Jennifer Walters has a problem. Her life hasn’t been the same since she got injured and needed an emergency blood transfusion from her cousin, Bruce Banner, the Incredible Hulk. It saved her life, but it also changed her. Jen can transform into her own Hulk form, affectionately called the She-Hulk. But unlike her cousin, who constantly struggles against the beast within, Jennifer’s conscious mind remains in full control of her Hulk form. And on the surface, this seems like a great setup. She’s an amazonian superhero, exuding strength and confidence, in complete control…all the positives of being a Hulk, with none of the negatives. At least on the surface.
Jennifer’s biggest struggle is still against herself. No matter how she tries to dress it up or ignore it, there’s no getting away from the fact that she can turn into someone who she truly doesn’t want to be, someone who she hates identifying herself as and who’s face she never wants to see in the mirror. And that person…is named Jennifer Walters.
Jennifer’s always been a timid bookworm. She spent her entire college career hold up in a dark corner, studying, to the point that most of her class only saw her for the first time at the graduation ceremony. She was intensely focused on being at the top of her class, being a success. And at that point in her life, being successful meant being a lawyer and working at a prestigious law firm. It meant studying, hard work, and sacrifice. But then She-Hulk happened.
All of a sudden, she was everything that “Jennifer” never was, and could never be. She was as popular as she was powerful, getting invited to half of the hottest parties and throwing the other half herself. She was the envy of everyone who saw her. The She-Hulk even maintained a day job as a lawyer, but that always took a back seat to more important matters, like saving the world with the Avengers and living the ultimate power fantasy.
But eventually she partied too hard, and her rockstar lifestyle got her thrown out of the Avengers. She was also fired from her law firm because it became impossible for a jury to avoid being swayed by her status as a world-saving superhero. She was hitting rock bottom, and didn’t know what to do…being She-Hulk had always been the crutch she leaned on to make life better, and now all of a sudden it’s the exact thing making everything fall apart.
That’s when she got the most important job offer of her life. One of the city’s biggest and most widely respected law firms wanted her to join their staff…but only on one condition. They didn’t want She-Hulk, they wanted Jennifer Walters, and only Jennifer Walters.
It was the moment she had worked so hard for her entire academic life, and she couldn’t pass it up, regardless of how much she didn’t want to change back to the form she’d come to think of as being nothing but weak, frail, small, and worst of all…ordinary.
But Jen did it, and the experience was as humbling as it was enlightening. Exploring legal cases in the Marvel Universe put her in a number of wild situations, all of which she instinctively tried to solve with her She-Hulk powers…but each time, the She-Hulk came up short, and it was Jennifer Walters who had to save the day by doing things she could only do by being a regular person, coming to understand her own value by dropping her guard and appealing to the Humanity in others. It takes her a while, but she comes to learn that the form that makes her powerful isn’t the big green super strong celebrity…it’s the one that’s just an average, caring, intelligent Human being.
The story of Jennifer Walters is one that I believe only becomes more important and relevant as time goes on. It’s the story of someone who can’t believe that they’re actually good enough learning their own worth. It’s about the faces we put on to interact with the world, it’s about reconciling who we are on the inside with the version of ourselves we show to others. It’s about the fact that sometimes we lose perspective on what’s important, and lose sight of what makes us strong. She-Hulk is an incredible metaphor that can speak to so many topics related to the identity and value of a person, while also being an entertaining action comedy. Even if the stories never address a particular topic directly, the groundwork is there for most people to see something of themselves in Jennifer, and the way she interacts with both versions of herself…and I think that’s as important and powerful as a Hulk is strong.
This whole story comes from the first four issues of the 2004 She-Hulk solo series written by Dan Slott and drawn by Juan Bobillo, collected in the trade paperback titled “Single Green Female”. These four issues are the first time I ever saw She-Hulk outside of a team book, where I could see her daily life and get inside her head a little bit…and once I had the chance to get know her as a person, Jennifer Walters very quickly became one of my favorite Marvel characters. Because of that, these issues have always been my preferred take on She-Hulk…not only for the story’s message, but also because this, to me, is the perfect way to visually depict this character. The art manages to be cartoony without being silly. It emphasizes proportion in a way that makes She-Hulk look big and strong without being overly muscular, all while making the difference between She-Hulk and Jennifer Walters utterly staggering, driving home the idea of just how different it must feel to try and live in both of these forms. The reason I cut it off at issue 4 is because both the story and the art abruptly become something closer to what you’d expect from a standard Marvel or DC comic, which itself isn’t a bad thing, it’s just the series returning to a more normal superhero aesthetic. And if there’s one thing Jennifer Walters can tell you with the utmost confidence, it’s that doing things the normal way can be pretty great too.
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