She-Hulk #24

Last month this site reported that Peter David's She-Hulk #23 had sold the second-lowest number of copies of any issue in the current run. High achiever that he is, in December 2007 Peter David went all out and set a new record for She-Hulk #24: LOWEST SALES TOTAL EVER!

He's made She-Hulk a monument to ignoring what readers want and abandoning what past creators have conceived. Let's give him a big hand. Way to go, smart guy.

Check out ICV2 for more comics sales figures.

She-Hulk #24Scans Daily has some scans from She-Hulk #24 in this thread. I don't really like that scans have been posted while #24 is still on newsstands, but Marvel must have decided to tolerate it or the company's lawyers would have sent takedown notices to LiveJournal.

The post text is fun. As an example:

So far I'm undecided about PAD's run. The MU's foremost expert in metahuman legal issues has become Dog the Bounty Hunter? But there's one extremely crucial characteristic that he kept: her status as an unrepentant fashion criminal.

It's also clear that Shawn Moll's art on She-Hulk is admired by the commenters, some of whom write that:

• "I appreciate that the artist actually drew a superstrong heroine as really muscular, instead of rail-thin. The Jen in those panels actually looks like she could crush you, if she wanted to."
• "Love muscles on the Jen! :D"
• "I really like that art."

[Jen Walters vs the deadliest breakfast cereal of them all... - Scans Daily]

I'm not lovin' it. I'll say that up front. In this issue PAD introduces several new characters having no apparent continuity with any past She-Hulk story from the creation of the character through Dan Slott's run. The new characters have problems and Peter David dedicates a significant portion of the issue to dealing with those problems. He doesn't make me care about them. Worse, one problem is "solved" in such a juvenile and vicious fashion that it left me stunned.

She-Hulk #24Let's break down the art:

• Shawn Moll's art and layouts are very good.
• Victor Olazaba's inks are not of consistent quality - they range from very good to merely OK.
• Rob Ro's colors are not impressive. She-Hulk is colored a shade of green that is difficult to look at, in part because she's frequently darker than the background coloring. Her hair is lighter than I've ever seen it.

As I noted above, the story is not grabbing me. I was eager to see what Peter David would do, but three issues in he's got Jen living with a Skrull in a trailer park and I have no idea why.