Friday, September 14, 2012

The Sensational She-Hulk 45: John Byrne Pioneers Dave Sim's glamourpuss

After finishing his epic Cerebus comic series, creator Dave Sim has engaged in a few other projects.  One of them is glamourpuss which mainly gives Sim the excuse to draw beautiful women in pin-up poses and have them say weird things in the word balloons.  A couple of decades earlier, Byrne did the same thing in this issue of She-Hulk (he was making fun of how the hot artists of the time mainly just drew characters in cool poses rather than tell stories visually).  His is even weirder since he also continues to run the regular space story (perhaps Byrne realized it was awful too) around the pin-ups, all of She-Hulk, of course, until the editor "makes him" stop about halfway through the story.  Yes, it's very weird, but it makes for a fun issue of the comic after a few duds.  Here are some other random thoughts on this issue:

*When an alien technology goes astray, She-Hulk switches bodies with Weezi, which will become a storyline for the next few issues.  The series often explored issues of female body image and gender roles in an interesting way.  Riot Grrrl and third wave feminism was breaking out at the time though, so understandably criticism of She-Hulk wasn't a high priority for feminist scholars, and still remains underexplored.  In fact, this might be as good as it gets, folks.

*Razorback and Rocket Raccoon remain petrified and unused.  Why Byrne left that kind of comedy gold on the shelf is puzzling.  He could have had Razorback try to wear a coonskin cap or something equally dumb, but nope, nothing.  Gas was running low in Byrne's She-Hulk tank.

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