While She-Hulk and Deadpool are wildly different superheroes, they both share a very rare power: the ability to break the fourth wall. While most comic book characters are content to stay within the boundaries of their medium, Jennifer Walters and Wade Wilson have made a name for themselves by becoming self-aware characters on the page. Deadpool might be better known for casually referencing the fact that he’s aware he lives in a fictional universe, but She-Hulk did it first and, arguably, she did it better.
Deadpool wasn’t always a fourth-wall-smashing, mentally-depraved comedic hero – when he first debuted in The New Mutants #98 in 1991, he was a simple humorless assassin with a design that strongly resembled DC’s Deathstroke (another humorless assassin.) It wasn’t until the 2000s that writers turned Wade Wilson into a parody of the edgy ’90s stereotypical assassin, and fourth-wall-breaking adventures followed. But Jennifer Walters, a hotshot lawyer who received a transfusion of her cousin Bruce Banner’s blood after an accident, has a history of comic-awareness since before Deadpool even existed.
John Byrne’s The Sensational She-Hulk was the first to make the character break the fourth wall in Sensational She-Hulk #3, when Jennifer discovered that an anonymous villain had set up a fight to test her. “I know how these things work! It’ll be at least my third issue before I find out…
