Avengers and Philosophy: Earth's Mightiest Thinkers, The Read Online Free PDF Page B

for them to travel across the page than across town.
     
    When Jen and Weezie violate comic book convention by stepping over the gutter, they force us to think about how the transition from one panel to the next operates in standard, non-“meta” comics. We normally make certain assumptions regarding the passage of time and distance when a character is depicted in two different locations in two adjacent panels—an assumption subverted by Weezie and Jen’s gutter-jumping mode of transportation. Jen and Weezie’s ability to treat the blank space between images as if it were a part of their world and not a part of ours highlights the critical role that panel transitions, and our assumptions about them, play in our understanding of comics. 7
     
    In the fifth panel, Weezie begins to explain things to a confused and exasperated Jen. Weezie was formerly the Blonde Phantom, a Golden Age comic book character published by Timely Comics from 1946 to 1949 ( The Blonde Phantom was a real Golden Age comic, and Timely Comics eventually became Marvel Comics). 8 She eventually retired from crimefighting and married her boss, detective Mark Mason. No longer appearing in a monthly comic, she and her husband began to age. After watching her husband die while other Timely Comics heroes such as Captain America and Namor the Submariner were revived, Weezie decides to manipulate events so that she will appear in Jen’s comic book and stop aging.
     
    The strategy works, and Weezie does not get any older. In fact, she even regains her youth in later issues! Weezie is, again, clearly aware of, and able to take advantage of, comic book conventions, including the fact that comic book characters typically do not age. Her presence in The Sensational She-Hulk also provides us with an opportunity to reflect on the development of mainstream superhero comics over the last eight decades. A particularly resonant example occurs later in this same issue. After Weezie asks why Jen’s clothing doesn’t rip in an immodest, inappropriate manner during battles, Jen shows Weezie the Comics Code label sewn into her chemise, reminding us that the industry-imposed self-censorship of the code did not exist when Weezie was appearing in her own comic.
     
    Don’t Make the She-Hulk Angry . . .
     
    Later issues of Byrne’s run on The Sensational She-Hulk contain additional strange metafictional twists and turns. Jen is able to travel between dimensions and is able to reappear after being erased from reality, by tearing the paper on which the comic is printed and stepping through the hole. 9 She is able to recognize regions of deep space by noticing that Byrne has reused background art from an earlier issue. 10 One of the most interesting metafictional stories, however, occurs in Byrne’s last issue on the book.
     
    Issue #50 (April 1993) begins with Renee, the editor of The Sensational She-Hulk , informing Jen that Byrne has died and that they need to select a new artist for the comic. Jen is then shown a handful of sample pages (depicted as full pages of the comic) in which a number of influential comics creators—Terry Austin, Howard Chaykin, Dave Gibbons, Adam Hughes, Howard Mackie, Frank Miller, Wendy Pini, and Walt Simonson—provide their own distinctive take on the character. Terry Austin’s contribution is particularly interesting: an inker who frequently collaborated with Byrne, he depicts Jen and a host of other characters in the style of E. C. Segar’s Thimble Theatre (Popeye) comic strip, complete with Wimpy, as Galactus, devouring the moon sandwiched within a huge hamburger bun. By depicting Jen and her cohort as Thimble Theatre characters, Austin forces us to confront the differences between monthly mainstream superhero comic books and daily newspaper comic strips. In particular, this page highlights the puzzling fact that newspaper comic strips are typically sillier than comic books, yet have traditionally been held in much higher cultural regard