She-Hulk is an adventuress, not a porn star

I write about culture, so it’s inevitable that my desk here at The Post is cluttered. Five piles of books creep up the walls, DVDs lean against each other in untidy stacks and printouts of old studies about Hollywood are cross-hatched on top of each other, waiting for my highlighter. There are some trinkets, too, though these have become less exciting over the years, and only a few pieces have survived successive cullings: a Knope 2012 button and a Ron Swanson bobblehead doll, a postcard with Dirk Bruna’s Miffy in an art museum, a signed poster from the Decemberists tour for “The Crane Wife,” which I won in a review-writing contest before I even dreamed of being a professional critic.

But my favorite piece of ephemera, set at eye-level to my left, is an Amanda Conner and  Laura Martin print of She-Hulk beating Iron Man at arm-wrestling.  It’s a terrific scene. Tony Stark, in full armor, has his lips parted in consternation at his loss. Spider-Man, hanging from the ceiling, has a hand to his forehead in amazement. Wolverine’s paying out the bet he placed before the match. Storm and Natasha Romanoff are taking in the scene around them with knowing expressions on their faces. Ms. Marvel and Sue Storm are cheering on She-Hulk from the sidelines, Marvel’s hands shooting into the hair in excitement, Sue’s arms up in a fighting stance as she urges her on. And a little smile plays across She-Hulks lips: she’s confident in her victory, but her certainty in no way reduces her pleasure.

The image is everything I love about She-Hulk, also known as Jennifer Walters, who became a superhero after she was shot and her cousin, Bruce Banner, had to give her a transfusion of his own blood to save her life. And it’s why it’s particularly puzzling to me to read the New Yorker’s Jill Lepore, who is generally no slouch when it comes to comics, slam She-Hulk as part of a sour rant about the state of female comic book characters.

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“Maybe it’s not possible to create reasonable female comic-book superheroes, since their origins are so tangled up with magazines for men,” she writes. “True, they’re not much more ridiculous than male superheroes. But they’re all ridiculous in the same way. Dazzler, Miss Elusive, the Enchantress, She-Wolf, Medusa, She-Hulk. Their power is their allure, which, looked at another way, is the absence of power. Even their bodies are not their own. They are without force.”

I don’t necessarily disagree with everything in Lepore’s piece, which is framed as an experiment in watching “Avengers: Age of Ultron” and reading “A-Force #1” with two 10-year-old boys, though the way she pushes her subjects to see sex instead of strength in these stories has a whiff of Wertham to it. Superheroine’s costumes have historically been a scandal (though as comics writer G. Willow Wilson notes about the cover in question, ” They are, for the most part, fully covered — a profound departure from the teeny bikinis of the 80’s and 90’s, while still cognizant of the fact that these characters are superheroes, and superheroes — male and female alike — wear funky colored latex. If Dr. Lepore is categorically opposed to latex, she should consider trolling a different genre.”). And both Marvel and DC Comics certainly should have more confidence about introducing and promoting stand-alone female characters.

But just because a female superhero has her origins in a man’s office or powers doesn’t mean she’s boring.

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It’s always been the case that when you take a man’s rib and fashion it into a woman, unsettling things start to happen. If Eve had arrived, fully formed, in the Garden, her rebelliousness and curiosity might have been due to the fact that she was an entirely different sort of creature from Adam. But because they are the same, Eve’s choices pose a challenge to Adam’s way of doing things. Maybe Adam’s submission to God is wise. Maybe it’s a kind of slavery. Whatever answer you arrive at, Eve is the person who makes us realize that there are many different ways to be human beyond the one that Adam has chosen.

Such is the case with many female superheroes, but it’s particularly true for She-Hulk, who was born not just from Bruce Banner’s blood, but from Marvel Comics’ fears that “The Bionic Woman” would steal some of the company’s super-powered thunder. But as a product of the marriage between patriarchy and capitalism, Jennifer Walters proved a delightful surprise.

Where the Hulk was a raging monster deprived of reason and self-control, She-Hulk was able to maintain her sense when she got green and smash-y. In the July 6, 1980, issue of “The Savage She-Hulk,” written by David Anthony Kraft, she faces off with Iron Man, who assumes that, like her cousin, she’s a dumb animal. He dashes up into the sky with her and explains, like he’s talking to a kindergartener, “If you let go, you’ll fall — fall back down to the ground! You’ll get hurt!” When she cuttingly explains that she can rip apart his suit as easily as popping a tab on a soda, leaving him far more vulnerable to the fall than she would ever be, Iron Man is shocked: “You mean … you actually speak English?” Back on the ground, he confesses, “I didn’t know. Guess I just thought you’d be … dumber.”

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The sequence is a sharp and funny take on the limits of mindless male rage, and surely an inspiration for both the drawing on my desk and the semi-aerial showdown between Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.) and Hulk (Mark Ruffalo) in “Age of Ultron.” If anything, She-Hulk is an improvement on the Hulk, combining immense physical power with rationality, subtlety and a real sense of humor.

She-Hulk’s also been a nice vector to explore the porn star problem Lepore describes. In Dan Slott’s “Single Green Female” arc, Jennifer wakes up in bed with a male model who she’d gone out with with the night before when she was in her She-Hulk persona. Anxious about how he might feel about having gone to bed with a green goddess only to wake up with a mousy lawyer, she wills herself to transform back into She-Hulk — and knocks her hunk out of bed with the force of the transition.

She-Hulk might be a sexually outgoing party girl who throws bashes so raucous they get her kicked out of the Avengers mansion. Juan Bobillo, one of my favorite illustrators to work on the character, draws her with muscles even more impressive than her mammaries. If She-Hulk’s body or her partying were intended to impress men, she might even be a Cool Girl, that dreaded creature conjured up in “Gone Girl” to describe a woman who’s optimized herself for male entertainment and comfort.

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But the power of She-Hulk is that she is, as the musician Janelle Monae described herself in mid-April, “not for male consumption,” and not, as the writer David Goyer crudely suggested in January, “the chick that you could f— if you were Hulk.” The pleasure she pursues is her own, whether she’s seducing a lover or singing her favorite Chumbawamba track at karaoke. She’s a true adventuress.

If She-Hulk were merely a lesser knock-off of Bruce Banner, Lepore and her childish interlocutor might be correct to describe her as “weak.” But instead, She-Hulk is a way to explore what it would be like for a woman like Jennifer Walters to acquire the freedom, strength and, frankly, the entitlement that so often accrues to men. If superheroes have begun to take their abilities for granted, She-Hulk makes having powers feel fresh, fun and liberating all over again.

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