Red She-Hulk #67 – Review

By: Jeff Parker (Writer), Carlo Pagulayan, Patrick Olliffe, Wellington Alves (Artists), Guy Major (Colorist)

The Story: Betty, Aaron, Jennifer and Man-Thing deals with the Echelon soldiers and gets to know about the order of the Shield with Nikola Tesla.

The Review: What a pity.

It’s always hard to see a title go, to see that despite all their efforts, the creators could not make the book sell enough to warrant a continuation. God knows that in this market we have seen a lot of cancellation on splendid titles, with the likes of Winter Soldier and Dial H being taken away because sales were low. It’s never a good thing to see such things happen, but there are also worse things that can happen to books that are cancelled. One of these, unfortunately, is to have an unfitting an unrewarding conclusion.

I am sad to say that this is the case here as even though Jeff Parker tries his very best to give us a grand finale and to resolve every plot points he had seeded in his book, he does not succeed. What gives this impression would be the fact that he tries to conclude too many elements at the same time, which gives the issue a very rushed feeling as the action jumbles a bit chaotically, not letting the reader assimilate everything that happens at a pace that feels satisfactory.

Red She-Hulk #66 – Review

By: Jeff Parker (Writer), Carlo Pagulayan, Patrick Olliffe, Joe Bennett, Ruy Jose (Artists), Val Staples (Colorist)

The Story: Betty should really know better than to try to harm Man-Thing. Seriously, the dude pretty much is the protector of various other realities.

The Review: This seems to be some kind of habit at some point. As awesome a writer as he is, capable of bringing enough care and development to characters that would never receive any, it seems he’s always the unlucky one that never has enough readership to maintain a book for a proper period of time.

Case in point, Red She-Hulk, who will see its last issue next month, has to make a point for the long-term storyline that had been running since the title and protagonist switch that happened when Betty Ross took a hold of the book. Despite the care he tried to give to this book, it seems that this book never really took off in a way that made it connect to a larger audience. Is it perhaps the lack of marketing, or maybe the sad fact that most female-lead books aren’t as hot sellers as other books in the superhero industry?

Red She-Hulk #65 – Review

By: Jeff Parker (Writer), Carlo Pagulayan, Ray-Anthony Height, Wellington Alves (Artists), Val Staples (Colorist)

The Story: Betty and Aaron have to fight several villains on Mount Rushmore in order to access another part of the great machine.

The Review: I think this title has an unfortunate curse, one that makes it unable to be consistent in terms of quality, despite the best effort of the team working on it. Either they balance their action and development well-enough to give us a rewarding read, or something gets in the way of our enjoyment.

Here, what seems to be causing a bit of disappointment would be the setting of a routine of some sort in the book. Sure, Jeff Parker bring some good and original ideas in the mix, but somehow the plot of most issues so far seems to be ‘’exotic locale, fight bad guys, look at the machine’’, which then continues like this. We are sometime treated to the development of other situations, like the original She-Hulk meeting General Fortean or the Mad Thinker and his schemes.

Red She-Hulk #64 – Review

By: Jeff Parker (Writer), Carlo Pagulayan, Wellington Alves (Artists), Val Staples (Colorist)

The Story: Both Betty and Aaron gets underground as they meet the Mole Monster who has some monsters for them to fight and some information to share.

The Review: Now this is the Jeff Parker I remember liking in the first place, the man who dared gives some absurd concepts their chance at shining, using them to his advantage to write quality stories. In short, the writer who could manage to give some deeper characterization and bring some fun to any characters if he was granted the chance to do so.

Red She-Hulk #63 – Review

By: Jeff Parker (Writer), Carlo Pagulayan, Wellington Alves (Artists), Val Staples (Colorist)

The Story: Betty and Aaron are on the run as S.H.I.E.L.D is trying to get them.

The Review: This title is a little bit infuriating. One second we think we’re going to have some more moment with our titular character and delve into who she is and what she wants, the next we get sidetracked with dozens of side characters that advances the plot without our heroine.

This does not mean it is a bad title or a bad issue, but it is annoying to see that Betty Ross does not necessarily have a great impact in her own book. So far, there seems to be more focus on the threat, Aaron Stack and the side characters than on Red She-Hulk. While there seems to be more characterization on her part, it still does not make her such an important or integral character to the plot. It even seems like they could have replaced her, so far, with a whole plethora of other characters and it would not have made any difference.

Red She-Hulk #62 – Review

By: Jeff Parker (Writer), Carlo Pagulayan, Wellington Alves (Artists), Val Staples (Colorist)

The Story: Betty explains how she got so much information on the potential disaster of military meta-humans and also encounters a cell of metahumans out to get her.

The Review: This is more like it. Although the series had suffered a bit with the absence of the titular character in the first issues of the re-titling of this book, the previous issue had remedied this problem a bit. This issue does it even further, giving us more of Betty Ross as a character.

Indeed, Machine Man is pushed a bit aside for this issue as most of the action and dialogue are centered on Betty Ross, both as her human person and as the Red She-Hulk. As the first page opens us on a scene explaining just how Betty met Nikola Tesla (the same one from S.H.I.E.L.D), we get much more characterization from her. Taking some part of Matt Fraction and Greg Pak previous versions of the character, Jeff Parker adds some more layers to her and what could make her go angry. It would make some sense of course that she’d become much more headstrong now that she knows she has the power of a Hulk, considering how much she had suffered with all the things people with that kind of power has done to her. Jeff Parker version of the character plays her like this, while still making her a good and interesting heroine, which is something I commend him for.

Red She-Hulk #61 – Review

By: Jeff Parker (Writer), Carlo Pagulayan, Wellington Alves (Artists), Val Staples (colorist)

The Story: Red She-Hulk and Machine Man escapes from a military base, then they engage in some conversation, explaining their motivation for what each other does.

The Review: In my previous review of this series, I said that the title character of this series should have been Machine Man, as he was the one which had received the most screen-time and had received much more development than Betty Ross. Since he had been our point of view character and that, in the span of three issues, we knew close to nothing of the reasons why Betty Ross was doing all these actions; the title was suffering since the book is titled Red She-Hulk.

This issue shows how much a series can change in the span of a single issue as we finally get more focus on Betty as a character, with a large part of the issue dealing with just who she is, who she was and how she got directed on the path she is right now. This helps us readers in connecting with her, since that character has actually been active since the 60’s in the Marvel Universe.