Avengers and Philosophy: Earth's Mightiest Thinkers, The (10 page)

In the fifth panel, Weezie begins to explain things to a confused and exasperated Jen. Weezie was formerly the Blonde Phantom, a Golden Age comic book character published by Timely Comics from 1946 to 1949 (
The Blonde Phantom
was a real Golden Age comic, and Timely Comics eventually became Marvel Comics).
⁸
She eventually retired from crimefighting and married her boss, detective Mark Mason. No longer appearing in a monthly comic, she and her husband began to age. After watching her husband die while other Timely Comics heroes such as Captain America and Namor the Submariner were revived, Weezie decides to manipulate events so that she will appear in Jen’s comic book and stop aging.

The strategy works, and Weezie does not get any older. In fact, she even regains her youth in later issues! Weezie is, again, clearly aware of, and able to take advantage of, comic book conventions, including the fact that comic book characters typically do not age. Her presence in
The Sensational She-Hulk
also provides us with an opportunity to reflect on the development of mainstream superhero comics over the last eight decades. A particularly resonant example occurs later in this same issue. After Weezie asks why Jen’s clothing doesn’t rip in an immodest, inappropriate manner during battles, Jen shows Weezie the Comics Code label sewn into her chemise, reminding us that the industry-imposed self-censorship of the code did not exist when Weezie was appearing in her own comic.

Don’t Make the She-Hulk Angry . . .

Later issues of Byrne’s run on
The Sensational She-Hulk
contain additional strange metafictional twists and turns. Jen is able to travel between dimensions and is able to reappear after being erased from reality, by tearing the paper on which the comic is printed and stepping through the hole.
⁹
She is able to recognize regions of deep space by noticing that Byrne has reused background art from an earlier issue.
¹⁰
One of the most interesting metafictional stories, however, occurs in Byrne’s last issue on the book.

Issue #50 (April 1993) begins with Renee, the editor of
The Sensational She-Hulk
, informing Jen that Byrne has died and that they need to select a new artist for the comic. Jen is then shown a handful of sample pages (depicted as full pages of the comic) in which a number of influential comics creators—Terry Austin, Howard Chaykin, Dave Gibbons, Adam Hughes, Howard Mackie, Frank Miller, Wendy Pini, and Walt Simonson—provide their own distinctive take on the character. Terry Austin’s contribution is particularly interesting: an inker who frequently collaborated with Byrne, he depicts Jen and a host of other characters in the style of E. C. Segar’s
Thimble Theatre
(Popeye) comic strip, complete with Wimpy, as Galactus, devouring the moon sandwiched within a huge hamburger bun. By depicting Jen and her cohort as
Thimble Theatre
characters, Austin forces us to confront the differences between monthly mainstream superhero comic books and daily newspaper comic strips. In particular, this page highlights the puzzling fact that newspaper comic strips are typically sillier than comic books, yet have traditionally been held in much higher cultural regard than mainstream superhero comics. Issue #50 concludes with Jen discovering Byrne tied up and locked in a closet. When Jen finally reads his new take on the comic—one that renames her Li’l She-Hulk and depicts her and her supporting cast as children—she tosses Byrne out of the window, ironically killing her “creator.”

The Sensational She-Hulk
only lasted ten issues after Byrne’s departure. Jen had to wait until 2004 to star in another solo title, but the wait was worth it. Lasting from 2004 to 2007, Dan Slott’s interpretation of the character in
She-Hulk
continued Byrne’s metafictional take on the Jade Giantess, although in a subtler vein. In Slott’s stories, Jen is able to use comic books bearing the Comics Code seal in the courtroom as legally admissible historical documents.
¹¹
One cover again shows Jen threatening to rip up your favorite comics if you don’t buy her book (but this time it’s Civil War variants and not X-Men comics).
¹²
Running through all of this, Jen’s new job as a lawyer specializing in defending captured supervillains provides the backdrop for an extended parody of the conceits and conventions of superhero comic book storytelling.

What Are the She-Hulk’s Powers?

Reflecting on both Byrne’s and Slott’s takes on Jen’s solo adventures raises more questions. Did the weird, metafictional aspects of the Byrne and Slott stories really happen? If so, does Jen also have these metafictional powers when appearing in
Avengers
comics, and just choose not to use them? Or are Jen’s metafictional solo adventures merely imaginary stories, in a similar vein to Marvel’s long-running
What If
series of comics? Or perhaps are they merely delusions that Jen and Weezie share?

We can put this question in slightly more precise terms. A work of fiction, such as a novel or comic, can be seen as a partial description of an imaginary or fictional world where things occur as they are depicted within the fiction. Most of the stories published by Marvel Comics intersect and overlap in complicated ways and are meant to be understood as describing a single, very complex fictional world—the Marvel Universe. Jen does not seem to possess any strange metafictional abilities when she appears in
Avengers
or in
Fantastic Four
, however, and in the few comics where she does display these traits either her behavior confuses other, non-“meta” characters, or she is depicted as being a bit crazy.
¹³

As a result, there are long-standing disputes regarding whether the She-Hulk stories we have discussed really happened, in the sense that they describe fictional events that occur in the same fictional universe as the events depicted in more traditional Avengers stories, or whether they are descriptions of some other fictional world (perhaps one that Jen imagines or is deluded into thinking she inhabits). As you would guess, the Internet age has only intensified these disagreements. Fortunately, we need not get bogged down in online fan forum discussions, since there is a more authoritative source to which we can turn: the
Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe.

The original version of the
Official Handbook
was published in 1982, and numerous updated versions and addendums have been published since. The
Official Handbook
consists of detailed biographies and data for major and minor characters in the Marvel Universe, and relevant excerpts from this stand-alone reference work are often included as “bonus material” at the end of trade paperback reprint collections. If, as seems reasonable, we can treat the
Official Handbook
as the definitive source regarding what is and is not the case in the Marvel Universe, then we merely need to look up the entry for Jennifer Walters (actually, she is listed under She-Hulk) and consult the description of her powers and abilities.

Actually, things are not that simple. New editions of the
Official Handbook
do not merely contain additional information that wasn’t available in previous editions. Indeed, facts in previous editions can turn out to no longer be facts in later editions through a process called retroactive continuity, or
retconning
, where later stories (often involving time travel or all-powerful cosmic beings) change facts about past stories, or at least our interpretation of them. Jen has been a victim of such retconning. In
Uncanny X-Men
#435 (December 2003), she is depicted as having sex with the Juggernaut, but it is later revealed that this was actually a Jen Walters doppelgänger from a parallel dimension.
¹⁴
Nevertheless, while facts about what did or didn’t happen in the past might be changed by strange events in the future, resulting in revisions to the
Official Handbook
, presumably changes in what powers a particular character possesses at a particular point in time should not change. Or so one would think.

If we consult the
Official Handbook
, it turns out that even this definitive source is less definitive than we might have hoped. Jen’s
Official Handbook
entry included in the May 2002 one-shot
Thing and She-Hulk: The Long Night
states that:

At one point the She-Hulk and [Weezie] Mason shared the belief that they and those around them were characters in a comic book, but this delusion rarely detracted from the She-Hulk’s fighting ability, and she no longer seems to suffer from it.
¹⁵

Several years later, however, the
Official Handbook
entry for Jen included in 2008’s
Marvel Encyclopedia: The Avengers
contains the following information about her superpowers:

She can swap physiques with other humans using Ovoid mind techniques, and seems to have the ability to sense extra-dimensional viewers observing her, a power similar to her cousin’s ability to see astral forms; Jen tends to downplay this last trait, as speaking to an unseen audience tends to unsettle those around her.

This later description not only lists Jen’s metafictional self-awareness as one of her superpowers, but it also tries to legitimize it as a reasonable superpower within the constraints of the Marvel Universe by comparing it to the Incredible Hulk’s ability to perceive supernatural entities.

Maybe Jen’s Reading This Chapter Right Now

I won’t try to determine definitively whether Jen’s metafictional adventures really happened, although it does seem unlikely that a highly delusional woman could successfully balance a legal career and roles in both the Avengers and the Fantastic Four. I will point out, though, that the question is not merely a fanboyish worry about the details of Marvel continuity (not that there’s anything wrong with that!). The puzzle is more far-reaching. If the metafictional aspects of Jen’s solo adventures are imaginary or delusional, then this puts the reliability of metafiction, taken as an accurate record of what happens in the fictional world supposedly being described, in doubt. As a result, we will need to reevaluate the role that metafictional content plays in describing the fictional worlds that this sort of fiction purports to describe. Given the increasing frequency and importance of metafiction within comics and other art forms, including literature and film, this promises to have a profound impact on the way that we understand storytelling in general. More important, perhaps, it will have a profound impact on how we understand Jennifer Walters, the Sensational She-Hulk—and perhaps how she understands herself.
¹⁶

NOTES

1.
Patricia Waugh,
Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction
(London: Routledge, 1982), 2.

2.
For a discussion of Deadpool’s metafictional adventures, see Joseph J. Darowski, “When You Know You’re Just a Comic Book Character,” in
X-Men and Philosophy: Astonishing Insight and Uncanny Argument in the Mutant X-Verse
, ed. Rebecca Housel and J. Jeremy Wisnewski (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2009), 107–123.

3.
For example, the question, “What is it that all artworks have in common that makes them art?”

4.
See, for example, Peter Kivy,
Philosophies of Arts: An Essay in Differences
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).

5.
See, for example, M. Thomas Inge,
Anything Can Happen in a Comic Book: Centennial Reflections on an Art Form
(Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1995), and Roy T. Cook, “Comics Are Not Film: Metacomics and Medium-Specific Conventions,” in
The Art of Comics: A Philosophical Approach
, ed. Aaron Meskin and Roy T. Cook (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2012).

6.
Sensational She-Hulk
#1 (May 1989), reprinted in
Sensational She-Hulk
(2011), which includes the first eight issues of the series.

7.
For an insightful discussion of the role of the gutter in comics, see Scott McCloud,
Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art
(New York: Harper, 1993), ch. 3.

8.
The Blonde Phantom
#12–22 (December 1946–March 1949).

9.
Sensational She-Hulk
#5 (September 1989) and #37 (March 1992).