Ms. Green Genes

She-Hulk Sensational #1

It’s the 30th anniversary of the creation of She-Hulk, so Marvel has put together a commemorative comic starring the Jade Giantess. We start out with a new story about Shulkie worrying about hitting her 30th birthday and getting visited by a bunch of spirits, including Stan Lee (Why is Stan Lee a spirit?) and the Ghosts of She-Hulk Past, Present, and Future. After that, there’s a story from a couple years ago where She-Hulk and Ms. Marvel team up with a possible Skrulled-version of Spider-Woman to fight HYDRA. And finally, we get a classic and thoroughly goofy story from the John Byrne era of She-Hulk’s comic.

Verdict: Thumbs up. Loved the new story by Peter David and Jonboy Meyers — it had a lot of funny stuff in it, like a few nods to Shulkie breaking the fourth wall, a cameo appearance by former “She-Hulk” writer Dan Slott, and Iron Man proclaiming that “I just barfed in my helmet.” I also loved the Byrne story — it really does encapsulate a lot of the things that make Shulkie so much fun as a character. I actively disliked, however, the more recent Skrull-clone-Spider-Woman story, ’cause it’s mostly just lame and unnecessary. Still, on the whole, it’s all fun and worth reading.

Wonder Woman #42

A trio of Green Lanterns, including the Khund GL introduced a couple years ago in “Wonder Woman,” investigate a planetary genocide caused by an unusual bioweapon — billions of tiny snakes that ate everyone, grew larger, then turned on each other, growing larger and larger as they ate themselves. Two of the three Lanterns make their escape, though the third gets eaten by the snakes. Turns out it’s a really impractical way of raising a really, really big snakey food source — and this time, it’s a food source that’s got some Lantern energy in it. Later, we find these snake-producing aliens attacking Earth — they’re all women, they want 100 Earth women to induct into their society, and they plan on exterminating everyone else for food. Can Wonder Woman stop a bunch of crazy alien cannibalistic snake fanatics all by herself?

Verdict: I hate to say it, but thumbs down. Decent dialogue, nice art, but the background is just too corny to take really seriously. Any society that has to rely on a food source as unreliable and inefficient as self-eating snakes is too stupid to survive at all.