12 Days of She-Hulk – Issue 12: “Final Verdict”

(Obligatory intro text paragraph – feel free to skip down to the non-italic text if you’ve already been reading these posts.)

This is the last of twelve essays I’ve written, one per day leading up to the release of She-Hulk #12, the final issue in the current run of the title, on February 18. The idea was to look at each issue a bit more in-depth before we got to that last one.

If you haven’t read She-Hulk, but you’d like to, you can get the trade for issues 1-6 here, buy all the issues digitally here or hit up your local comic shop.

You may have noticed that this post is going up on Thursday, February 19, while the final issue of She-Hulk actually hit shelves yesterday, on the 18th. I decided to wait to post this for two reasons. First, I really, really wanted to finish the script for the fifth issue of [redacted] yesterday, and it took longer than I expected. That’s a tricky project.

Second, this post will feature spoilers, as have all of my little writeups, and I wanted to give people a chance to find the issue and read it before they accidentally stumble across my thoughts here. I actually went to three shops looking for a copy before I could find one – the first two places were sold out, which seems like a nice thing.

Anyway, issue 12 – the ride’s over for now. Let’s talk about this last installment.

Lots to wrap up in this issue – I needed to explain all of the little bits and pieces in the Blue File mystery in a satisfying way, figure out how to get some punching going, say goodbye to these characters (for now) and work in a Howard the Duck cameo:

Turns out that good ol’ Howard is taking office space in Jen’s IdeaHive building down in DUMBO, which we’ll see in Chip Zdarsky and Joe Quinones’ Howard the Duck series, starting any minute from Marvel. I love that so much. (Also, I’ve read the first issue, and it’s pretty darn delightful.)

If you want to see more of Jen, Patsy, Angie and Hei Hei, that’s the first place to look.

Anyway, back to the list of to-dos for this issue. You may note that there’s a big item missing from that list – a good explanation of what the hell is up with Angie and Hei Hei. I was reading some reviews of this issue (I try not to read reviews, but I am only human, and I really wanted to see what folks thought of this one,) and one referred to Angie as a sort of “paralegal Mary Poppins,” offering her services to attorneys in need across the Marvel Universe.

That’s not exactly it, but that made me laugh, so for now, let’s say that’s what Angie and Hei Hei are, until I get an opportunity to tell their story in more detail. The truth is, I felt like I didn’t have enough space here to do their story justice. It deserves at least a few issues, and I didn’t want to shortchange them with a few throwaway lines at the end of this story. Whether or not I get to tell that story… we’ll see. I know exactly when and how I would like to do it, but of course that will depend on many other factors. We’ll get to that.

For now, all you get is that apparently she can do this:

I hope readers weren’t too bummed that I didn’t fully explain Angie here, but I felt strongly that if I couldn’t do it right, I didn’t want to do it at all. If the stars never align for me to write it the way I want to, I’ll make sure the truth gets out eventually, either here or somewhere like it.

I loved writing the flashback sequence that opened the issue – it’s always fun to go back and use older versions of characters.

I’ve always loved that Captain Marvel costume in particular. Such a great design.

By this point you’ve (hopefully) read the issue, so you know what happened – Nightwatch executed an in-story retcon to change the Marvel U’s perception of him from the villain Nighteater to the hero Nightwatch. He did so by murdering a town’s worth of people and using their “mental energy” to power a spell that would rewrite reality.

Dr. Druid was the magician behind it – one interesting note that I haven’t heard about yet, although I thought I would – Dr. Druid is technically a hero himself. So what the hell is he doing here, working with villains like Nighteater, Shocker and Vibro? Well, it turns out Dr. Druid’s continuity includes some pretty tough times. At least once, he was possessed by an evil spirit of a sort, after which none of the other heroes trusted him all that much. He was forced to take odd jobs to survive, some of which were for bad guys – and this is something that happened during that phase.

Nighteater is a new creation for this series. I actually thought he came off pretty badass for a guy we only see for a few pages:

That’s one hell of a cool design and color scheme – once again, kudos to Javier and Muntsa. I actually liked Nighteater more than Nightwatch – at least Nighteater is honest about who he is (for a while.) Nightwatch is just a lying liar.

I’d like to point you to a review I read today from the folks at Retcon-Punch, a site I’ve come to love for their very sharp reviews and discussion not just of my books, but many other titles as well. They did a writeup on this issue as well as what they thought it meant in context of the series as a whole that really nails a lot of the themes I was trying to work with here. You can read it here, if you want to. Rather than me go through all of that here, I thought I could just piggyback on their hard work. You know me – nothing like a quick, easy shortcut.

I hope the whole thing works well when you read it as a unit – these mysteries are hard to build, and sometimes you forget something you intended to do when you laid in a clue in an issue you wrote nine months before. But that said, what you see is pretty much what I was planning from the beginning.  (One funny thing, though – the D-list Marvel hero I was originally going to retcon wasn’t Nightwatch. It was determined that using the one I originally wanted would hypothetically invalidate a bunch of Fantastic Four stories, or at least put them in a strange and not necessarily desirable light. I think Nightwatch worked out really well, but the other character would have been fun too. And no, I won’t tell you who it was. The FF mention is enough of a clue.)

Favorite panel: This seems like the perfect opportunity to make special mention of an element of this book I haven’t talked about enough to date – Kevin Wada’s unbelievable covers. His work helped to lock in the title’s vibe – it’s not a cheesecake book, it’s about a kickass icon. The cover for this last issue might have been my favorite out of all 12 (including the amazing triptych covers for 8-10), and even though it’s technically not a panel, I think we can stretch the rules just this once:

Look at her expression! Kevin has promised to paint me a Jen I can stick on my wall, but he is not exactly the least busy guy in the world. Hopefully I’ll get one eventually.

Favorite character: Jen Walters, especially in this panel:

She is the best.

And that, as they say… is that. I will miss working on this series immensely – everything I said in the little note that ends the physical copy of this issue is completely true. Will we do more? I can’t announce anything – there’s nothing to announce – but the door remains open. If my schedule permits and Marvel’s schedule permits, then hopefully we’ll get that season 2. In the meantime… I’d say keep your eyes on Wolverines, the weekly series I’m writing. Especially around the beginning of April.

Thank you all for reading, both these posts and the series. This has been a fair amount of work to put together, but I’ve enjoyed the look back. As always, if you have questions about this issue, or anything at all, you can reach me on Twitter (www.twitter.com/charlessoule) or via the email form at www.charlessoule.com.

 

12 Days of She-Hulk – Issue 11: “Titanium Blues”

(Obligatory intro text paragraph – feel free to skip down to the non-italic text if you’ve already been reading these posts.)

This is the eleventh of twelve essays I’m writing, one per day as we lead up to the release of She-Hulk #12, the final issue in the current run of the title, on February 18. The idea is to look at each issue a bit more in-depth before we get to that last one. I’m doing these in conjunction with a live-tweet using the tag #12daysofshehulk on Twitter, also one per day leading up to the release of 12 starting at 7 PM EST – so you can play along at home! Feel free to @ me (I’m @charlessoule) – I’d love to hear what you think of this issue and all the others, whether it’s a re-read or you’re checking them out for the first time.

If you haven’t read She-Hulk, but you’d like to, you can get the trade for issues 1-6 here, buy all the issues digitally here or hit up your local comic shop.

Tomorrow’s might be a bit delayed, fyi, because I expect it to be filled with spoilers for the last issue of the series, and I don’t necessarily want to have people accidentally reading it before they’ve had a chance to get the issue.

But we aren’t there yet, are we? Nope – today’s Issue #11, “Titanium Blues.”

I wanted to check off two boxes with this issue, both of which I suspect were pretty obvious. First, I wanted to write a big fight between Titania and She-Hulk. Second, I wanted to write a big fight. And that’s Issue 11!

Titania is a very cool character – she’s pretty much She-Hulk’s big bad. They’ve had some truly epic battles over the years, and in much the way it’s almost mandatory for a Batman writer to eventually write a Joker story, I think She-Hulk writers tend to find their way to Titania eventually.

The lady’s real name is Mary MacPherran, and she has an interesting history. She was powered up by Dr. Doom in the original Secret Wars miniseries back in the 80s, along with her best bud Volcana (who we also see in this issue.) You can bop on over to her Wikipedia entry if you want to know all the ins and outs, but the thing about Titania that most interested me was that she’s always been something of a blue collar character.  Some writers have hit that harder than others, but I thought it could make her a good stand-in for general anti-lawyer bias.

I mean, let’s face it – some folks think lawyers are just greedy scum, using the system to their own advantage. And let’s also face it – some lawyers are exactly like that. Many, many more are not, of course, but one bad apple…

So, Titania doesn’t like lawyers – from where she’s standing, it all comes easy to them. They don’t really do anything, but they get to live the good life off the fees they charge honest, hard-working people.

While she and Volcana were hired to attack Jen as punishment for her continuing investigation of the Blue File, it’s always better if you can make a fight personal. So, throwing in the anti-lawyer thing alongside the long antagonism between Titania and She-Hulk seemed like it would be a nice engine for this battle.

I also wanted to write a fight issue after 8-10, which were very talky. It would be sort of a palate-cleanser both for the readers and for Javier/Muntsa. Superhero fights are fun to construct, and I hear they’re fun to draw. Reversals, unexpected allies/enemies arriving…

(Note the way Hellcat’s crowbar is superheated after smacking Volcana in panels 1-2, by the way – that’s some amazing work from Muntsa. Also, of course, the Fantasticar, a callback to Issue 3 – apparently Jen parked it on the roof of her building and never gave it back to the Fantastic Four.)

Both sides need to seem like they’re winning and losing in almost equal measure. The fight needs to have an ebb and flow to it, like a really good song or a classical composition. As many surprises as you can come up with, really.

Such as… Hei Hei being whipped about five miles into the air by Titania, after which this happens:

As Angie Huang put it back in Issue 2:

So, we have a monkey that has a winged battle mode, and we also see Angie directly using what appears to be some sort of magic or superpowers in this issue. Pretty weird. What is the deal with those two?

Another neat little thing about this issue – I knew I wanted to stage the fight north of the city, because Jen would want to get civilians out of the line of fire. She’s thrown down enough with Titania to know that serious property damage tends to result. Up north of NYC, we get into the Hudson Valley, where it’s less populated, especially in the mountains along the river. So, I was poking around for a specific place to set the fight, and found this:

I realize that’s a little small, but I wanted to get the awesome color work from Muntsa in here for the leaps – She-Hulk is green, and Titania is purple. So good. If you can’t read it, the name of the mountain where they end up is Breakneck Mountain – a real place. If there’s a better place in the world to set a Titania/She-Hulk fight, I don’t know where it could be. Just one of those awesome happy accidents like finding the county of Divide in North Dakota (see Issue 5) or the fact that Mark of Zorro was playing at Mann’s Chinese back in November 1940 (see Issue 10.)

Other things about this issue – you’ll note that when Titania is doing her big rant about how much she hates lawyers because they just talk all the time… who’s not talking there? Jen says almost nothing during the entire fight, in fact. When it’s time to get down to business, she gets down to business.

And then, of course, the reveal on the last page – Nightwatch is behind the Blue File, and everything bad we’ve seen related to it in the series so far. But how? And why? You’ll find out… tomorrow.

Favorite panel:

It’s really four panels, but you get so much from them. Such a great sense of time passing, especially across the three “sky” panels. This might be one of my favorite bits in the whole series, actually.

Favorite character: Super Hei Hei.

Right on, Super Hei Hei. Right on.

Tomorrow… it all comes to an end.

If you have questions about this issue, or anything at all, you can reach me on Twitter (www.twitter.com/charlessoule) or via the email form at www.charlessoule.com.

 

 

12 Days of She-Hulk – Issue 10: “The Good Old Days – Conclusion”

(Obligatory intro text paragraph – feel free to skip down to the non-italic text if you’ve already been reading these posts.)

This is the tenth of twelve essays I’m writing, one per day as we lead up to the release of She-Hulk #12, the final issue in the current run of the title, on February 18. The idea is to look at each issue a bit more in-depth before we get to that last one. I’m doing these in conjunction with a live-tweet using the tag #12daysofshehulk on Twitter, also one per day leading up to the release of 12 starting at 7 PM EST – so you can play along at home! Feel free to @ me (I’m @charlessoule) – I’d love to hear what you think of this issue and all the others, whether it’s a re-read or you’re checking them out for the first time.

If you haven’t read She-Hulk, but you’d like to, you can get the trade for issues 1-6 here, buy all the issues digitally here or hit up your local comic shop.

So, it’s Monday, and the last issue of this run of She-Hulk hits Wednesday – that’s awfully soon. I just got back from a convention, and I heard a lot about this little series from you guys. Thank you for supporting it as much as you have.

Now, though, let’s move on to this issue, the third and final part of the She-Hulk/Daredevil trial, with Steve Rogers in the midst of a wrongful death suit related to events back in 1940, before he became Captain America. We’ve already heard the other side’s version of events, and it doesn’t look great for Cap. In fact, it looks like he might have significantly contributed to the death of someone, and then fled to the Army to escape responsibility. In fact, when Matt Murdock puts him on the stand, he actually says that the entire story is true. Uh-oh.

But maybe he’ll be okay after all. Why?

Oh, all right then. Phew.

When we get Cap’s version of events, we learn that the bad guys in the story were actually Nazi Fifth Columnists, and Steve was trying to help out a young man to save his brother from them. While Steve absolutely did antagonize them, and one could say that his actions resulted in the death of that young man, the legal question here revolves more about whether he could have reasonably known that would happen, whether there were mitigating factors, and so on. Actually, Jen and Matt lay it out pretty well in their closing arguments, and you can make your own call. You’ve got the issues itself if you want to read about the case.

I’d like to focus more on a few cool elements from this story – just background beats I happened to like.

First, the bad guy isn’t just a nameless Nazi. He’s actually a character from Marvel history named Saurespritze (which is German for “Acid Syringe,” according to Google Translate, but I think we could go with Acid Sprayer, something like that.) This is what he looked like back in the day:

He was a member of the Das Vernichtungs-Kommandos (or the Death Squad) – a trio of Nazi supervillains, each with their own evil power. Saurespritze was sort of the non-speaking scary henchman, from what I can tell – he mostly sprayed acid at people. I mean, I think there are two kinds of people in the world. Some, when their parents name them Acid Sprayer, struggle their entire lives to overcome that – maybe they never even spray acid on anyone at all.

Saurespritze is pretty clearly not the other kind of person. That’s okay. Sometimes you gotta own it.

Here’s how Javier redesigned him for this story:

Pretty awesome, I think. It’s not too far off the original design, but it has that simplification and elegance that characterizes Javier’s (and Muntsa’s) work.

Another beat from the flashback story I wanted to highlight – you remember in yesterday’s post about Issue 9 when I mentioned that there was something important about the date in which this story was set? Well, you look back at Issue 8, this panel:

That’s Steve and Sam Fogler, the buddy he went to LA with, the poor guy who dies in the story. They’re outside Mann’s Chinese Theater IN Hollywood. As we learn in this issue, it’s the one good thing Steve remembers about the trip, before everything went to hell.

Like I said in the prior post, this story had to take place in the first week of November, because of timing and continuity questions. And what was playing at Mann’s Chinese that week? Well…

The Mark of Zorro!

This is a pretty important film in comics history – it’s also the movie Bruce Wayne went to see with his parents the night they were killed.

When I looked up the old schedule for Mann’s for that week, I couldn’t believe my luck. I had no idea ahead of time that Mark of Zorro was playing the same week as the story in which I’d had to set my story – total happy accident, but I sure as hell wasn’t going to ignore it once I knew.

So, the same movie contributes to Cap being Cap and Batman being Batman – pretty cool.

Favorite panel – there are two, both related:

I just love Faustus’ ever-so-elegant handwriting in the first panel, and I think the way that punch was handled in the second example is top notch.

Favorite character – young Steve. Tough kid.

I loved writing this arc, as challenging as it was. I was traveling (again) in India when I was working through most of this, and I spent almost the entirety of a nine-hour car ride from the southern mountains to Bangalore trying to figure out how the hell it would work, especially the ending. It put me through the wringer – but I think it all worked, and it was a chance to write Daredevil, Steve Rogers and She-Hulk in one story. Dream come true.

Tomorrow – back to the Blue File, and lots of punchy punchy.

If you have questions about this issue, or anything at all, you can reach me on Twitter (www.twitter.com/charlessoule) or via the email form at www.charlessoule.com.

 

 

12 Days of She-Hulk – Issue 9: “The Good Old Days, Part 2”

(Obligatory intro text paragraph – feel free to skip down to the non-italic text if you’ve already been reading these posts.)

This is the ninth of twelve essays I’m writing, one per day as we lead up to the release of She-Hulk #12, the final issue in the current run of the title, on February 18. The idea is to look at each issue a bit more in-depth before we get to that last one. I’m doing these in conjunction with a live-tweet using the tag #12daysofshehulk on Twitter, also one per day leading up to the release of 12 starting at 7 PM EST – so you can play along at home! Feel free to @ me (I’m @charlessoule) – I’d love to hear what you think of this issue and all the others, whether it’s a re-read or you’re checking them out for the first time.

If you haven’t read She-Hulk, but you’d like to, you can get the trade for issues 1-6 here, buy all the issues digitally here or hit up your local comic shop.

I’ve been pretty good about staying ahead on these posts – I usually type up each one a few days ahead of time and schedule it to auto-post at noon on the day in question. This one, however, I’m typing up on the fly, just a few hours before it goes live. If it feels like it has more urgency, that’s why.

I knew this weekend would be tough timewise because it’s a con weekend – I’m attending the Amazing Arizona Comic Con in Phoenix. Cons are awesome, but it can be all but impossible to get anything else done. Much like…

…when you’re at trial! (That’s a segue, folks.) Trial can be all-consuming. Most of my experience with it comes from time spent as a paralegal (or, as you may know it, an Angie Huang) before going to law school. I worked for a very large firm at that time, and they worked on gigantic corporate litigations. For those, you fly to the place where the trial is happening and live there for as long as it lasts, working out of a hotel or a satellite office. You’re in the courtroom all day and you’re preparing all night for the next day (more or less, depending on what’s going on). Really grueling. You sort of have to, though, because, well, you have to win. You lose enough cases and you probably won’t be a lawyer for all that long.

The experience of litigation can be very different depending on which level of the judicial system you’re talking about, or area of law, but I chose to make the Steve Rogers case we look at in issues 8-10 a real meatgrinder. In issue 9, we start to see more of what Cap is actually being accused of, through “dying declaration” testimony from a childhood acquaintance of Steve’s. I heard from some attorneys on this one – the way I use dying declaration here maybe isn’t the way it’s always used in California, but I based it on Rule 804(b)(2) in the Federal Rules of Evidence, which states that a witness statement relayed to someone else just prior to death can be admissible in court if it is:

(2) Statement Under the Belief of Imminent Death. In a prosecution for homicide or in a civil case, a statement that the declarant, while believing the declarant’s death to be imminent, made about its cause or circumstances.

I always thought that was a fascinating rule – I mean, like people can’t lie when they think they’re about to die? It seems very based in what the framers of that law believed about human nature – or wanted to be true. This rule comes from the “common law,” which is a set of laws or rules that existed before law was formally codified – almost like very binding rules of thumb that society (especially English society, since that’s where much of our legal system comes from) used to handle disputes.

As an aside, poor Javier, right? I gave him so much text to handle in this arc, and he worked with it beautifully. The chase scene at the end of this issue was included specifically to give him a bit of action to draw, considering that so much of the rest was talking heads.

Now, as far as the actual substance of this dying declaration – we hear that just before the US entered World War II Steve Rogers apparently antagonized a criminal into killing the older brother of the declarant. It doesn’t sound good for Steve, but it seems like it could be plausible. That was the key.

You’ll note in this sequence that it’s written in the “voice” of Harold Fogler, the dead guy, even though it’s supposedly being relayed by the policeman who heard the testimony back in the hospital. The captions here aren’t the way the court heard it, exactly – but I felt that adding a lot of “and then Harold said this…” would have taken a lot of the immediacy out of the scene. I thought it was important to get Harold’s voice here, to convey his pain about what happened back in that LA warehouse.

Once we get the testimony, Matt Murdoch begins to build his case.

That date, November 6, 1940, was settled upon because there was actually a very tiny window, both historically and in Marvel U history, for this story to happen. We actually know pretty much exactly when Steve signed up for Project Rebirth – the program that ended up with him getting the super-soldier serum and becoming Captain America. We also know when the US entered the war, and, more importantly, when the draft was imposed (the law was approved on September 16, 1940, and it went into effect a month later.) We know from Cap’s lore that he tried to volunteer for the Army but was classified 4-F (unfit for service), which was something that was part of the draft rules. We also know that Captain America #1 hit shelves on December 20, 1940.

So, this story had to take place between October 16, 1940 and December 20, 1940, and probably on the early side, to give Cap time to get back to Brooklyn, volunteer, be classified 4-F, and then get into the super-soldier program. A pretty tight window. However, it worked really well for this story because it supported the idea that Cap could be guilty – as you see, Murdoch is trying to build up the idea that Steve Rogers was so desperate to get into the Army because it could be a safe haven for him from the criminal consequences of causing the death in LA.

There’s another reason that the dates here worked out so nicely, but we’ll get into that with Issue 10 tomorrow.

Jen does what she can to tear down Murdoch’s case, but he’s pretty surgical about it – which is in keeping with his character. He’s supposed to be brutally effective, and he needs to be, otherwise Jen isn’t in “danger,” and the story’s boring. We need, as readers, to really think that this might not work out for Cap. Jen certainly feels that way.

But don’t worry, Jen, you’ll get your chance tomorrow!

Favorite panel – there were a ton of possibilities here. The chase sequence across NYC (in which, you’ll note, Jen is wearing a Cap-branded pajama top and purple pants – both a nod to her Hulky roots and support for her client), something from the flashback sequence, that great split panel on the last page… but I think it’s this one:

Javier did such a lovely job here conveying the nervousness of the bailiff at the very idea that he has to swear in Captain America as a witness. Note the little trembles in his upraised hand and on the bible, and Steve’s comparably rock-steady hand. The fact that Steve Rogers casts an incredibly long shadow is a central part of this case, and this beat really supports that.

Favorite character: Daredevil. I love writing that guy, and I got to do much more with him here than I did in his prior appearance in Issue 4. Super fun.

(Also, look at the colors in that bit, especially those silhouettes in the second panel. Muntsa Vicente is brilliant.)

Tomorrow, the conclusion of the case! Wow, we’re really getting close to Wednesday, aren’t we?

If you have questions about this issue, or anything at all, you can reach me on Twitter (www.twitter.com/charlessoule) or via the email form at www.charlessoule.com.

 

 

12 Days of She-Hulk – Issue 8: “The Good Old Days, Part 1”

(Obligatory intro text paragraph – feel free to skip down to the non-italic text one if you’ve already been reading these posts.)

This is the eighth of twelve essays I’m writing, one per day as we lead up to the release of She-Hulk #12, the final issue in the current run of the title, on February 18. The idea is to look at each issue a bit more in-depth before we get to that last one. I’m doing these in conjunction with a live-tweet using the tag #12daysofshehulk on Twitter, also one per day leading up to the release of 12 starting at 7 PM EST – so you can play along at home! Feel free to @ me (I’m @charlessoule) – I’d love to hear what you think of this issue and all the others, whether it’s a re-read or you’re checking them out for the first time.

If you haven’t read She-Hulk, but you’d like to, you can get the trade for issues 1-6 here, buy all the issues digitally here or hit up your local comic shop.

Issue 8: “The Good Old Days, Part 1”

Here we are with the start of a three-part story involving something that had never happened before in comics up to this point – She-Hulk vs. Daredevil in a court of law.

Once I started working on the story, I realized why. It was all but impossible to pull off, at least in regular continuity. You could do it in something like an Elseworlds / alternate reality setting, but in the real-deal Marvel Universe? Oof.

Let me explain. I’d been talking with my editor Jeanine Schaefer about doing this story for a while, and so it had been in the back of my mind for ages. When we started to get into specifics, it became clear that I’d be dealing with a few very significant bullet points. To wit:

• She-Hulk must be heroic.
• Daredevil must be heroic.

Tricky enough, because if you’re writing a court case that feels even a little bit realistic, one side probably comes off a bit looking a bit negative, if not both. Actual litigation can get extremely intense. Just to bring up one example, discrediting the other side’s witnesses by impugning their character happens quite often, and it can get vicious. As a lawyer, you’re obligated to do everything you can to serve your client, even if it means (sometimes especially if it means) screwing over the other side in some dastardly but perfectly legal and legitimate way (within the confines of our legal system, of course.)

In this story, all of those strategies were immediately off the table for both sides, even though Daredevil in particular has done some very morally questionable things in the past. There’s a reason he keeps getting disbarred.

So, tough enough to do this at all. The reason why no writer had tried this before started to become very apparent to me. At which point, I made my life ten times as hard by choosing the defendant – Steve Rogers, aka, at times, as Captain America. At the point in Marvel continuity where this happens, Steve has lost his super-serum-ness, which means he’s ninety-some years old. A hale, hearty ninety, for sure – he’d kick you off his lawn if he had one, which he doesn’t, because he lives in Red Hook, Brooklyn and almost no one down there has lawns – but still, old.

I chose Cap because I wanted to do something momentous for the story, something worthy of the idea that Marvel’s two legal titans were doing battle for the first time. Generally speaking, Steve Rogers is morally unimpeachable, so putting him in a position where he was defending himself against a heinous accusation seemed like it would have some real juice. Of course, it brought up another problem:

• Steve Rogers must be heroic.

Steve is the Marvel U’s moral arbiter, more or less. Putting him in a position where that was called into question was very sticky, and resulted in many emails back and forth with my wonderful editor Jeanine Schaefer, as well as Tom Brevoort. Both were very supportive of me doing the story, but they wanted to make sure I wasn’t going to tarnish Steve’s carefully developed legacy.

This was particularly true because the case revolved around events in Steve’s past prior to becoming Captain America at the end of 1941. The story of Steve becoming Cap is serious canon in the Marvel U, and you screw around with it at your peril.

When all was said and done, here’s what this story needed to do, just from a mechanical standpoint:

• She-Hulk must be heroic.
• Daredevil must be heroic, with the corollary that we need a legitimate reason why he would take a case against Steve Rogers, an aged hero whom he has fought alongside many times.
• Steve Rogers must be heroic, with the corollary that we need to believe that he could actually have done what he’s being accused of.
• The legal case in the story must feel and read as a legitimate case, with serious potential consequences for Steve if it goes wrong.
• Everything that happens needs to work with the continuity of all three characters.
• All of the flashbacks need to work with real-world World War II history, or get damn close.
• It has to resolve well, with neither She-Hulk or Daredevil looking like a bad lawyer, or using the rough and tumble tactics actual lawyers would probably use.

That list developed over the course of breaking and working on the story, and I’ll be honest – if I’d seen it laid out for me right from the start, I probably would have bailed on the whole idea and done something light and fun about Batroc the Leaper or whatever.

But now that it’s done, I’m so glad I didn’t.

I’ll talk more about the specifics of the story in future parts, but for now, let me hit a few things quickly. First, I have gotten questions from eagle-eyed readers about two things.

First, “why did She-Hulk need to temporarily associate herself with a California firm in order to defend Steve Rogers in an LA court, when she used to practice law in California years ago?”

There are two answers to this. First, Jen was admitted, a long time ago, but bar registrations expire. In New York, for example, you have to renew them every two years, and you also have to show that you’re taking Continuing Legal Education (or CLE) courses to stay up on your field. Jen didn’t do that for California, because she’s been working out of NY for so long, and so she’s no longer admitted to practice there. I could have explained that in this story, but it would have opened up a much longer set of things to explain. Space was tight here, and there were a ton of little things like this I opted not to include, because I wanted to focus on the bits that would build drama or actually serve the story I was telling.

The second answer is more writerly – it gave Jen a challenge to solve. I saw Matt Groening (creator of the Simpsons, Futurama, etc.) speak last night, and he said something that really struck me: “Struggle is funny.” That’s true for drama, too. You can get more out of a character who hasn’t made it yet than someone whose life is comfortable. So, you throw as many obstacles as you can in your character’s path, and see what you get from it. In this case, we got the incredible Matt Rocks (because he does), and I think that was one hell of an exchange.

The second question I’ve seen about this case was how the hell Jen could not know that Matt Murdock was the lawyer on the other side before she walked into that courtroom. In most cases, the attorneys on both sides know a ton about the other side’s case long before they ever step before the judge. It’s called the “discovery” process, and the idea that Jen wouldn’t know that Matt was the lawyer she was up against would ordinarily be ludicrous. Unless… Matt subbed in that very morning, via a motion to the judge, which is exactly what he did.

Murdock knew that there would be some serious shock value from surprising Jen, and (spoiler), he also knew that Cap had ordered him to do his absolute best to win the case, so he engineered things to spring himself on She-Hulk at the last minute. I consulted with a California litigator on this point, and he confirmed that it would be possible, albeit the sort of thing that most would consider sketchy. I decided that it was worth the beat, and did it.

Favorite panel:

I loved the stuff with the robot lady flight attendants on Stark’s plane. This was a callback to Issue 1 and those holographic receptionists in his building. The fact that Stark lent his plane to Jen at all is also a little nod to the idea that I thought he would probably feel guilty about the events of that issue.

Favorite character: Matt Rocks. I considered a bunch of possible lawyers for Jen to partner up with in LA, including some of the characters from Dan Slott’s run, but ultimately I decided to make someone new. I’ve always loved Jamie Madrox, too – so much potential, as we saw in Peter David’s incredible X-Factor run. Javier did such a wonderful job with this guy, too – he’s got that perfect “charming ass” vibe I was looking for.

Tomorrow: The case kicks into high gear, as we learn more about the terrible crime Steve is accused of!

If you have questions about this issue, or anything at all, you can reach me on Twitter (www.twitter.com/charlessoule) or via the email form at www.charlessoule.com.

 

 

 

12 Days of She-Hulk – Issue 7: “Small Victories”

(Obligatory intro text paragraph – feel free to skip down to the non-italic text one if you’ve already been reading these posts.)

This is the seventh of twelve essays I’m writing (we’re more than halfway!), one per day as we lead up to the release of She-Hulk #12, the final issue in the current run of the title, on February 18. The idea is to look at each issue a bit more in-depth before we get to that last one. I’m doing these in conjunction with a live-tweet using the tag #12daysofshehulk on Twitter, also one per day leading up to the release of 12 starting at 7 PM EST – so you can play along at home! Feel free to @ me (I’m @charlessoule) – I’d love to hear what you think of this issue and all the others, whether it’s a re-read or you’re checking them out for the first time.

If you haven’t read She-Hulk, but you’d like to, you can get the trade for issues 1-6 here, buy all the issues digitally here or hit up your local comic shop.

Issue 7 was a huge challenge for me. I’m not sure why, exactly. I knew I wanted to do a one-shot, and I had the plan to do the Hank Pym story pretty early, but getting it all to gel took me a number of drafts. I suspect that was related to a few factors – one, I was coming back into writing for Javier Pulido after a few issues writing for Ron Wimberly, which meant a switching of mental gears. Second, I was maybe a little focused on plot as opposed to what the issue would really be about. You can think up all the goofy bits with shrunken superheroes you want, but if the characters’ engines aren’t humming along properly, it’s just a bunch of goofy bits about shrunken superheroes.

I finally cracked it when I realized that this was a perfect issue to bring the Patsy/Jen partnership/friendship to the fore. The surface story has two business partners in a spat because they can’t seem to agree about how to go about their business – and that’s paralleled by what happens with Hellcat and She-Hulk here.

It seemed pretty plausible to me that Patsy Walker could have a bit of an inferiority complex about her superheroing gig. She doesn’t have powers, really – she can detect magic use, but in a world where people can blast mountains apart, that’s not really all that much to speak of. Basically, she’s an incredible acrobat and hand-to-hand fighter, and she has one hell of a lot of pizzazz. That’s it.

I knew this was a thread I’d want to play out eventually, so I started hitting it early. We see it in her first beats in Issue 2, when she wants to go (drunkenly) beat up AIM, and the AIM agents straight up say she’s “powerless.” We see it again in Issue 6, when she’s trying to figure out what happened with Tigra.

Powerless is a pretty strong word for a woman like Patsy Walker, though. I don’t see her as powerless – not even a tiny bit. She might not have the most impressive superpowers, but that’s not the only way you can kick some ass.

As we see in this issue.

Jen, being Jen, realizes this towards the end of the issue.   – but I also wanted to make it clear that She-Hulk isn’t stepping aside to give Hellcat a chance to prove her worth. As this panel shows, she trusts her with her life.

(I’m sure you all got this, too, but Patsy spends most of the issue trying to figure out how to use Ant-Man’s ant-commanding helmet – she’s trying to get superpowers, to measure up the way she thinks Jen and other superheroes feel she should. But when it comes down to it, how does she save the day?)

With moxy and a sharp stick. Sometimes that’s all you need.

Anyway, that was pretty much the deal. Everyone learns some valuable lessons, the contract gets signed, etc. A few fun facts about this issue – the first page was a fun tease of the big storyline to come in issues 8-10, and a deliberate contrast to the aged version of Captain America we see on the last page.

Yes, sparks were starting to fly between Patsy and Rufus, the adorably business-minded inventor down the hall. We’ll see if we can’t get back to that.

As scripted, the sparrow that Ant-Man befriends off-screen in the issue was supposed to be flitting around the conference room in panel 1 of page 19, just to suggest that they’d become real buddies. I have no idea why Javier didn’t include it – sometimes things just disappear between script and panel. The trick with stuff like that is not to be too precious. You pick your battles. Artists aren’t robots, they’re collaborative partners, and you aren’t always going to see things the same way.

And finally, I was in Hong Kong when I wrote this. Hong Kong is a very vertical city – everything building is a hi-rise. My hotel was no exception, and it had a little bar near the roof, completely empty in the mornings, where I would go sit and write while I had a cup of coffee.  This was the view:

Pretty amazing. I know. I love Hong Kong. While you can’t see any people in that shot, if you could, I bet they’d look like… ants. I was clearly writing the right issue for that particular view.

Favorite panel: Poor Ant-Man! As a character, Hank Pym more or less can’t catch a break – and I didn’t want to break that streak here. He’s one of the Marvel Universe’s greatest geniuses, but for whatever reason, he’s typically shown as flawed in one way or another. The point of this scene was to remove the “expert” from the equation – with Hank gone, She-Hulk and Hellcat were stuck on their own without any way to get big again unless they found the missing inventor they were looking for. And I didn’t punk Hank too hard, really – after all, in the space of one issue, he tames that sparrow and makes the business deal he was looking for. I like Ant-Man.

And how about that sparrow? Artists blow my mind. If I tried to draw a sparrow, it would look like a marshmallow peep. If I was lucky.

Favorite character: You know, I think it’s probably Rufus. While I don’t think it’s stated in the issue, his full name is Rufus Randall, and his partner’s name is Reza Rahmani – that’s why their company is named R&R&R&R. Nothing like some good old comic book alliteration. I’d love to do more with these two someday.

Tomorrow – the start of by far the hardest story arc in this run, the Daredevil/She-Hulk/Cap court case. That one almost broke me in half. See you then!

If you have questions about this issue, or anything at all, you can reach me on Twitter (www.twitter.com/charlessoule) or via the email form at www.charlessoule.com.

 

12 Days of She-Hulk – Issue 6: “Blue, Part Two”

(Obligatory intro text paragraph – feel free to skip down to the non-italic text one if you’ve already been reading these posts.)

This is the sixth of twelve essays I’m writing, one per day as we lead up to the release of She-Hulk #12, the final issue in the current run of the title, on February 18. The idea is to look at each issue a bit more in-depth before we get to that last one. I’m doing these in conjunction with a live-tweet using the tag #12daysofshehulk on Twitter, also one per day leading up to the release of 12 starting at 7 PM EST – so you can play along at home! Feel free to @ me (I’m @charlessoule) – I’d love to hear what you think of this issue and all the others, whether it’s a re-read or you’re checking them out for the first time.

If you haven’t read She-Hulk, but you’d like to, you can get the trade for issues 1-6 here, buy all the issues digitally here or hit up your local comic shop.

Okay, first off, yes, I ended the last issue (#5) with a literal cliffhanger. Wyatt Wingfoot, Jen’s sometime fella, was hanging off a cliff with a bunch of cub scouts dangling from a safety line below him. We knew by this point that (a) Wyatt Wingfoot was involved with the Blue File (the mysterious legal case Jen’s been investigating in the series) and (b) the moment anyone mentions certain trigger names to people involved in that case, they go berserk, killing those around them and then themselves. When we ended Issue 5, Jen was just about to say one of those trigger words to Wyatt – the expectation being that he would flip out and all those poor cub scouts would pancake down into a bloody mess at the bottom of the cliff, followed shortly by Mr. Wingfoot himself.

Cliffhangers are fun – I try to do them every issue, not just because it’s a really good idea to set the hook and bring people back for the next one, but because I like thinking them up. There are a number of types – there’s the “whoa, I can’t wait to see that…” bit, when you bring in an awesome new character or reveal a setup for the next issue, and then there’s the “no… he wouldn’t…” type, when you set up something so horrible for your beloved characters that the readers can’t help but come back to see how it all pans out. The trick with those is that sometimes you need to fulfill that promise. Sometimes Wyatt does need to fall off the cliff, because if you never follow through on the cliffhanger, then your readers will think you’re bluffing every time. It’s like a game of chicken with the audience.

In this case… Wyatt does not fall off the cliff. He loses cell reception just as Jen says the magic death words. But perhaps next time, gentle readers… he will. You never know. YOU JUST NEVER KNOW!

This, also, is Wyatt’s one main appearance in the series so far, despite him being (traditionally) her main romantic interest – her Mary Jane, so to speak. There’s a major element in She-Hulk’s typical storyline that I didn’t address at all in this run, purposefully – her romantic entanglements. You get the idea that she’s dated folks in the past, maybe even a lot of people, but she doesn’t have a boyfriend in these first 12 issues. It doesn’t even come up, really. Now, I like romance – I had a blast with the Superman-Wonder Woman series I did for DC, and I’m doing some stuff with that in the Attilan Rising series I’m working on right now for Marvel. However, I thought it was important here to get away from that, and focus more on Jen’s professional life as she worked to define herself in that way. Jen’s not who she’s dating – really, no one is.

Issue 6 was designed to move the Blue File storyline ahead substantially, while not giving everything away. There were a million plot threads to juggle – first, there was the fact that poor Angie Huang had been shot in the head. Then this happens:

This was our first strong evidence that something truly bizarre was going on with Angie and Hei Hei. As far as I know, ordinary monkeys cannot bring their dead friends back to life. But what do I know?

We also get a visit from the very cool, very smooth NIGHTWATCH. Nightwatch hadn’t appeared in Marvel Comics for over 20 years, since around 1992. He was originally a Spider-Man character, a hero, who was spun off into his own title for twelve issues. The word is that he was supposed to capitalize on the then-mania for the Image Comics character Spawn by, ah, being Spawn. While I have no specific evidence for this theory, there’s this:

It didn’t seem to work as well as Marvel might have hoped, and that was that… until now! This happens all the time – people show up, don’t make the splash their creators and the company are hoping for, and sink back into oblivion. Until they are resurrected decades later by continuity-mining writers hoping to show off how much they know about Marvel Comics history, anyway.

I dig Nightwatch immensely – I think of him as being a perfect Billy Dee Williams character. His inclusion here wasn’t just a stunt, either. I think that when you read the run as a whole, this issue will read very differently than it did the first time around, especially scenes like this:

Favorite panel:

How about Sharon King with a shotgun? She’s the best. This scene was also another chance to see what the weird, cool renters at IdeaHive were capable of – and it seems like they are entirely able to fight off an attack by weird demons who all seem strangely focused on Jen Walters.

Favorite character: Nightwatch. I mean, look at this cool cat.

Tomorrow – Honey I Shrunk the Superheroes!

If you have questions about this issue, or anything at all, you can reach me on Twitter (www.twitter.com/charlessoule) or via the email form at www.charlessoule.com.

 

 

12 Days of She-Hulk – Issue 5: “Blue, Part One”

(Obligatory intro text paragraph – feel free to skip down to the non-italic text one if you’ve already been reading these posts.)

This is the fifth of twelve essays I’m writing, one per day as we lead up to the release of She-Hulk #12, the final issue in the current run of the title, on February 18. The idea is to look at each issue a bit more in-depth before we get to that last one. I’m doing these in conjunction with a live-tweet using the tag #12daysofshehulk on Twitter, also one per day leading up to the release of 12 starting at 7 PM EST – so you can play along at home! Feel free to @ me (I’m @charlessoule) – I’d love to hear what you think of this issue and all the others, whether it’s a re-read or you’re checking them out for the first time.

If you haven’t read She-Hulk, but you’d like to, you can get the trade for issues 1-6 here, buy all the issues digitally here or hit up your local comic shop.

As many of you probably noticed (except possibly those who consume their comics as audiobooks, but I suspect that’s a pretty small percentage), the art team changed for Issue 5 of She-Hulk. Javier Pulido and Muntsa Vicente stepped away for Issues 5 and 6, while Ron Wimberly did pencils/inks for #5 alongside colors from Rico Renzi, and Ron did the pencils, inks and colors for issue #6.

Why, you may ask? Well, it’s pretty simple – the demands on artists to produce the level of art that modern comics readers are used to seeing are significant. It’s tough to put out an issue every month and not get behind. So, fill-in teams are used to give the “regular” artists a chance to catch up, maybe even get a little bit ahead. It’s very common these days. If you’re lucky, you also get to work with a consistent rotating team, so the run can build a strong look and feel over time. That’s what I’ve been able to do with Swamp Thing, for example – for most of my run on that book, Jesus Saiz and Javier Pina have been rotating on and off issues, and it’s been pretty seamless (not least because as I understand it, those guys sit next to each other in their studio in Spain, so they can chat about whatever they’re working on.)

So, when Javier and Muntsa took a planned two-issue break for 5-6, the question became about who would take over the reins. Even in just four issues, the aesthetics of She-Hulk had become very firmly defined, which meant whoever came on had some big shoes to fill. I talked with my great editors at Marvel about some possibilities for 5-6, and Ron Wimberly’s work grabbed me right away. If you’re only familiar with him from She-Hulk, do yourself a favor and check out his Prince of Cats or really any of his work. I think he’s phenomenal – in particular, I like the way he plays with perspective, and his sense of color is amazing.

I wanted an artist who would be as idiosyncratic and cool as Javier, but who was not Javier. That was Ron, for sure. It’s funny – the art on this series could be strangely divisive. Not everyone loved JP (crazy!) and not everyone loved RW (crazy!), and some people seemed to love one but hate the other. There were clearly people who loved both, too – but people don’t always take the time to tweet about things they love. I mean, where’s the fun in that?

Anyway, let’s talk about the issue a little. Issue 5 was our first look at the mystery of the Blue File, the ongoing thread that would run through the full 12-issue arc. You’ll note that the tone changes pretty drastically. I mean, Tigra damn near kills Hellcat, and Angie Huang gets shot in the head at the end of the issue. Not to mention Shocker’s story, which if you think about it, is pretty sad. He’s basically a punch-drunk boxer, or one of those football players with mild brain damage from their skull getting rattled so much. I did this because (as you’ll see), what actually happens with the Blue File isn’t exactly happy-go-lucky. I needed to start setting up a slightly darker tone here so the ending for the arc would work (hmm…)

Also, I wanted to establish that She-Hulk, as a book, wasn’t just one thing. Remember that line from the first issue?

No one!

Neither is the series. We can have light, fun one-offs and Giant Dooms all we want, but that’s not all She-Hulk’s life is about.

Angie and Hei Hei were overdue for a solo adventure, where we got to see Angie’s real superpower – FILING!

She goes to Divide County in North Dakota, which is a real place, a teeny tiny little county way up in the Northwest corner of the state. It’s very, very far away from anything.

One thing that I had fun with in She-Hulk (and continue to enjoy in other series) was finding real place names that tied in really well with the story I happened to be telling. So, we get Divide here (the reason for that will be clear once you read Issue 12… spoiler.) In Issue 11 we get another cool one like this – but we can talk about that then. That’s also why I set the last issue of Death of Wolverine in Paradise Valley, Nevada. I mean, it just sort of worked.

I tried to get the clerk’s dialogue right – all that Fargo-esque northern Midwest dialect business. It’s always tricky to work with accents in written dialogue. My suggestion, if you’re ever going to try it – use regional slang instead of transliteration of accents. So, you might have a Bostonian refer to a water cooler as a “bubbler” instead of trying something like “I went to the bah in my cah…” As I see it, the first works, the second just drags people out of the story. I don’t think you can ever get it perfectly right unless you actually speak the local dialect in question – but it can be fun to try!

The Hellcat/Tigra meeting was also interesting – fun fact, Patsy’s Hellcat costume originally belonged to Tigra. They’re somewhat linked, continuity-wise. The dialogue alludes to this, but I’m not sure it’s something people talk about much. I certainly didn’t know it until I researched Tigra a bit prior to writing her. You can find out all sorts of cool, weird stuff once you start poking around in the backstories of these characters. Some have been around for such a long time that it’s inevitable that certain bizarre phases in their fictional lives would pop up. Hellcat, for example, was married to the Son of Satan.

The Son.

Of Satan.

Go comics!

Last bit on this issue – writing mysteries is tricky! Figuring out how to dole out the clues, give just enough so that someone could maybe start to put things together… but not too much… it ain’t not simple. I hope it worked well, but the key to mysteries is really the ending, and you guys don’t have that yet. But soon. Too soon!

Favorite panel:

Really, it’s the entire fight scene with Patsy and Tigra. I think it really showed what makes Ron’s work special – that twisty, rubbery physicality that makes action sequences stand out from anything else I’ve ever seen. I’d love to see something like this animated – I bet it would be amazing.

Favorite character: Shocker! Such a sad sack. Nick Spencer and Steve Lieber’s great Superior Foes of Spider-Man was running when I wrote this issue, and I took their characterization of Shocker as a jumping-off point for how I wrote him here. Love that dude – I dig blue collar heroes (and villains) in general.

Also, I want to make a special point to mention the amazing letterer on the whole series, Clayton Cowles. He approached mountains of dialogue and art deviations from script with aplomb, and figured out perfect solutions for tricky lettering problems again and again. For example, there’s this sequence:

The flow is awesome, even though it crosses multiple panels and has twenty zillion words. So thank you, Clayton, you are an unsung hero no longer!

Tomorrow – Blue Part Two, the second part of the Blue File mystery.

If you have questions about this issue, or anything at all, you can reach me on Twitter (www.twitter.com/charlessoule) or via the email form at www.charlessoule.com.

 

12 Days of She-Hulk – Issue 4: “The Zealous Advocate”

(Obligatory intro text paragraph – feel free to skip down to the next one if you’ve already been reading these posts.)

This is the fourth of twelve essays I’m writing, one per day as we lead up to the release of She-Hulk #12, the final issue in the current run of the title, on February 18. The idea is to look at each issue a bit more in-depth before we get to that last one. I’m doing these in conjunction with a live-tweet using the tag #12daysofshehulk on Twitter, also one per day leading up to the release of 12 – so you can play along at home! Feel free to @ me (I’m @charlessoule) – I’d love to hear what you think of this issue and all the others, whether it’s a re-read or you’re checking them out for the first time.

If you haven’t read She-Hulk, but you’d like to, you can get the trade for issues 1-6 here, buy all the issues digitally here or hit up your local comic shop.

Sometimes you just can’t let a case go. Not every case has a positive resolution (although you better hope that most of them do, or you’ll be out of business pretty damn quick as a solo practitioner.) The ones that end well you just sort of chalk up to “of course it worked out – I know what I’m doing.” But the ones that don’t… you don’t ever forget about those. You wonder if it was somehow your fault, even if the negative outcome was clearly due to something outside your control.

That’s Jen in Issue 4. In the previous issue, she attempted to gain political asylum for Kristoff Vernard, the son of Doctor Doom. An incredibly difficult challenge – but she did it! She faced Doombots a-plenty, a blasé, mostly unhelpful client and a skeptical judge… and won! But then, the thing that was outside her control – her client’s megalomaniacal, dictator father smashed into the courtroom and yanked him back to Latveria.

Really, there was nothing she could do – Doombots are one thing, Victor Von Doom is another. Even more importantly, her client told her to stand down. It’s ethically tough as a lawyer to go against your client’s express wishes, even if it’s not in their best interests. Jennifer knows all of that, but she can’t let it go.

Fortunately, she is not just a lawyer – she is also the She-Hulk, a super kickass superhero, and so she has options not available to your typical attorney.

This issue really has two discrete sections – one’s the visit to see Daredevil in San Francisco, and the other is Jen’s trip to Latveria. Jen goes to see DD, as opposed to just calling him, in part because I loved the idea of her going to a new location (and I wanted to see Javier draw it), but also because I wanted to actually get Matt into the issue and maybe give them a chance to have a little adventure.

Daredevil has been one of my favorite characters forever. FOREVER. I’ve had this thing ever since I started writing Big 2 comics (comics for Marvel and DC) – if I have a chance to sneak a character I love into a storyline, even if it’s not “their” book, then I’ll do it. There’s always a chance all of this could vanish tomorrow, and so I want to take opportunities to write Daredevil, (or Constantine, or Superman, or any of the other characters I’ve done this with). Look at the early issues of any of my runs – you’ll see cameos popping in, and it’s all because of this particular theory.

At this point in the run, we were already talking about doing a court case where She-Hulk faced Daredevil, but it was pretty tentative. There were a lot of question marks surrounding that idea that needed to be addressed before we could move forward. I was hopeful, though, and that’s why I put in this little tease:

I couldn’t believe that DD and Shulkie had never had a case against each other, and I really wanted to do it, no matter how tricky it would be. So, was this whole sequence possibly a little self-generated audition to show that I could successfully write Daredevil in a future She-Hulk storyline? Maybe, in sort of a backhand way.

Anyway, it was a lot of fun.

But so was Latveria!

This script went through a few drafts – one earlier version had a scene involving a squad of SHIELD agents who materialize around Jen just before she attacks Doom’s castle, and tell her she can’t do what she’s doing, because it could cause an international incident, even a war, if she steals Doom’s son from him. They made the same assumption that Doom does – that she’s there to try to take Kristoff to America – as opposed to the actual reason she came, which is just to get them to have some father-son bonding time.

The SHIELD scene was cut because it seemed to add a weird digression to a story that already had a few – all for the best, though, because it meant I could fit in more scenes of Jen smashing poor, hapless Doombots. As we learned yesterday…

Bottin’ ain’t easy.

Favorite panel – oh come on, like you don’t already know:

GIANT DOOM!!!

This one not only has what remains one of my favorite lines from the whole run, it also has Kristoff’s little Sky-Vespa! Touches like that made working with Javier a particular joy. That was exactly the right (precious, particular) vehicle for a guy like Kristoff Vernard to drive around.

Favorite character – I can’t say the Giant Doom again, so Matt Murdock, Esq. gets it.

Tomorrow: The debut of Ron Wimberly on art duties! Our first real look at the mystery of the Blue File! Some very fun cameos! If you have questions about this issue, or anything at all, you can reach me on Twitter (www.twitter.com/charlessoule) or via the email form at www.charlessoule.com.

 

 

 

12 Days of She-Hulk – Issue 3: “The Man Who Wouldn’t Be King”

(Obligatory intro text paragraph – feel free to skip down to the next one if you’ve already been reading these posts.) Here we are with the third of twelve essays I’m writing, one per day as we lead up to the release of She-Hulk #12, the final issue in the current run of the title, on February 18. The idea is to look at each issue a bit more in-depth before we get to that last one. I’m doing these in conjunction with a live-tweet using the tag #12daysofshehulk on Twitter, also one per day leading up to the release of 12 – so you can play along at home! Feel free to @ me (I’m @charlessoule) – I’d love to hear what you think of this issue and all the others, whether it’s a re-read or you’re checking them out for the first time.

If you haven’t read She-Hulk, but you’d like to, you can get the trade for issues 1-6 here, buy all the issues digitally here or hit up your local comic shop.

Issue #3: “The Man Who Wouldn’t Be King”

With Issue 3, all of the pieces were in place to start Jen’s solo law practice in earnest. She had an office, a paralegal/assistant and an investigator. What she did not have, however, was a client. We addressed that here with her first case – an asylum filing on behalf of Kristoff Vernard, the son of Victor Von Doom, PhD. (Doom must have a doctorate, right? Probably lots of doctorates. I know he went to school with Reed, but did we ever see him graduate? Could you imagine if “Dr.” is just a title he gave himself, like those esteemed practitioners J and Dre? Fabulous.)

ANYWAY.

The reason I chose this particular type of legal case is because immigration law has been a significant part of my own practice for many years. I knew from the start that I wanted to get the law side of things in She-Hulk as correct as possible – being a lawyer, I suspected I would be raked across the coals a bit by other attorneys if I got things wrong. I was correct about that, but we’ll get to that more with Issues 8-10. I thought I was pretty safe with immigration, though, since I’ve been doing it so long. While I certainly took some liberties, most of the points you see here are the way asylum actually works in the US.

Not to turn this into a law school class, but in a nutshell, to successfully claim asylum in the States, you have to be able to prove that you’ve been persecuted in your home country because of your membership in a particular race or class (religious group, etc.), that the persecution was connected to the government, and that it would be likely to recur if you were shipped back home. That posed some tricky questions for me, because Kristoff has mostly been shown to be Doom’s hand-picked heir to the throne of Latveria. They’ve had their differences over the years, but it was pretty consistent that he stood to inherit an entire country if and when Doom died. Hardly “persecution.”

Unless… Kristoff wasn’t sure that’s what he actually wanted. Once I came up with that central idea – that Kristoff was a kid who had been groomed for something all his life, but he was realizing he might want to at least see what else was out there… I had a story.

Ultimately, this little tale (which concludes in Issue 4) is about fathers and sons. You’ll see that the legal stories I told in this run of She-Hulk tend to another, more potent emotional throughline than just a simple contract dispute or something like that. There’s always another angle – which hopefully makes them easier to connect with as a reader.

Why did I make Kristoff read as spoiled Eurotrash? Easy – I thought it would be funny, especially the way it would contribute Jen’s increasing exasperation as she deals with him. As an attorney, you don’t like every client, but you have to do your best for them whether you like them or not. That’s part of the obligation of being a lawyer (and a physician, and any other profession with a “duty of care.”) Hopefully, though, by the end you guys connected with him a bit (as does Jen.) Kristoff has had a bizarre, fairly awful upbringing, and it’s hard to hold that against him. Too much.

Favorite panel – this one is very tough. I loved a lot of what Javier did in this issue. So, I will pick several!

(This gag was related to the idea that Hei Hei doesn’t seem like your average monkey. He’s taking notes! Wait, can he read and write? And then you get the scribbles… “solid work, Hei Hei.”)

(I just love that everyone is on their phones. That’s pretty typical of the fun stuff Javier would add. He also sometimes vehemently disagreed with scripted ideas – I originally had this whole idea of putting in maps of Brooklyn and Queens to help convey the layout of where they were traveling in the issue, just to lock in the geography, but he thought he could get it done without them. Every issue is a discussion.)

(look at the swirls from the engines!)

Favorite character – it has to be the ill-fated Ernst. I bet being a Doombot is probably a pretty tough gig. I’d wager that of all the many types of mechanical automatons in the Marvel universe, we’ve seen more Doombots destroyed than any of the others. Oh well.

No one ever said ‘bottin was easy.

Tomorrow: Latveria! And Daredevil! If you have questions about this issue, or anything at all, you can reach me on Twitter (www.twitter.com/charlessoule) or via the email form at www.charlessoule.com.