She-Hulk #9 // Review
April has been feeling awkward ever since she made herself and her husband victims of gamma radiation. Things are very awkward for both of them, but now she’s going to fix things. All she needs to do is get into Jen Walter’s DNA...and her energy, and everything’s going to be okay in She-Hulk #9. Writer Rainbow Rowell continues a largely satisfying run with the jade giantess in another issue rendered for the page by artist Takeshi Miyazawa and colorist Rico Renzi. Though the specific nuances of Rowell’s script aren’t handled with the kind of weight they need, the latest date with Jen Walters proves to be a memorable one.
April and Mark haven’t exactly asked for Jen’s permission to...y’know...kidnap her. April intends to do something awful to Jen without her permission until Jack shows up. Then things begin to get really, really complicated, but don’t think that Jen doesn’t know what’s going on. Jen knows Rainbow Rowell...even if she doesn’t mention her by name. Whatever it is that’s going to happen, Jen’s going to see the action from both sides of the page. That doesn’t mean that she has to like it, though.
Since she started this latest series, Rainbow Rowell has been hanging out with Jen with a pretty wide lens. The story has covered all ends of her life. In the ninth issue of the series, Rowell’s time with Jen gets quite intimate. When John Byrne opened up the fourth wall for Jen, there was comedy and drama in Jen’s awareness of both sides of the comics page. Rowell fully embraces the more dramatic end of the fourth wall (or lack thereof) in a very powerful moment that adds substantial substance to the intensity of the conflict that’s explored in this chapter.
Miyazawa and Renzi aren’t given a huge canvas for the ninth issue. It all takes place in a single basement in New York. All of it. The whole issue. (And well...some of it takes place on the comics page, but that’s always the case from a certain perspective.) The drama of the conflict is written across the faces of the characters. The action feels suitably percussive as Jen and Jack deal with April and Mark. Miyazawa and Renzi embrace the emotional gravity of the situation that Rowell is conjuring. It all fuses on the page with great visual grace.
It’s refreshing to see Jen break the fourth wall with the kind of strength that she’s exhibiting in the ninth issue of the series, but there’s some delicate finesse that seems slightly out of reach for the creative team. Maybe the sudden turn to the fourth wall feels a bit too sudden. Maybe there should have been a little more of a lead into the big confrontation. Something is missing in the flow of action from beginning to end. It’s not quite clear what it is. Whatever it is, it’s enough of a jarring shift in energy that it feels more clunky than it should, given the overall sophistication of Rowell, Miyazawa, and Renzi’s story.
