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There’s this weird thing with superheroes that goes right into this discussion I had with my brother a couple weeks ago.
We were talking about The Thing from Fantastic 4 and how it’s always, “My god, I’m a MONSTER! A hideous rock man for whom it’s hard to feel feelings! Why did my inner toughness have to be reflected with this outer, orange, boulder-y toughness!?” Or something like that.
My question, though, is would The Thing ever be like, “You know what? Yes. At first, very difficult to come to terms with who and what I am now. However, looking back over the last decade, I’ve had a billion amazing space adventures that I wouldn’t have been able to partake in if I’d been a soft, pink, fleshy thing. Also, I thought I was Blackbeard once. Not my proudest moment.”
My question is, wouldn’t it be worthwhile to be The Thing, abandoning your physical humanity, in order to have a range of possibilities and experiences unavailable to everyone else?
Of course, this conversation devolved into…uh, talk of how one might round the bases with a partner if you were made of orange rock. Which I maintain is a silly reason to turn down intergalactic adventure, but my brother is a more passionate man than I.
Anyhoo, it’s sort of weird to me that She-Hulk sort of wants to be a normal lawyer, but also really seems to enjoy smashing Doombots. Which I accidentally misspelled as “Doomboys” just then and imagined as ripped, shirtless dudes with Dr. Doom heads. “Get ’em, Doomboys!” The Whitney Houston kicks in and we have a fight on our hands.
I will say, this isn’t my fave.
For starts, the mystery of the assistant and her mystery monkey gets kinda old. I know, it sounds great. But it’s like, we GET IT. She’s got some kind of weird power. Now I just feel like it’s being kept hidden from me for use later as a Deus Ex Monkeyna.
Second, the art in the second half of the book. Woof. I googled the artist’s work, and some of it I like, but this was not his best showing. The colors were kinda ugly, and it was hard to tell what was going on. I was like 90% sure She-Hulk had smashed her ally in a fight, and then turned around and shook his hand like, “Job well done, guy I maybe just smashed because nobody told the artist what’s going on, or maybe I just couldn’t tell who was who.”
The art was to the point that I started skimming dialog just to get through the book. It reminded me a lot of some of the Keith Giffen art that didn’t do a lot for me from the 90’s.
I’m thinking I’ll skip ahead to the Dan Slott She-Hulk.
As for reading this as a lady superhero book for 2015, Year Of the Lady (this REALLY needs a better name, and I’m open to suggestions that don’t contain the word “chick” or “gal”), I guess it was alright. Great moments with a bad guy in there towards the end (“They’re all Thors”), but for the most part, not enough action for your action junkies, not enough character story for your soap opera fans.”