She-Hulk and the importance of lawyers in Marvel stories down the years

Marvel’s latest series, She-Hulk: Attorney at Law, will begin its six-episode run on August 18. The show has been created by Jessica Gao, a TV writer who has previously worked on acclaimed shows like Silicon Valley and Rick and Morty (for the latter, she wrote the acclaimed episode ‘Pickle Rick’, which juggles survivalism, science fiction and psychiatry quite impressively). The story follows Jennifer Walters (Tatiana Maslany), a lawyer who works at a large firm called Goodman, Lieber, Kurtzberg and Holliway (GLK &H) specialising in cases involving super-beings. After Walters suffers a car crash alongside her cousin Bruce Banner/The Hulk (Mark Ruffalo), she gets an infusion of his blood that ends up giving her super-powers that are pretty similar. Like Bruce she, too, can turn into a green-skinned, physically imposing version of herself with super-strength and endurance. She can also hold her human form far longer than Bruce and has greater control over her rage (although it’s still there). One of the most interesting bits released from the show so far shows her representing Emil Blonsky aka The Abomination (Tim Roth), a character we’ve seen before in The Incredible Hulk (2008) and Shang-Chi (2021). In the latter, we saw the character alongside Wong (Benedict Wong) who comes looking for Walters, trying to convince her that Blonsky might be too big a problem for the American legal system. “We answer to a higher power,” says Wong and Walters responds, “I am a lawyer, I have to do things by the book!” upon which Wong replies, “The Book of Vishanti?”, referring to a book of enchantments he came across in Doctor Strange: Multiverse of Madness released earlier this year. Walters deadpans right back (comedy happens in threes, remember): “No, the book of American laws” Walters/She-Hulk is yet another Marvel character who’s a lawyer by day. For a variety of reasons, lawyers have always played key roles in Marvel stories. Superhero characters who’re also lawyers, like Matt Murdock aka Daredevil, often end up representing minority groups, immigrants and so on, giving the comics writers the leeway to discuss these red-button political issues, big talking points with their younger readers. Plus there was the small matter of superhero comics being on the conservative radar, legally speaking, because of the violence and on occasion, the sexuality and nudity on display on some of these titles. Legal challenges on the page, therefore, were a great way to discuss matters of censorship without actually spelling it out. Multiple Man and Matt Rocks, Esq. One of the more interesting examples of a superhero lawyer actually happened within the pages of She-Hulk itself, in a secondary character called James Madrox aka Multiple Man, who can create infinite copies of himself, each with its own consciousness and free will, and then ‘re-absorb’ them later, along with everything they’ve learned on their own, including new skills and memories. In one of his ‘iterations’, we see Madrox creating ‘Matt Rocks’, who becomes an attorney, an entertainment lawyer in Los Angeles. Matt Rocks was played mostly for laughs by Marvel, but he ends up having a couple of poignant moments. Notably, he is not absorbed in the end by Madrox, who doesn’t view his skill set as good enough for re-induction. Harsh if you ask us because Rocks had developed something of a conscience, which was not always Madrox’s strong point. Ultimately, Madrox loses control over his mind after creating one too many copies of himself. After a point he fails to distinguish between his own memories and those belonging to the copies he ‘re-absorbed’.   Matt Murdock aka Daredevil As a young boy, Matt Murdock was blinded by a radioactive substance that fell into his eyes following a car crash. The grown-up Matt Murdock (having acquired deadly fighting skills from a ninja named Stick) is an independent lawyer in Hell’s Kitchen by day and the crime-fighting vigilante called Daredevil by night. Murdock and his friend Foggy Nelson (Elden Henson). Nelson and Murdock’s work in the Netflix-era MCU show Daredevil showed them fighting for the underdog again and again. Their first-ever client and later, ally, is Karen Page (Deborah Ann Woll) who’s a whistle-blower. She discovers evidence of financial corruption at her workplace, Union Allied Construction and soon, becomes the target of some very powerful, mobbed-up businessmen. Murdock has to protect her inside the courtroom when she’s falsely accused of murder and outside, when the mobsters hired by her former employers try to bump her off, only to run into Daredevil. Eventually, of course, Murdock’s two jobs—as a lawyer who cannot be bought and is unafraid to go after mobsters—and as a one-man crime-fighting army in Hell’s Kitchen by night, bring him in direct conflict with the show’s Big Bad, tycoon/mob boss Wilson Fisk/Kingpin (Vincent D’Onofrio). When Nelson and Murdock represent Carl Hoffmann, a police detective on Kingpin’s payroll, the man agrees to testify against Fisk, providing enough evidence to put Fisk behind bars for years. Murdock’s victory against Fisk comes in the courtroom and not by night on some rooftop, where Daredevil is usually found beating criminals to a pulp. Narratively speaking, this is important for Murdock’s character development because his best friends Foggy and Karen are both very invested in the “right way” to bring down criminals, ie the legal way. Murdock however, especially in his early days donning the Daredevil suit, is a little more trigger-happy and keener to let his alter-ego finish what his legal acumen started. Conversely, in the show’s second season we see Matt Murdock in direct conflict with someone who does not believe in the legal system at all—ex-military hero Frank Castle aka The Punisher, a brutal vigilante who has murdered scores of gangsters, taking them out long-distance with his expert sniping and superior firepower. Murdock and Castle are on opposite sides of the debate whenever the screenplay discusses “the system” and they essentially represent two grades of comicbook superheroes — one filled with old-school virtues like hope and optimism (the Superman archetype) and the other with a grittier, much more cynical view of humanity (ie the Batman archetype).   Jennifer Walters from the comics   There are plenty of thrilling courtroom stories involving Jennifer Walters/She-Hulk from the original Marvel comics. On one memorable occasion, she faced off against Matt Murdock in the courtroom, representing Captain America/Steve Rogers himself in a wrongful death case. In general, Jennifer Walters has been known to fight for minority rights, immigrants and the importance of due process. She has clashed with quasi-governmental organisations like S.H.I.E.L.D when they have used super-villains’ bodies for medical experimentation, for example. Over the last 10-15 years in the comics, Walters has also represented several fellow superheroes in court. For example, she sued J. Jonah Jameson (played by JK Simmons in the MCU) for slander, representing Peter Parker/Spider-Man. One of the most controversial story arcs involving Walters’ legal career in the comics happened in 2006, when in She-Hulk#6, she led the defence team for Starfox, a member of the Avengers who uses his superhuman powers of persuasion to have sex with a civilian woman. It is implied that Walters is herself under Starfox’s superhuman influence when she argues in court. But she also believes, somewhat naively, that an Avenger would never abuse their powers for sexual gratification. When she realizes her mistake (as it turns out, she may also have been similarly ‘persuaded’ to have a sexual encounter with Starfox in the past) her She-Hulk persona takes over; she captures a fleeing Starfox and brings him to justice. Any one of these storylines would be pure gold for a TV series and it’ll be fascinating to see how Tatiana Maslany tackles the courtroom segments of her role. As we mentioned before, she’s the lawyer representing Emil Blonsky, in which capacity she’s already in conflict with a segment of the Avengers line-up. We already know that Wong isn’t too impressed with her, and it’s not unreasonable to see Doctor Strange in the mix in future shows/films. Thanks to the events of Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, we know that Stephen Strange’s faith in “the system” has been greatly diminished—on a parallel Universe, he saw an overlord body called The Illuminati kill their version of Strange and then lie to the world about it, making a literal statue of the man they murdered in cold blood (he was perceived as too unstable). A lot of the comicbook storylines discussed here were written in the mid-to-late 2000s, and that was the heyday of legal dramedies like Boston Legal and Ally McBeal, both created by David E. Kelley whose screenwriting in that era was heavily informed by irony, sarcasm and breaking the fourth wall. As a result, She-Hulk the comicbook was also influenced by these qualities. This is an intriguing mix of tonalities and themes and Marvel has its task cut out, really. Aditya Mani Jha is a Delhi-based independent writer and journalist, currently working on a book of essays on Indian comics and graphic novels. Read all the  Latest News ,  Trending News ,  Cricket News ,  Bollywood News ,  India News  and  Entertainment News  here. Follow us on  Facebook ,  Twitter  and  Instagram .