As I said before, I buy in bulk and I never know what I’m going to get. I’ve had very little exposure to She-Hulk to be honest with you. I read Avengers Disassembled and she’s made a few guest appearances in some of the mutant-line of books I am more familiar with but that’s where my experience with Jennifer Walters (She-Hulk) ends. I have to be honest with you, aside from impossibly perfect & buxom female bodies in tight spandex, I wasn’t expecting much from this book. I was proved wrong.
To begin with I really enjoyed the somewhat unique softer art that is found more often in anime and less often in super hero comics. I normally don’t show pictures of interior artwork, but I just had to share the artwork Vincenzo Cucca & Pasquale Qualano teamed up to provide. They demonstrate perfectly how sometimes you can do less with more.
The dialogue in the story was well thought out and mature, not dumbed-down in the least. She-Hulk actually came off as being an intelligent ex- lawyer, not just another muscle bound hero. She-Hulk’s thought baloons and discourse with fellow Liberators question topics such as morality, religion and even the definition of friendship and the relationship between the protagonists comes across as genuine.
Ok, so the artwork was great and the dialogue was well crafted, but how was the story? Well, the story like all super stories was a bit over the top and like many comic books deals with issues that lie parallel to real world problems. The first half of the book told the story of a fictitious country called Merinmer which is in the middle of civil war with religious basis. When a major earthquake strikes Merinmer the government hordes the supplies and denies aid-workers entry into the country with the explaination that God is settling the civil war with his own hands. This doesn’t sit well with our green heroine so She-Hulk gathers the Lady Liberators which are made up of the Invisible Woman who is part of the Fantastic Four, Thundra who is an amazon style warrior from a planet ruled by women and Valkyrie, an honest to god Valkyrie (pun intended). The Lady Liberators head off to Merinmer to distribute aid to the earthquake victims regardless of who stands in their way. She-Hulk’s best friend an side-kick Jazinda (Jaz for short) also makes the trip but plays a reduced role in the story.
This of course brings up the moral dilema of whether it’s Ok to break international laws and invade a foreign country if innocent lives are at risk. The characters don’t side-step the issues and the possible ramifications of their actions, they deal with them and discuss them and make what they as a group decide what the right thing to do is.
The second story intimately involves Jazinda and her Skrull heritage. Did I mention she was a Skrull? Well she is and you can imagine what kind of problems that might bring about right after Secret Invasion. Compared to the first story it’s kind of weak but at least there’s a decent brawl in it.
So if you read the spoiler you already know that while I really enjoyed the Merinmer story, Jazinda’s tale was pretty weak. They even swapped out artists in between the stoires and while art isn’t bad at all in the second story, it just isn’t up to par with the first half of the book. So there you have it, my first She-Hulk book and it gets mixed reviews.
Story | |
Artwork | |
Value | |
Can It Stand Alone | |
Cool Factor | |
Average |