HULK & RED SHE-HULK
Betty Ross had essentially been Lois Lane to Bruce Banner’s Superman since Day One, so one supposes it makes sense that in this post-Lois & Clark era, Bruce and Betty don’t really exist anymore, either.
Sure, Bruce is her second husband, and Betty is one of three of his wives (the only human one, though!), and his being the Hulk complicated things severely. However, they WERE married for a quite a while – even when his unstable personality aspects merged and he was ONLY the Hulk (albeit with Bruce’s intellect and some much needed confidence bordering on arrogance that is characteristic of the Hulk – chicks dig confidence), she was able to get over it and stand by her man. Hell, when she thought he was dead for a while, she nearly joined a convent. She does tend to be a woman of extremes when push comes to shove, being the hardass daughter of the hardass General Thunderbolt Ross and all. Once, MODOK irradiated her with gamma power and turned her into a half-bird monster called the Harpy, who then tried to kill the Hulk at all costs. She never much liked the Hulk, and she saw how tortured Bruce was about it all the time.
No wedding is complete without haggard old men and gunshot victims.
Also, she was dead for years. Bruce’s old enemy Emil Blonsky, aka The Abomination, poisoned her with radiation and made it look like just being with Bruce all those years was the root cause. It wasn’t, and old Thunderbolt Ross would eventually kill Blonsky as payback. How? By becoming a Hulk himself, after making a deal with MODOK and The Leader and using the same process to bring Betty back to life. As a Hulk.
Her worst nightmare, right? One problem, though. She loved it. She loved the release of being a Hulk, as she can shift back and forth at will, and when she’s all red, her inhibitions fall away – and considering that she was almost a nun and she was raised by a very repressed military father, that’s kind of a big deal. Thus, there’s a big OH, FUCK YOU sense about her now when it comes to Bruce and all his angst about being a Hulk, when in her experience, being a Hulk is goddamned amazing. Almost like being drunk with power – and she went on kind of a crazy bender for a while with that, going so far as to schtup one of the Hulk’s oldest enemies, the subterranean King Tyrannus. To be fair, he’s pretty smooth and is in no way like Mole Man, and it seems she considers her previous death to cancel the old marriage vows. There’s been death, so that’s when she and Bruce must part. Especially considering the fact that the Hulk got married to an alien warlord, had kids and nearly beat up the Earth while Betty was dead. People change.
Incredible Hulks. A lot of stuff got broken. Including hearts and minds.
However, when Greg Pak ended his epic run on The Incredible Hulks back in 2011, he left the pair on a positive note. They’d worked through some issues (by beating the crap out of each other repeatedly – like you do when you’re Hulks in love) and realized that this could be the beginning of a new kind of relationship for them – Green Hulk and Red Hulk! A real power couple! An actual happy ending for the most put-upon characters around? Who’da thunk it?
Not Jason Aaron. The Ol’ Love-Hater rolled in once again with his new (and pretty well universally reviled) take on The Incredible Hulk that posited that Bruce Banner was insane after being mysteriously separated from the Hulk at the end of Fear Itself out of nowhere, and was dumb enough to start giving himself brain tumors to try to re-Hulk himself. Needless to say, this drove Betty away, although she did come back long enough to bang the Bruce-less Hulk in the middle of the street… it… it wasn’t very good.
Yes, we get it. You are very clever with that switcheroo, there.
So now, Betty Ross is in her own book (weirdly enough, Marvel didn’t bother to renumber the Red Hulk series when handing it off to Red She-Hulk – you’d think they’d jump at the chance to renumber anything, but no) trying to put a stop to a military gone too far, while Bruce Banner is re-Hulked, and he has decided to come out of the shadows (now that everyone is thankfully ignoring Aaron’s Hulk run) and has started working for SHIELD. He even has a little robot buddy. They haven’t talked to each other in a while, and there’s no sense that there’s anything on the horizon for them. On one hand, it’s great to see a character who has been resigned to love interest most of her existence step up and get her own book, but on the other hand, some of us really liked those two together. Jason Aaron hates everything I like. Or maybe he’s just determined to disabuse me of the tendency to be a shipper.
This is what happens when you have alter egos made out of spite.
