Review by Ian Keogh

Betty Ross has a long career as a supporting character in Hulk comics, and when Marvel broadened their Hulk titles by including other shades, she became Red She-Hulk, not the most merchandise-friendly of names.

Jeff Parker hooked back into her upbringing as the daughter of a military commander to set the plots in motion for the first of two solo graphic novels. In Hell Hath No Fury she learns of a military project in which experiments are undertaken on both military and civilian volunteers to endow them with super powers, and she doesn’t like it, considering the only result will be planetary damage on a vast scale. Her attacks on the project draw the attention of establishment superhero team the Avengers, who, reliably enough, take a different view.

A couple of ordinary fight chapters lead to Parker’s big idea, that the Earth itself maintains a predictive protection system, an incredibly advanced millennia old super computer powered by the Earth’s rotation. It’s a pretty heady concept to throw in after two chapters of punch-em-ups. Allied to this is Machine Man as a supporting character, now reined in from his Nextwave-era mechanical snark pariah. Artists Carlo Pagulayan and Wellinton Alves make the most of a constantly morphing android with a raft of technical and weapons systems at his disposal, simultaneously ensuring that he doesn’t come across as an Iron Man copy. There’s no indication of which artist illustrates which sequences, but based on his absence in the latter part of the concluding volume it’s Alves supplying the more interesting looking pages.

That, though, is the good stuff among page after page of either exposition or repetitive fighting against variations of the same enhanced opponents. There is a viable reason for She-Hulk’s actions, but not really for why she wouldn’t take a different approach and use the intervention of others surely in her contact lists.

Hell Hath No Fury is the padded set-up, and the story continues in Route 616.