She-Hulk #6 – Review

By: Charles Soule (story), Ron Wimberly (art)

The Story: Jen has her own demons to confront.

The Review: Exposition is a necessary evil in storytelling. Without it, stories lose context, substance, pretty much everything that gives the characters and action real meaning. At the same time, nothing slows down a story more. Part of the art of writing is doling out enough of exposition so the story doesn’t devolve into a mindless series of dramatic outbursts and car explosions, while pacing it so you don’t just bury your audience in background facts.

If a long streak of exposition is bad, it’s even worse when you’ve heard it all before. Comics have a particularly bad habit of doing this, I imagine for purposes of being accessible to the fabled new readers. It’s not a great justification; when you consider most comics tend to peak at their debut and gradually lose readers afterward, the repeated exposition seems more likely to annoy loyalists than inform the uninitiated, which is exactly what happens here. All that recapping about Jen’s blue file and the parties involved and the fact you’re not meant to say the plaintiff’s name out loud just seems redundant when the issue has a recap page to rely on.

She-Hulk #5 – Review

By: Charles Soule (story), Ron Wimberly (art), Rico Renzi (colors)

The Story: Now adding another person to those who must not be named.

The Review: You’ve probably heard of cops and criminals who run into each other so often that there’s an almost friendly tension between them. Familiarity, it seems, breeds friendship as much as contempt. I imagine that if superheroes and villains were real, they’d probably have the same dynamic. At some point, those repeated encounters, which so often turn out the same way—the villain caught, defeated, humiliated—would have to strip away the pretensions and B.S. for a straighter relationship.

Which is basically how Jenn and Herman Schultz (a.k.a. Shocker) play it in this issue. Having gotten to the point where Jenn can just show up on Herman’s doorstep to ask some questions, sparring each other is an unnecessary formality (and a futile one; Herman has a flee-on-sight rule for Hulks of any size, color, and gender).* Instead, they talk shop amicably over Chinese food (Jenn’s treat), charming Herman into cooperating with her investigation into the mysterious Blue File.

Black Dynamite #1 – Review

By: Brian Ash (writer), Ron Wimberly (pencils), Sal Buscema (inks), JM Ringuet (colors) and Chris Mowry (letters)

I have very mixed feelings about this issue.  Your enjoyment will really come down to how you like your Blaxploitation.  Back in the 1970s when the Blaxploitation genre existed, it was a deadly serious thing.  It was all about strong black men (and women) taking a stand for the community when politicians, police and businessmen didn’t care what happened in urban black neighborhoods.  Being a suburban white kid, I obviously couldn’t really understand it.  But it was clear than films like Shaft, Dolemite, Foxy Brown, Super Fly, etc. came from a place of anger rather than a place of laughter.

Then the 1980s happened and “we” decided all those afros and hot-girls in bell-bottom pants and strong black men learning kung fu was really silly and we started to get films like I’m Gonna Git You Sucker that turned Blaxploitation on its ear and made fun of everything….and I do mean EVERYTHING.  But, within those films, there was always a sense of homage to why the genre existed in the first place.

This story leads off by showing 1970s Black Dynamite fixing a problem in the neighborhood with nunchucks only to be cast out of the community for causing more wreckage than he solved.  After being cast-out, he goes on a walkabout only to be tracked down by the government at the very end of the issue.  I presume that the first issues of this miniseries will detail his exploits in present day with the government – and probably lead him full-circle back to the neighborhood.