The Sensational She-Hulk 37: Byrne Gets Paid For Drawing Nothing

Sales had dropped on She-Hulk between creator John Byrne's runs, so he was desperately trying to goose sales with crass covers.  This time around, it's three then-red-hot characters on the cover.  Of course, as She-Hulk notes at the bottom of the scrunched up cover, the three characters (Wolverine, The Punisher, and Spider-Man) do not appear inside.  What does appear inside are blank pages.  How did Byrne get away with this stuff?  Here are some random thoughts on this issue:

*After last issue's new corner illustration of She-Hulk with Santa Claus, Byrne reverts to his old She-Hulk corner illustration (of course, it's scrunched up along with the She-Hulk title logo).

*The silly villain this issue is the Stan Lee and Jack Kirby creation The Living Eraser, which is how Byrne is able to justify storywise having three blank pages in the story.  He pulled this trick before in an issue of Alpha Flight which involved a fight in a snowstorm, which She-Hulk references in the issue.  Given Byrne's heavy workload (he was usually writing and drawing at least two books a month), it's understandable that he would occasionally fall behind schedule.  Perhaps this is one of his clever ways of catching up.  The jig is up however when She-Hulk smashes through another blank page and demands he stop before her book gets canceled.

*Byrne finds yet another clever way of running the credits, this time by having She-Hulk break a balloon with confetti inside.

*Sales were bad.  From 300,000 or so copies sold monthly during his earlier run, Byrne's latest run was only averaging 50,000 or so.  In fact, sales upon Byrne's return had only bumped up by 5,000 copies.  Despite being one of the most interesting comics Marvel was publishing at the time, the book was struggling.  One bright sign though was the publication of a trade paperback collecting Byrne's earlier She-Hulk run.  Trades weren't supercommon then, so the collection was a mark of honor.  Alas, it didn't seem to help sales much.

The Sensational She-Hulk 36: Christmas With The She-Hulk

For a holiday issue, She-Hulk and Weezi visit She-Hulk's father in California for Christmas, and, though creator John Byrne provides extra helpings of corn and syrup, it's still a fun issue.  Here are some random thoughts on it:

*The cover features a pencil with "JB" on it.  I could imagine Byrne getting pencils made with his own initials on them.

*The phone numbers on the cover are real phone numbers.  I'm sure that whomever had them back in 1992 appreciated comics fans calling up and asking for She-Hulk.

*Wyatt Wingfoot, a Native American comic book character from The Fantastic Four, who dated She-Hulk when she was in the group, returns to the fold, and She-Hulk's bed (though not explicitly, due to the comics code).  Wyatt has no superpowers, so he is a brave man.  I'm not sure that most men would risk getting crushed to death just to have sex.  Well, maybe, some men wouldn't . . .

*She-Hulk, echoing some readers I'm sure, complains about Byrne starting too many subplots.

*When She-Hulk visits her father (her mother is deceased--hey, at least she has one more parent than Superman, Batman, and Spider-Man), she throws out a bunch of other relatives, claiming that she doesn't want Marvel to turn any more of her cousins into monsters (an occupational hazard for relatives of superheroes).

*The rejuvenated Weezi hits it off with She-Hulk's father, and they start a romance.  Even though Weezi is older than She-Hulk, that's still a creepy plotline, though Byrne plays it off as heartwarming.  How would you like to bring a pal home for the holidays though and then your divorced/widowed parent starts making out with her or him?

*Two minor characters from She-Hulk's first series, Zapper and Richard Rory, show up for dinner.  Byrne gives them both happy endings, by marrying one off and having the other inherit a large amount of money.  I'm surprised he didn't beat up on Richard since he is a Steve Gerber-created character and occasionally was a stand-in for Gerber himself.  Apparently, Byrne did not bear much ill-will towards Gerber for the Byrne-based company man satire, Booster Cogburn, from Gerber's Destroyer Duck.

*The heartwarming ending, where She-Hulk turns back into plain old Jen Walters (due to a present from Santa Claus way back in issue 8) because her father missed the old Jen is less heartwarming when you realize that Dad is basically ashamed of his daughter the freak. We won't psychoanalyze what this suggests about Byrne family holidays here.

The Sensational She-Hulk 35: Marvel Zombies Attack!

The title of this story is "Hail, Hail The Gang's All Dead."  Creator John Byrne certainly knows how to rework a cliche, eh?  This zombie-infested issue continues the story from the previous one where Byrne appears to be satirizing the idea of Marvel Zombies, comics fans who buy crap comics just because they're published by Marvel.  Keep in mind that Byrne is making fun of the company he works for.  Little wonder then that in a couple of years he would leave to work on his own creator-owned material for a smaller company, Dark Horse.  As for the story, the plot pretty much goes:  She-Hulk fights zombies.

Here are some random thoughts on this issue:

*Aside from Garth, Black Talon's personal assistant who would go on to play a similar role for She-Hulk, the zombies whom (that?  With zombies, word choice gets tricky) She-Hulk fights are all deceased characters associated with the X-Men ("The X-Humed").  Byrne appears to resent the fact that crappy X-Men comics are outselling his own stuff.  Former partner Chris Claremont was selling a million copies of X-Men 1, while Byrne was not.  Worse, probably from Byrne's point of view, was that while he could count on 50,000 fans following his work from title to title, younger artists such as Jim Lee and Todd McFarlane would have hundreds of thousands of fans follow them from title to title.  Little wonder then that Byrne pretty much detested Image Comics, which would soon be formed by those same younger artists.  To Byrne's credit, he was right that many of those early Image comics were pretty bad.  Though arguably the younger artists could draw as well as Byrne, none could write as well as him.  Unfortunately for Byrne, writers such as Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman made John Byrne's writing look like Todd McFarlane's writing.  Poor Byrne.  It wasn't the 1980s anymore. 

*Byrne has She-Hulk get ticked off about having zombie dragon goop get on her so she complains to the Comics Code.  For those not familiar with the Code, it was an industry-regulated organization that made sure the publishers who belonged to it followed certain guidelines, and the Code was formed in response to the hysteria in the 1950s that arose after some people claimed that comics were corrupting the youth of America.

*Byrne leaves a loose end in that the zombies who terrorized The Simpsons in a previous issue appear to still be on the loose.  Of course, if one reads the story favoring the Marvel Zombies satirical interpretation, the zombies would still be on the loose, wouldn't they?  That's who is buying all those awful comics instead of the fine John Byrne comics they should be buying.

*Byrne has a funny gag where some of his black art gets jostled to the last page of the book and She-Hulk has to climb around it.  What a wonderfully weird book!       

The Sensational She-Hulk 34: Demi Moore, Eat Your Heart Out!

Thor never has to pose shirtless on his covers, does he?  Alas, poor She-Hulk!  With sales down, creator John Byrne was breaking out the cheesecake to goose sales.  This issue's cover was a parody of the naked and pregnant Demi Moore cover of Vanity Fair.  By the way, that's a beachball, not a tumor.  The story has little to do with the cover beyond it starting on the beach.  It's set in New Orleans and involves zombies, and, uh, hell if I know what's actually going on here.  It's John Byrne letting his id bleed out all over the comics page, and that's kind of fun.  The story is somewhat reminiscent of Wolff and Byrd:  Counselors Of The Macabre, a fun indie comic which features lawyers representing supernatural clients, but it's unlikely Byrne knew of the comic strip, later a comic book, since it was only appearing in a legal newspaper then.  He also seems to be riffing on "Marvel Zombie" which had become a pejorative term for comic readers who only bought Marvel Comics, even when a lot of publishers were putting out better comics.

Here are some random thoughts on this issue:

*The anniversary UPC corner cover art often featured Byrne's work whether it was Captain America's 50th anniversary or The Fantastic Four's 30th, an indication of his popularity with readers at the time.  From what I remember, this art ran on nearly every comic Marvel published at the time.

*The Black Talon is this issue's silly villain.  He's an African-America voodoo dude.  They call him "Black" just in case you didn't notice he was black.  Can you say racial stereotype, boys and girls?  I knew you could.  Don't blame Byrne though.  He's just making fun of this stuff.  Notice that white comics characters don't get called white too often.  White Wolverine.  White Superman.  White Tiger does, but he's actually Puerto-Rican.  White characters can be other colors though.  Check out Green Lantern or Blue Beetle (the original couple of characters, not the Hispanic teenager when DC tried to be multicultural).

*She-Hulk starts answering letters again on the letters page.

*All in all, a fun issue.  It's also really hard to find in the quarter or back issue bin.  When I realized that I had missed a couple of Byrne She-Hulks, most were easy and cheap to find, but not this one.  Presumably, some people collect it because of the parody cover making it scarcer than the other issues.  It's readily available on eBay though, but if you have to spend over $5 to get a 20-year-old comic mailed to you . . . well, I guess that's cheaper than therapy.  But check out your health care insurance plan or government medical program.  Maybe not.

The Sensational She-Hulk 33: She-Hulk Almost Gets Hitched

In this issue, She-Hulk almost gets married to The Mole Man, but, fortunately for all the fanboys panting after her in the letters page, she breaks things off at the last minute. 

Here are some random thoughts on this issue:

*Writer/artist John Byrne appears in person to recap the story early on.  Byrne often seemed to enjoy inserting self-portraits into stories.  He even did this in The Fantastic Four a couple of times and that wasn't a metafictional title as She-Hulk was.  He draws himself well.  From his drawings of himself over the years, I recognized him walking around Mid-Ohio Con in 2002 (he had an "off-duty" sign around his neck so I didn't bother him to scrawl his autograph across Spragg The Living Hill).  Speaking of Mid-Ohio Con, it looks as if She-Hulk creator Stan Lee and former She-Hulk editor Renee Witterstaetter will be at this year's edition in Columbus, Ohio USA.  I won't be though.  Paying $40 to get in the door at a convention to pay more money for comic books gives me the hives.  Sometimes the bargains can make up for the door price, but I'm trying to unload these things, right?  That would be like an alcoholic hanging out in a bar sipping ginger ale.  The alcoholic sips the ginger ale, not the bar, by the way, unless the alcoholic is very, very drunk

*Byrne must have watched a lot of television.  In this issue, he references Cop Rock and has The Simpsons appear (they're not yellow, so you might not recognize them right away, but look carefully).

*In the last couple of issues, Byrne takes subtle potshots at Todd McFarlane and Jim Lee.  He had been usurped by newer, hotter artists.  He didn't seem to like the direction comics were heading in either as he makes fun of the grim and gritty antihero storytelling as well.

*Weezi, She-Hulk's sidekick, gets turned into a younger woman, according to the text, because of Byrne's midlife crisis.  I kind of enjoyed the senior citizen character, but I suppose Byrne knows that sales will go up with two attractive female characters.  The last page, of course, features the two women in swimsuits.  Don't worry, next issue gets even more exploitative.  As the sales drop, so do the clothes.  She-Hulk is kind of full frontal feminism.

The Sensational She-Hulk 32: The Mole Man Has A Crush on You

In the previous issue's cliffhanger, She-Hulk had fallen into a giant hole while fighting Spragg The Living Hill.  I'm surprised that writer/artist John Byrne didn't just have the entire issue being She-Hulk falling, but as She-Hulk put it "Darned continued stories.  Feels like I've been falling for a month!" so he has mercy on her, and she splashes down in a couple of pages into an underwater portion of The Mole Man's lair.  The Mole Man is an old Fantastic Four foe, and, despite his name, he usually isn't played for laughs so he doesn't fit the usual She-Hulk silly villain pattern.  Fortunately, Spragg shows up again, and you haven't seen silly until you've met an angry rock.

Here are some random thoughts on this issue:

*When Byrne returned, he immediately restored his art to the corner logo.  This issue he replaces it with a new airbrushed shot of She-Hulk in a red gown.  Green and red, she knows how to color coordinate, or maybe she just really likes Christmas. Byrne apparently liked the splash page banner copy added during the Steve Gerber issues since he kept it:  "A blood transfusion from her cousin, The Incredible Hulk, transformed petite Jennifer Walters, attorney-at-law, into an emerald Amazon!  Now she battles for truth, justice, and her clients' personal injury claims!"  Or he had no choice and had to keep it.  I think it's clever at least.

*The pun on the cover is fun, as is the story title, which references a 1970s horror film:  "The Hills Have Eyes, And Mouths And Ears (And Maybe Noses . . .)"

*This issue is mainly a setup for the wedding issue next issue, but it is still quite fun.  Next issue:  The She-Hulk marries The Mole Man!