "Logan fights the Avengers" depends on Jen like this here. Kelly and Ryan could have just not used her, or used different characters. And the jokes written are specifically for the dumb Hulk version (though I guess the Jessica Jones stuff might be a "wanted to write Jen but would only have worked if she was green so was stuck with this").

(Not trying to blame Kelly and Ryan for this, just pointing out that it's not like it looks like they hold the same dislike for this that fans do.)

[thehood]

Except they kinda did, especially Ryan who wanted to write Thor being on a date, which would need to include the person he's currently dating.

[akodo_rokku]

Honestly I feel like North just liked the idea of the currently more Hulky She-Hulk being good at logic puzzles.

[thehood]

Exactly, it's ridiculous to blame Kelly and Ryan for this. Especially since Jen is like this whenever she makes a guest appearance recently.

Like in Immortal Hulk, which isn't mentioned here.

And Squirrel Girl is a comedic book, so i don't see the issue with that one.

[mastermahan]

Yeah, Squirrel Girl is a comedy that happily ignores continuity. Hell, "Squirrel Girl Beats Up The Marvel Universe" had Classic Dumb Hulk, and good luck fitting that into continuity.

Mind, this is absolutely a terrible take on She-Hulk, and it's not like I'm a purist. I liked the gray version with the glowing scars.

[bruinsfan]

I kind of wish Jen had reverted back to comedic title mode here and been all "Oh thank God, a continuity-agnostic title! Do you have any idea how frustrating it is to speak in third person monosyllable all the time? Er, the editors aren't watching us closely here, right?"

[thehood]

And the Gray She-Hulk with the Green Scars could talk in full sentences, so i still don't understand why Aaron made her talk like the Savage Hulk.

[thehood]

She didn't seem all that dumb in the Squirrel Girl panels. It doesn't seem like she did badly with the Quizzlers logic puzzles.

Unless your issue is with her talking in the third person, which is a different thing.

And it's not Kelly and Ryan's fault, she's talking in the third person in Aaron's Avengers. You're also ignoring her appearance in Immortal Hulk.

[informationgeek]

I'm not ignoring the Immortal Hulk appearance. I'm well aware that one. It's good. Very good and interesting, but it feels so strangely out of place with every other cameo that Jen has made. It's almost as if happened during Tamaki's run timeline-wise if anything.

I didn't include it because I wanted to focus on these two particular cameos, because I felt they were the worse. I'll update the title of the post to better reflect my intentions. My apologies.

[akodo_rokku]

Immortal Hulk is supposed to be a horror book. I think if you take that view of it her appearance there makes more sense.

[thehood]

Ok, but the Squirrel Girl one still seems like an odd choice to use as an example since it's a comedy book and most guests are basically parodies of themselves.

[alicemacher]

Even that Jessica Jones excerpt, on its own, doesn't suggest to me a low-intelligence Jen, so much as... maybe a Jen with expressive aphasia or some other neurological disorder that doesn't affect intelligence but prevents her from speaking normally. Maybe. A lot would depend on whether she was in She-Hulk mode when she purchased the gift, which, notice, Jen's daughter seems to love. Even apart from that, some of her facial expressions (especially in the "No. Not really. Don't ruin!" panel) are far more subtle than, for example, the Hulk's are when he's of low intelligence.

[an_idol_mind]

The childlike Hulk worked well in the 1970s because he was written with a certain degree of emotional intelligence despite his speech patterns. For some reason, writers get hung up on the Hulk-speak these days and ignore the other subtleties of the character. It's one of the reasons why I like having an intelligent Hulk around, and the reason I hope Jen gets her voice back in the future.

[trooper924]

Speaking as someone who never particularly cared for the old She-Hulk, I'm okay with this.

Admittedly, I'm mostly just glad that they're not drawing her like a big green supermodel (for now).

[alliterator]

Jen isn't dumb in either one of these appearances. She's just...non-verbal. And I understand why the writers did it: they have to follow Jason Aaron's lead, even if it doesn't make any sense.

In any case, they do a lot more with Jen than Aaron is doing -- North's Jen is smart enough to figure out it's Peter Parker who is kidnapped and Thompson's Jen seems sweet and nice enough to bring a present early, knowing she couldn't come later.

[roxas832]

The version in Jessica Jones almost seems like an act Jen is putting on for Dani.

[jlbarnett]

Option 1. Marvel doesn't know what they're doing

Option 2: Jen's internal She-Hulk is fucking with Jennifer Walters. Now I'm no Hulk expert, but I know on numerous occasions Bruce Banner ends up inside his own head talking to his various Hulk aspects. So I'm figuring Jen has that too.

I don't know her first run, but in the Dan Slott She-Hulk books, Jen was small. Tiny. She was good looking but she wasn't the head turner some superheroines were. Through out that serious she became more comfortable being Jen and all. and in later series she was depicted more typically for superheroes. There was one issue where she, Spider-woman and Captain Marvel didn't want to just go busting into a place with civilians in it, it was a club, so they went in in clubbing outfits, and she carried herself just like them and didn't look out of place next to them

So my idea is that Jen is tapping more of She-Hulk as Jen and Shulkie is being spiteful in her transformations because of that. Because she feels like Jen is stealing bits of her

[penguinzero]

The thing is, it's been established that Bruce's multiple personalities aren't a side-effect of his Hulk transformations, but instead a result of childhood abuse by his father -- fracturing his psyche was a defense mechanism, similar to real-world Dissociative Identity Disorder. I think it was Peter David who established that in the 90s, building on work done by Bill Mantlo in the 80s.

Jen's never really had that. She's always been just one person. Instead, any personality differences are the result of Jen feeling like she can come out of her shell as She-Hulk -- it turns out being super-strong, nigh-invulnerable, beautiful, and taller than most men can give a timid person a lot of confidence. I honestly think that'd be an interesting angle to approach things from, in this #MeToo-era world -- show how threatening the world can be for women, and how much caution they have to take in just doing the things men take for granted, and how liberating it is when you don't have to be careful any more -- but apparently the current writers prefer leaving behind Jen's classic themes to bring her closer to Bruce's, for no strong reason I've yet seen.

[his_spiffynesss]

This is all part of the mess of Civil War II, Thanos beat Jen into a coma, and when she finally came out of it, her trauma took the form of the gray, over muscled, rage filled form. Even when the series ended with Jen back in control and her traditional green form (though much more muscled) she was showing her intelligence. But yeah that got ignored in the Avengers relaunch and she's been made into the gamma bimbo.

[silverzeo]

.... would it be too farfecth if it turns out the next offcial Marvel/DC crossover team up will be with this Jen and Ric Grayson?