REVIEW: THE IMMORTAL SHE-HULK #1

THE IMMORTAL SHE-HULK #1

2.5 out of 5
I’ve been a long-time fan of She-Hulk and especially Jennifer Walters. I say that because it’s her personality that comes through She-Hulk that makes her endearing. This is a complete dichotomy to Bruce Banner’s Hulk, which is one of the reasons I loved it. She would even go to court as She-Hulk. Visually this was very amusing and original.
Several years ago, her book was cancelled – which saddened me. Then a new writer took over and altered the chemistry of the book, which saddened me further. So, I stopped collecting the title all together.
With a new number one, I deciding to pick it up once again, and unfortunately, it hasn’t gotten any better. Some people may like that fact that her appearance is no longer feminine and speaks broken, nonsensical language, but not me. When what I found charming about the character has been stripped away, there isn’t much left for me to like.
The issue begins with a flashback to She-Hulk’s origin, which gave me hope that the writer was trying to reboot the character back to her roots. However, the following page destroyed all hope I had garnered. She no longer has the feminine body and continues to speak in the “Hulk Smash” broken English, but she says her mind is fully lucid, which is very strange. I’m not sure I buy into any of it. Also, her costume alters as she changes back to Jennifer Walters, which she can do at will. Logistically, of course, this makes no sense.
Then she shares beers with Wolverine, and they discuss resurrection. Jennifer fears that she’s no longer the same person she was. Then she has some kind of vision of her Uncle Brian, who is apparently really evil. Then she works out with Thor and recounts her battle with the plant aliens from Empyre and has a vision of the Leader, who looks a lot different than I remember him looking. I like the Leader as a villain. Whenever it’s a brains versus brawn battle, it’s pretty interesting like Luthor vs. Superman.
This issue sets some stuff up, but it’s more of a recount of older events and again, the character isn’t very interesting to me. It’s not a bad issue, but it doesn’t go anywhere on its own. It’s more of filler issue. If you like the new direction, then the art is pretty decent. As for me, I’ll wait for them to put her back how she was. There is hope for that. I saw a preview of Nexus War: Thor. In the advance pages, Thor looks different, but She-Hulk looks like she’s back to her original look.

About Author

Frank Zanca

…began working in local television at the age of 22 when he became a Promotional Producer for Channel 9, the Orlando ABC affiliate. During this time he wrote and produced thirty-second spots for the newscast and syndicated shows such as Geraldo and Sally Jesse Raphael. Later he worked as a Production Assistant on NBC’s Gonzo Games and Dick Clark’s Sea World Summer Spectacular. Frank created and wrote his first comic book, which was distributed internationally under the name of Shadow Raven. For a number of years, Frank worked in Sales and then moved into Marketing where he became CFO and later President of two Independent marketing firms that were later sold for several million dollars. Recently Frank helped design Shadow Raven: the Combat Card Game, which was distributed internationally and has written the Shadow Raven novel (to be released next year). Frank is currently producing Shadow Raven: Fading Thoughts, a thirty-minute pilot, which is designed to become a feature film or television series.

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