YMMV / The Sensational She-Hulk

• Audience-Alienating Era: The Sensational She-Hulk languished in this between John Byrne's two runs on the title. The second one actually begins with She-Hulk realizing the comics Byrne didn't write were All Just a Dream.
• Best Known for the Fanservice: Among other things, this series helped establish She-Hulk as one of Marvel's most notorious Ms. Fanservice characters by featuring her in several instances of undress. As a result, quite a number of people remember it for its fanservice just as much as they do its humor, if not moreso. Special mention goes to her jumping rope in a swimsuit in the first pages of issue #40 and her nipples being partially exposed in◊ Marvel Graphic Novel Issue #18: She-Hulk.
• Complete Monster:
  • Ceremony: Carlton Beatrice is the CEO of Carlton Industries who tries to purchase Apache sacred land, Keewazi Reservation, for business purposes. Learning about the Apache people's religious ceremony, Beatrice masters the art of soul stealing. Learning that he lacks the beneficent energy produced by women, he killed an Apache woman who tried to stop him. Learning that the mystic basket that could expand his powers was in the possession of She-Hulk, Beatrice attempts to persuade her, and when his assistant hurts She-Hulk with his spirits, Beatrice punishes him by ripping his soul apart—not because of any standards, but because he needed She-Hulk to give the basket to him to harness its power. To this end, he ripped out her fiancé's soul and used it as a bargain to retrieve the basket. After retrieving the basket, Beatrice performs a ritual to consume all of the souls in Earth to gain more power.
  • Vol. 1 issues #21-23: Jasper Keaton is the founder of the American Purity Foundation whose goal is to purify America of all pornography and smut. Keaton experiments on two of his employees, permanently transforming one into a monster during a failed medical experiment. Keaton tried to locate the "rosebud bomb" to persuade the Senate to save his company. However, Keaton later decided to simply use the bomb to destroy all of Las Vegas, trying to kill 2 million people as a means to purge the city of its indecency.
• Crosses the Line Twice: Issue #50 opens with She-Hulk being informed that her writer John Byrne died by "tripping over a dangling subplot and breaking his neck". In the issue's climax, it is revealed that Byrne actually isn't dead but was knocked out and stuffed in a closet by his editor because of his crazy ideas for She-Hulk's book. She-Hulk reads the ideas and decides she doesn't like them, tossing them out a window. Byrne jumps out after them and seemingly dies for real. The issue ends with She-Hulk quipping that "death sells".
• Fashion-Victim Villain:
  • Clark Finark, whose costume is a Superman-like suit with a Fishbowl Helmet giving it a rather gaudy look.
  • Doctor Bob Doom's outfit has large teeth logos on it to reflect his status as Depraved Dentist. He clearly doesn't have the same sense of style as his more famous cousin.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • Clark Finark's backstory is that he was a politician whose career was ruined by false information that he was an illegal immigrant^note His parents, while suffering from an acid trip, wrote the planet "Veegwal" as his place of birth on his birth certificate. During his presidency, Barack Obama had to deal with rumors that he wasn't born in America and thus not eligible to be President of the US.
  • In issue #55, Jennifer reawakens from a coma and battles the villain who took her out. During the fight, Jen's anger causes her to become larger and more savage and she even states that she likes being this way. When Jen returns to normal, she expresses concern over this happening again and wondering how far she will go. We get an answer in Avengers Disassembled when She-Hulk loses control and kills the Vision.
  • In issue #16, Jen becomes Gray She-Hulk and turns violent and berserk. When she returns to normal, a character says she liked Jen when she was a raging berserker. Following Civil War II, She-Hulk became larger and more monstrous-looking while speaking in Hulk Speak, much to the chagrin of many fans, which prompted Jason Aaron to write a Take That! toward this backlash in his Avengers run. However, it was ultimately undone, restoring She-Hulk to her classic design and personality.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • In issue #6, Poppa Wheelie mistakes She-Hulk for a Skrull when he meets her. Peter David's run gave Jen a Skrull as a supporting cast member who is first seen impersonating Jen in her human form.
  • A Twitter user observed that an image from Issue #8 looks very similar to the distracted boyfriend meme.
  • Issues #10 and #11 featured Clark Finark, a Corrupted Character Copy of Superman who lost an election for a Midwest congressional seat and blamed his Image Consultant who was a pastiche of Lex Luthor. In the 2000s, Lex Luthor became President of the US in the DC Universe.
  • Issue #19 has someone throw a Darth Vader helmet through the window of Purple Hayes which inspires her to think up an idea for a superhero costume in a parody of how Bruce Wayne became Batman. Both Marvel Comics and the Star Wars franchise are now owned by Disney.
  • The Critic could easily be mistaken for a spoof of Doug Walker with both being bald, bearded men who wear glasses and comment on stories.
  • Issue #50 features the idea of Jen wielding Mjolnir as a gag. 21 years later and the idea of a woman wielding Mjolnir isn't so far-fetched.
  • The villain of Issue #51 is the Man-Elephant whose plan to take over the world involves turning ordinary elephants into intelligent, talking animals. Replace "Man-Elephant" with "Mojo Jojo" and "elephants" with "monkeys" and you have the main villain's plan in The Powerpuff Girls Movie.
• Pandering to the Base: There is a reason the cover of Issue #40 is the page image for Fanservice. The book was quite infamous for exploiting Jen's figure to get attention, putting her in various revealing outfits or having her suffer Clothing Damage. This gets spoofed in Issue #45 in which Byrne inserts random pin-up images of She-Hulk for nine pages straight during the story and gets chastised for it by his editor Renee Witterstaetter.
• Values Resonance: Issues #10 and #11 have a Central Theme about media sensationalism, and the corruption of iconography and imagery to manipulate the public which is still relevant even to this day. Issue #10 begins with a reporter suggesting that She-Hulk drop a case she is prosecuting because the public has gotten "bored" with it. She-Hulk retorts that the law is not a source of entertainment and that his question is not only an insult to her but to the American system of jurisprudence itself.