First of all, one of the five issues collected here is entirely concerned with explaining and cleaning up after some kind of cross-over (in which it looks like Shulkie went crazy and rampaged around) -- which is a massive waste of space, and emblematic of how screwed up "mainstream" comics are. That issue also pushes one of my biggest buttons, in that Shulkie gets worked up about the fact that she might have been responsible for one death during the aforementioned rampage. Hey, girl -- you've caused the death of dozens of people, easy. Your cousin, the original Hulk? I know you make a big deal of arguing that he couldn't possibly have ever let even a little kitten get its widdle toesies hurt, but that's bullshit. I'd bet that at least hundreds, possibly thousands, of people are dead because of him. That's how violence works; that's what happens when super-powered people throw each other through things for forty years or so.So that issue sucked. And the one that's all a long list of random people talking about how special and wonderful Jen Walters/She-Hulk is (with a whole lot of interchangeable over-bulked art by a bunch of probably popular artists) is also tedious and dull.
The rest of this trade is pretty good, though, and those issues really drive home the essential lesson: screw continuity. This book could possibly still be in print in ten years, and no one will give a crap what was going on in Avengers in mid-2005 at that point. So there's no reason that this book should have cared. Comics writers: tell your stories, and ignore the stories the other writers are telling if they don't fit. Really. It's much easier, and it makes everything better.
(On the plus side, this has Juan Bobillo as the artist most of the time; I'm liking his stuff so much I might even go out and see what else he's done. And the same thing for Dan Slott, the writer -- he has a nice light touch and a sense of the absurd that works well with super-powered silliness.)
The Fabulous Book-A-Day Index!
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