I guess the arrival of the She-Hulk television series must’ve been a boon for Rainbow Rowell’s comic series too, since both of the local comic book stores I’ve been to are sold out of #6. Even online retailers are out of stock, except for third-party re-sellers who are trying to make an extra profit. However, in my search for issue #6, I discovered I’d neglected to get issue #5 due to all the hubbub surrounding our big move. I managed to find what I guess is the variant cover of it (which I prefer) in one of my searches for #6 and was confused because I legitimately thought I’d already bought and read #5. I was stood there googling about it for minutes while my fiancee sat in the car, and then they had a $5 minimum for credit cards, so I had to spend even longer finding something worth buying to get my total up. That was way harder than it should’ve been. Maybe if I played card games it would’ve been easier. Or if I read more comics and/or didn’t care about buying something considerably more expensive, like a full volume of something else.
Onto the comic itself, this is another issue that just feels more like set-up than anything. We get introduced to a new character who She-Hulk and the Jack of Hearts fight, are promptly confused about what their deal is, get some character beats between our two main characters, and then are made even more confused about that new character with another revelation about them. I’m interested, but it feels kinda cheap and annoying to introduce a character that makes you ask a ton of questions and then leave them unanswered as a way to get you to continue reading. Like I’ve said before, I’m sure I wouldn’t mind as much if I were reading this in the context of a compiled volume, rather than a one-off issue, but I’m not. I’m learning as I go through this run of She-Hulk that I never intend to consume comics this way again. Maybe that’s sacrilegious to “true” comic fans, but it just feels like if I watched an episode of a show on Hulu and the commercial breaks lasted a month or longer. I can’t really settle into the story at all. Maybe if it was a serialized story like King has done, it would be better, but it’s a comic, meaning you can only fit in so much actual story in a particular issue. Oh well. How many issues do we even have left? I think we’re almost done anyway.
P.S. I did wind up reading all of Fire Punch, so the review of volumes 1-8 of that are soon to come. Just depends upon when I get around to sitting down to write ’em up.
