"Have They Even Read the Comic?" 

• Marvel Studios

Marvel has been pumping out television shows faster than anyone except Lucasfilm, and their most recent, She-Hulk: Attorney at Law, has been a delight from start to finish. Part of that is because it's so different, part of it is because it's charming, and part of it is because it's so damn self-aware.

Perhaps the best way to describe this particular show to an average audience is to imagine Ally McBeal, but set in a superhero universe. (For those of you too young to remember Ally McBeal, just insert any standard comedy sitcome that takes place in a legal setting, then plop that into the Marvel universe and you'll get the idea.)

Of course, you understand—you're smart. Otherwise you wouldn't be reading words like this, right? Instead, you'd probably be watching grifters on YouTube to help form your opinions about things. But the problem with them is they only live to monetize and manufacture outrage. Seriously. It's true.

Take She-Hulk, for example. It's a terrific show, and critics are really into it (myself included). It has an 87% score on Rotten Tomatoes (typically a worthless metric, but instructive in this case).

Thanks to some of those manufactured campaigns railing against how "woke" the show is (woke is a word defined as "being conscious of racial discrimination in society and other forms of oppression and injustice" but somehow to these folks this is a bad thing), some folks have review-bombed it on every platform they can, driving the user ratings through the floor.They also rail against the jokes. And they ask in the reviews over and over again if anyone involved in making the show has ever read a She-Hulk comic.

Now, this is the dead giveaway that they have no idea what the hell they're talking about. She-Hulk comics have always been exactly like this show. Jennifer Walters—She-Hulk's lawyering alter-ego—has always been quippy and broken the fourth wall. In one of my favorite comics, she literally turns to break out of the gutters of the comic, threatening the writer of the book—John Byrne—with violence for some inane plot twist or another.

In fact, given how far some of that fourth wall breaking has gone in the comics, Tatiana Maslany's performance has been downright restrained in its zaniness and strikes a terrific balance between the source material and the demands of the realities of live television. The only major change is that all the feminism that was in the subtext of the comics has been dialed up to 11—and rightly so.

When you look at the She-Hulk comics at their best side-by-side with the show, the only conclusion that one can come to is that folks complaining in these brigades across social media are the ones who have never actually read a She-Hulk comic. They do not know what they are talking about. They are unwitting soldiers in a culture war that their side is losing miserably—again, rightly so. These people did the exact same thing to Ms. Marvel earlier this year. And they've tried to do it in other franchises, too.

The lesson here is to not listen to "user reviews," and certainly don't watch any YouTube videos that star conservative outrage-grifters complaining about popular culture. I watched Ben Shapiro's latest for you, so you don't have to. In it he asks, "Do you remember when [Disney] used to make comic-book movies that were fun, and didn't lecture you on woke garbage?" Then he proceeds to explain that he canceled his Disney+ subscription because Disney is trying to "indoctrinate kids into LGBTQ+-%[sic] queer theory."

This bigot admits in his video he doesn't even watch the shows, let alone read the comics. So who cares what he has to say? It would be fun to see these clowns flail around like this, angry that they're losing, if it weren't so depressing to see how they're infecting others with their hateful rhetoric. It's no wonder these sorts of folks turn out to be the real villains of She-Hulk.

I can only imagine what She-Hulk's legal advice to you would be: Do your own research. Read the comics. Watch the shows. Skip the conservative hate machine. I hope it'll all turn out in the end.

In the meantime, I'm going to go watch and read some more "woke garbage," because it's some of the best and most insightful art being produced today.