When the first trailer for She-Hulk: Attorney at Law dropped online, Marvel fans were quick to compare Jen Walters’ fourth-wall-breaking to Deadpool. But She-Hulk’s comics predate Deadpool’s by more than a decade, and her relationship with the audience is completely different from his. Whereas Wade Wilson breaks the fourth wall to make meta nods to the audience, Jen forges a more intimate relationship with the viewer by breaking the fourth wall to share her inner thoughts and feelings and insecurities.
John Byrne introduced Jen’s self-awareness in the Sensational She-Hulk series in 1989, a couple of 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 himself and reach out to 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 fourth-wall-breaking in the Disney+ series is a lot different from her fourth-wall-breaking in the comics. In the show, she doesn’t mention the writers or specifically refer to the audience as an audience. Instead, she treats the viewer as a trusted confidant that exists in another dimension that none of her fellow characters are aware of. She can tell the audience anything, because they exist outside 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 jab at the franchise itself. When Colossus remands ‘Pool and tells him, “You will come to talk with Professor Xavier,” he asks the silver X-Man whether he means the version of Xavier played by “McAvoy or Stewart?” and then tells the audience, “These timelines can get so confusing.” Before chopping off his arm to free himself from Colossus’ custody, Deadpool tells the audience, “You ever seen 127 Hours? Spoiler alert!” He imitates Ferris Bueller to tease the sequel in the post-credits scene. None of Deadpool’s fourth wall breaks give the audience a deeper insight into his emotional state. His winks to 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 innermost desires and insecurities and frustrations with the audience. As she explained in the first episode, Jen has to control her emotions and bottle up her irritability. She tells her cousin Bruce, “I’m great at controlling my anger. I do it all the time: when I’m catcalled in the street, when incompetent men explain my own area of expertise to me. I do it pretty much every day because if I don’t, I will get called emotional, or difficult, or might just literally get murdered.” Breaking the fourth wall gives Jen the chance to express the rage that she usually has to keep to herself.
Jen is a lot more relatable than most other superheroes – and most other TV characters, for that matter – because she’s able to tell the viewer exactly how she’s feeling at any given moment. When she arrives at her new job and her boss drops the bombshell that working in her pesky She-Hulk form is a job requirement, she tells the audience everything that’s going through her head: “I am totally qualified, but now, everyone around here will always think this is the only reason that I got the job. It’s so unfair! I should be able to enjoy the fact that I got an amazing 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 for her thoughts on a conversation that she wasn’t listening to, Jen awkwardly replies that she’s “agnostic,” then confides in the audience: “I’ll spend the rest of the year worrying about what I just said.” Everyone can relate to overthinking an embarrassing statement. Her boss will probably forget all about it in a matter of seconds, but it’ll still be on Jen’s mind in a few months’ time.
The fourth wall breaks in She-Hulk offer the kind of introspection that appears all the time in superhero comics but is rarely seen in their film and TV adaptations. Since this introspection usually appears in thought bubbles on the page, it’s difficult to translate to the screen. Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man movies used voiceover narration, while Jon Watts’ Spider-Man movies gave Peter Parker a high-tech suit with a built-in sentient A.I. that he could talk to. She-Hulk’s head writer Jessica Gao has figured out the most straightforward and most effective way to put thought bubbles on-screen by having her lead actor simply express her thoughts directly to the camera.