She-Hulk #9 – Review

As some of you may know, I just graduated law school, which hardly makes me an expert on all things legal, but which at least has given me enough experience to see how accurate legal fiction is. Now, Soule is a full-fledged attorney with a good amount of actual practice behind him, so on paper, there’s no reason to think I’d ever catch him making mistakes in portraying the art and craft of lawyering. That doesn’t mean I won’t try, however; that’s the ego of a lawyer for you.

But first, let’s talk about the actual story in the issue. Of course, we’re all curious to know what kind of crime someone would try to pin on the impeccable Steve Rogers, and Soule delivers a decent one that even manages to fit with the ex-Captain’s character. [Spoiler alert!] It’s actually not that difficult to imagine a young, self-righteous Steve unintentionally provoking a thug into killing his pal, although it makes Steve look a lot more like a moron than a murderer.

Steve doesn’t leave things to your imagination, however; he flat-out admits that everything the late Harold Fogler said Steve had done is true. Although Soule ends the issue on that note, we know, somehow, he’s going to worm Steve out of taking the blame. I couldn’t tell you how, but I do know it’s highly unlikely that Soule’s going to permanently stain Captain America’s reputation in the pages of someone else’s book, especially with a story so thin and open-ended.*

I’ll leave it to the Musings to talk about some of the legal problems I see with Fogler’s “testimony,” but even from a narrative standpoint, it’s flawed. It’s completely one-sided, for one, so it could all very well be true and Steve still has plenty of room to elaborate and clear himself. For another, Fogler’s deliberately vague about what he was doing (“I got in with a bad crowd… We were getting ready to cause some trouble…”) and who he was doing it with (“These are dangerous characters… I could see the boss getting angrier and angrier…”). It hardly takes someone with a legal background to find all this very, very sketchy—because it actually is.

But we also have to be understanding of the limitations Soule’s working with here, trying to fit an entire trial into two or three issues. That’s not really possible without taking some narrative liberties and loosening the legal pretensions to a certain degree, but that doesn’t diminish the story any less. Looking at this from a layperson’s perspective, I think Soule does a pretty great job making the legalities seem convincing and exciting (and probably somewhat more accurate than, say, Law & Order).

Some holes he just can’t paper over, however. The one that sticks out the most is how Jen seems to have no idea what Steve’s side of the story is, which is the only way Soule can get her to react to the information that comes to light, but which also makes it seem like she’s bad at her job.** Maybe all will be explained once Patsy comes back from the “mission” Steve set her on, but again, Jen should probably know what that mission entails and what he expects Patsy to find. Otherwise, it looks like Steve is deliberately sabotaging Jen’s ability to advocate for him, which is probably the more serious crime he’s committing in this issue.

As you can imagine, the issue is almost all talking heads, which Pulido tries to liven up with some striking reaction panels and by shifting the POV ever so slightly. He also does his part to keep us in the dark by blacking out a critical figure in Fogler’s flashback and limiting our vision in the panels, although that should be even more reason to alert your suspicion. It’s hard to argue with Rocks’ identical assistants working together to draw a banana at Hei-Hei’s behest, however. Nope—can’t beat that.

– Minhquan Nguyen