She-Hulk

• 1. Introduction

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  She-Hulk first appeared in November 1979, in the first issue of The Savage She-Hulk from Marvel Comics. Her name is Jennifer Susan Walters, and she is a lawyer. When she changes, her skin turns green and her body grows enormous. Even so, she keeps her wit and her composure. In 2022 she reached live action in the Disney+ series She-Hulk: Attorney at Law, with Tatiana Maslany in the title role.

  Peter David, a writer who once scripted her own series, made a bold claim about her: "She-Hulk has the potential to be our Wonder Woman." That is a lot to ask of a character who began life as a business precaution. This documentary asks why Marvel really created her and what set her apart from the Hulk. It asks how a hero ended up speaking straight to her readers. And it asks what it means to be a superhuman whose real battlefield is the courtroom.

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• 2. Insurance Policy

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  The Incredible Hulk, which aired from 1977 to 1982, and The Bionic Woman were both made by Universal Television. That combination worried Marvel. The producer Kenneth Johnson had already given The Six Million Dollar Man a female counterpart. Marvel feared the Hulk series would suddenly do the same. So the company published its own green heroine first. If a similar character ever turned up on screen, Marvel would already hold the rights.

  Stan Lee created her but wrote only the first issue. She turned out to be his final new creation for Marvel until he came back to comics with Ravage 2099 in 1992.

  Johnson later explained what he had planned for the show's fifth season. Banner's sister would fall ill with a disease that only a sibling's blood could cure. The cure would turn her into a "woman Hulk who was crazy and scary and dangerous". It never happened. Six episodes into that season, a new boss at CBS cancelled the show with immediate effect. The run ended at episode seven.

  After the first issue, David Anthony Kraft did the writing and Mike Vosburg the penciling, with Frank Springer inking most issues. Vosburg later noted that both he and Springer drew beautiful women, yet "the She-Hulk was never overly attractive." The series ended with issue 25 in March 1982.

  After that, she drifted through other heroes' books. In Avengers issue 221, dated July 1982, she became a member of that team. Her most dependable running gag in those early guest spots was her terrible luck with cars.

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• 3. Gamma Blood

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  Sheriff William Morris Walters of Los Angeles County had a small and somewhat shy daughter named Jennifer. Her mother, Elaine, whose maiden name was Banner, was killed in a car accident when Jennifer was 17. Later, operatives working for the crime boss Nicholas Trask shot Jennifer. Trask had a history with her father. The shooting happened on the very day her cousin Bruce Banner visited to tell her he had become the Hulk.

  No other donor shared her blood type, so Banner gave his own. His gamma-irradiated blood, mixed with the adrenaline of fear, changed her. When the mobsters came to the hospital to kill her, she became the green-skinned She-Hulk. She then went after Trask, who died when the earth-boring machine he rode failed and dropped him into the planet's molten core.

  Her new body was a milder version of her cousin's. She looked less monstrous and more Amazonian. Unlike Banner, she kept her personality, most of her intelligence and her emotional control. Her height did not make her lighter, either, since her body stayed as dense as it had been. Anger still made her stronger. At first, anger also triggered the change itself.

  Control arrived when Michael Morbius cured her of a deadly blood illness. Jennifer, a criminal defense lawyer, later defended Morbius at his trial for serial murder. She got the conviction reduced to involuntary manslaughter, citing his medical condition. In time she chose to stay in her She-Hulk form for good. It made her a better lawyer, she felt, and gave her an assertiveness she lacked as a human. Later, she stopped a radiation leak aboard a downed S.H.I.E.L.D. Helicarrier and could no longer change back at all. Much later, Leonard Samson and Reed Richards revealed that the block was entirely in her mind.

  Her strength responds to effort. After the Champion of the Universe defeated her, she trained for several months in her human form. Her She-Hulk body amplified the gains, and she beat him soundly in a rematch. She can absorb radiation to grow stronger. She once soaked up the wild energy of the new Starbrand. A skewering by the Wendigo healed within minutes. Captain America and Gamora trained her in combat. She once knocked the Abomination senseless with strikes to nerve clusters, after first distracting him.

  No single costume defines her, unlike Superman's tights. Readers recognize her by her size, her green skin and her long hair, dark green and almost black. In her first appearances she wore a ragged white blouse that tore as she grew. Asked about those clothes in the second series, Jennifer joked that they carry the label of the Comics Code. The Code would get mocked again.

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• 4. Breaking the Page

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  In 1989, John Byrne launched The Sensational She-Hulk, and its heroine knew she was in a comic book. Byrne wrote and drew issues 1-8, 31-46 and 48-50. His stories satirized comics themselves. Visually, she might tear the page or stride across a page of advertisements to reach a villain's control center.

  She argued with Byrne, her writer, and appealed to the book's editor, Renée Witterstaetter. Issue 50, Byrne's last, ended with Witterstaetter locking him in a storage closet, bound and gagged. She and Jen then went looking for the series' next writer. During her stint with the Heroes for Hire, she even "fired" the book's narrator for losing the plot. She became the first major Marvel character to do this often, ahead of the better-known Deadpool.

  The series also poked at censorship. Issue 34 references a 1991 Vanity Fair cover that showed the actress Demi Moore pregnant and unclothed. She-Hulk's version holds a green beach ball. In issue 40, she jumps rope in the nude, with blur lines covering her. The cover shows her hiding behind a form stamped with the words "Approved … Comics Code".

  Steve Gerber, Simon Furman and Peter David also wrote for the series. It reached issue 60 in February 1994. That made it the longest-running solo title for any Marvel superheroine at the time.

  Dan Slott's later series treated the habit with a wink. In the third issue of its second volume, billed as issue 100, a researcher named Stu Cicero asks whether she can really do such things. She answers, "No. I can't". Yet the panel is drawn at an angle that suggests she is looking out at the reader. Official Marvel handbooks still list her page-crossing as an ability, and explain that she simply plays it down around other characters.

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• 5. Superhuman Law

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  Louise "Weezie" Grant Mason had once been a Golden Age superheroine called the Blonde Phantom. She-Hulk met her in New York after she became an assistant district attorney under Blake Tower. Later, Jennifer discovered that Mason had tricked Tower into giving her a job. Mason wanted to star in a comic book again and so avoid dying of old age.

  Jennifer's real legal home became the New York firm Goodman, Lieber, Kurtzberg and Holliway. The firm offered her a partnership and planned a "Superhuman Law" division. She accepted, agreeing to stay in her human form while practicing. Her training was real, too. She studied at the UCLA School of Law, where she joined the Order of the Coif, a society for top legal scholars.

  Slott's series built jokes on this foundation. In that universe, comics published before 2001 carried the seal of a federal Comics Code agency. That made them evidence that courts would accept in superhuman cases.

  In the 2006 "Civil War" storyline, she registered under the Superhuman Registration Act, supported Tony Stark and advised clients on both sides. She also agreed to sue Peter Parker for fraud for her father-in-law, J. Jonah Jameson. Her secret aim was to tie the suit up in court indefinitely. She was also the lawyer for Speedball.

  Her cases reflect her ideals. She has defended minorities, the mentally ill, victims of unethical corporations and criminals who lacked a proper defense. She also believes in the need for law and order, and that tension sometimes pulls her apart.

  Her career has had steep falls. After she defended a client named Arthur Moore, he gloated that he was guilty and showed her pictures of his crimes. Her rage returned, and she revealed privileged information. The result was disbarment. Only later did she learn that Moore was innocent and the pictures were false.

  Her universe once faced an odder judge. The Living Tribunal asked her to weigh it against a newer, "ultimate" one, and hers won.

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• 6. Losing Control

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  Issue 15 of The Sensational She-Hulk brought a grey version of Jennifer that appeared only at night. This version had a childlike mind, spoke in the third person and called Jennifer "puny Jennifer". She was gone by the next issue, and the green returned in issue 17. It was an early sign that the Hulk's temper never fully left her.

  The most dramatic loss of control came when her teammate Jack of Hearts, who absorbs radiation, kept exposing her to it. Fearing she would hurt her friends, Jennifer fled to Bone, a town in Idaho. The anxiety of being found made her change, and she damaged much of the town. Bruce Banner arrived and failed to reason with her. The two fought, and the Hulk was blamed for the wreckage. Jack eventually returned the radiation to her. She later worked as a volunteer helping to repair the town. A gamma-charger from Leonard Samson gave her full control for what she called "the time being".

  During "World War Hulk" in 2007, she faced her cousin in the street. The Hulk warned her to leave, but she stayed and punched him in the face. He smashed her into the ground, leaving a crater. All she could say was "God help us all."

  The deepest wound came in 2016. During "Civil War II", the villain Thanos mortally wounded her, and her cousin Bruce Banner was killed. Her series Hulk began in December 2016 and showed how she dealt with that trauma. She was now colored grey, like her cousin's "Joe Fixit" persona, and the tone had darkened from her earlier lighthearted adventures. She lost control during a fight with a baker named Oliver, who had turned into a monstrous Hulk on camera, and almost killed him. The Hellcat calmed her down.

  Healing came from a self-help author, Florida Mayer. Mayer used a special pill to send Jennifer into her own subconscious, where she faced illusions of Thanos and Banner. Waking, Jennifer returned to her green form. The title ended with its 163rd issue in March 2018.

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• 7. Family and Friends

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  After his wife's death, Sheriff Walters hovered over Jennifer, tried to control her and judged her choices. Jennifer wanted both independence from him and his approval. She saw her choice to become a defense attorney as a tribute to him. He took it as a rejection of what he stood for.

  Being She-Hulk let Jennifer express feelings she was otherwise uncomfortable showing. Her childhood friend Zapper became her romantic partner, but the relationship fell apart. She insisted on staying green, and Zapper felt she was rejecting her true self.

  Friendship shaped her more than romance did. Janet van Dyne, the Wasp, became a fast friend during her Avengers days and urged her toward a freer way of living. When the Wrecking Crew temporarily killed the Wasp in the first Secret War, She-Hulk stormed off to avenge her. She nearly fell victim herself. Her best friend is Patsy Walker. At a Christmas party described in the 2015 Gwenpool Special, dozens of superhumans showed up for her.

  Secret Wars also sparked her rivalry with the newly empowered Titania. They later made peace, though they agreed to remain regular sparring partners under lawful conditions.

  Her love life has been lively and often comic. She was briefly engaged to Wyatt Wingfoot, whom she met during her Fantastic Four years. She eloped in Las Vegas with John Jameson, whom she met when he was the Man-Wolf. The marriage was annulled. Augustus "Pug" Pugliese, her colleague, holds a crush on her that he never speaks aloud. She hesitated to date Power Man because he was an "ex-con", but they became friends. She dreamed about Hercules for years. After he jovially smacked her bottom, she sent him through a brick wall.

  Her most unusual romance is with Jack of Hearts. His ability to drain energy means they must keep the relationship almost entirely non-physical, built on love and trust.

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• 8. Cancellations and Praise

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  Marvel launched a new She-Hulk title in May 2004, as part of a wave of six new books. Critics liked it, but the cluster launch hurt its sales. The series closed with issue 12, and Marvel promised a relaunch eight months later. The story itself alludes to the gap. With the same creative team of Dan Slott and Juan Bobillo, the book returned in October 2005. Its third issue was marketed as the hundredth She-Hulk comic. Reprints of Byrne's and Buscema's first issues stood in for new artwork from them.

  Slott wrote 33 solo issues, more than anyone else, and his last was issue 21 of the relaunch. Peter David took over with issue 22. Marvel announced that issue 38, dated February 2009, would be the last. David wrote on his blog that readers were confused when Jeph Loeb's Hulk series portrayed her differently. "I didn't even know she WAS going to be in Hulk," he said.

  She kept returning. She appeared in FF in November 2012. In 2014, Charles Soule and Javier Pulido launched a series that put her in court against Matt Murdock, and it ended after 12 issues. In 2022, Rainbow Rowell and Rogê Antônio brought back the lighthearted tone and her law practice. That run ended in 2024 after 25 issues across two volumes.

  Writers have praised her. Jenna Anderson of ComicBook.com wrote that Byrne's version is often seen as the most iconic. Alyssa Rosenberg of The Washington Post called her a "feminist superhero" and said she shows how wonderful it would be not to censor yourself. Chris Arrant of Newsarama ranked her 8th in their list of the best Marvel characters of all time. He wrote that "She-Hulk isn't a cliché or an archetype".

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