It’s normal to feel a mixed bag of things when encountered with the words “Final Issue” in the solicits page next to one of your favorite current comics. “Final issue of what?” you might think: surely they can’t be cancelling something that you love so much. They’re not monsters.
But, sometimes they are cancelling the thing. Sometimes it really is over. You are then faced with a choice on how to react:
- With graceful disappointment
- With rage
- Denial
- Mysterious fourth option—party?
Many of us were faced with this moment of emotional decision-making today when CBR revealed the Marvel January Solicits, listing issue number 12 of Charles Soule’s She-Hulk as its last.
There is, at the moment, no evidence that this decision came from a lack of sales, or directly from the he-man woman haters club at Marvel. It could be that Soule has simply told the story he wants to tell (no comment from him yet), and that the book is over.
This is not always a bad thing, nerdy friends. Remember when the American version of The Office started to lose all its good cast members and yet shambled on, a miserable Frankenstein’s monster of recycled jokes and increasingly nonsensical plotlines? Sometimes things need to end. It is better to have twelve really great issues than to force a creator to continue pumping out work against their will. These are writers, not machines. They have ideas they want to do, and then they move on to something else. While it’s painful to see a female-lead book get cut, it doesn’t necessarily have to be an indicator of a backward slide back into the nightmare days of dudely comics gatekeeping. There’s no need to fly onto Twitter in a rage about how Marvel is preaching a false message of diversity.
It’s a shame to see Jen go, but I have no doubt that Marvel will launch a re-numbered series sometime in the future. Until then: don’t jump to conclusions.
