The first issue of “The Savage She-Hulk,” the debut appearance of Bruce Banner’s cousin Jennifer Walters, was the only one in the series written by Stan Lee. The rest of the run was penned by David Anthony Kraft, who lamented the character as a rush job. Sean Howe’s book “Marvel Comics: The Untold Story” quotes Kraft as saying She-Hulk was “done under duress.” Kraft explained:
“It was like, ‘We need to create a character called the She-Hulk and we need to get it out in the next 30 seconds.’ If you look at that first issue that Stan did, there’s really nothing to it: Bruce Banner gives a blood transfusion to his cousin, she growls and runs around, and that’s basically it. I grew up on Marvel Comics, and remembered Stan making fun of how DC had endless iterations of the characters: Super-Monkey, Super-Horse and Streaky the Super-Cat and on and on. We were all pulling our hair out and wailing and bemoaning the day that Marvel had to create a She-Hulk.”
Thankfully, Jen Walters has grown to become much more than just a gender-swapped copycat of her cousin, thanks to the meta elements of John Byrne’s “Sensational She-Hulk” and the zaniness of Dan Slott’s “She-Hulk,” both of which were the main inspirations for the MCU’s live-action “She-Hulk: Attorney at Law” series on Disney+. Besides, Stan Lee turned out to be right: Kenneth Johnson admitted that the plan for the cancelled fifth season of “The Incredible Hulk” was for David Banner to save his dying sister’s life with a blood transfusion, turning her into, you guessed it, a She-Hulk.
