When the first trailer for She-Hulk: Lawyer online, Marvel fans were quick to compare Jen Walters’ fourth wall to Deadpool. But She-Hulk’s comics are more than a decade older than Deadpool’s, and her relationship with the public is completely different from his. Where Wade Wilson breaks through the fourth wall to make meta-nods to the audience, Jen forges a more intimate relationship with the viewer by breaking through the fourth wall to share her inner thoughts, feelings, and insecurities.
John Byrne introduced Jen’s self-awareness to the Sensational She-Hulk series in 1989, a few years before the Merc with a Mouth first broke the fourth wall in Deadpool #28 by Joe Kelly and Pete Woods. In these early comics, She-Hulk’s fourth wall breaks were used as a fun way to deconstruct the comic book medium. She would argue with Byrne herself and contact the editor, Renée Witterstaetter. In Byrne’s last issue, The sensational She-Hulk #50 Witterstaetter tied up Byrne and locked him in a closet while she and Jen searched for his replacement.
Her breakthrough of the fourth wall in the Disney+ series is very different from her breakthrough in the comics. On the show, she doesn’t name the writers or specifically refer to the audience as audience. Instead, she treats the viewer as a trusted confidant existing in another dimension that none of her fellow characters are aware of. She can tell the public anything because they exist outside of her world.
When Deadpool breaks the fourth wall, at least in the movies, it’s usually to share an inside joke with the fans or to take a meta-prick at the franchise itself. When Colossus hands ‘Pool’ into custody and tells him, “You’re coming to talk to Professor Xavier,” he asks the silver X-Man if he means the version of Xavier played by “McAvoy or Stewart?” and then tells the audience, “These timelines can be so confusing.” Before Deadpool cuts off his arm to free himself from Colossus’ custody, Deadpool tells the audience, “Have you ever seen… 127 hours? Spoiler alert!” He impersonates Ferris Bueller to tease the sequel in the post-credits scene. None of Deadpool’s fourth wall breaks give audiences a deeper insight into his emotional state. His winks at the audience are just another vehicle for pop culture references. .
She-Hulk’s self-awareness, on the other hand, gives her the opportunity to share her deepest desires, insecurities and frustrations with the public. As she explained in the first episode, Jen has to keep her emotions in check and bottle up her irritability. She tells her cousin Bruce, “I’m good at controlling my anger. I do it all the time: when I’m called to the street, when incompetent men explain my own field to me. I do it pretty much every day because if I don’t, I’ll be called emotional or difficult, or I might be literally killed. Breaking the fourth wall gives Jen a chance to vent the anger she normally has to keep to herself.
Jen is much more recognizable than most other superheroes – and most other TV characters for that matter – because she can tell the viewer exactly how she’s feeling at any given moment. When she arrives at her new job and her boss drops the bomb that working in her pesky She-Hulk form is a job requirement, she tells the audience everything that’s going through her mind: “I’m fully qualified, but now, “Everyone around here will always think this is the only reason I got the job. It’s so unfair! I should be able to enjoy the fact that I got a great new job, and I can’t.” She sees a conference room full of men in suits laughing hysterically (which might as well be a caricature of the patriarchy) and says, “These dodos never had to deal with this on their first day at work.” When her boss asks her opinion on a conversation she didn’t listen to, Jen awkwardly replies that she’s “agnostic,” confiding the audience, “I’ll spend the rest of the year worrying about what I just said.” Anyone can relate to contemplating an embarrassing statement Her boss will probably forget it in seconds, but in a few months it will still be on Jen’s mind.
The fourth wall is breaking She-Hulk offer the kind of introspection always found in superhero comics but rarely seen in their movie and TV adaptations. Since this introspection usually appears in speech bubbles on the page, it is difficult to translate to the screen. Sam Raimi’s Spider Man movies used narration, while Jon Watts’ Spider Man movies gave Peter Parker a high-tech suit with a built-in sentient AI that he could talk to. She-HulkLead writer Jessica Gao has come up with the easiest and most effective way to get thought bubbles on the screen by simply having her protagonist express her thoughts directly in front of the camera.
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