KICK YOUR ENTHUSIASM (5)

By: Adam McGovern
January 17, 2022

One in a series of 25 enthusiastic posts, contributed by 25 HILOBROW friends and regulars, on the topic of a favorite sidekick — whether real-life or fictional.

JACQUELINE “JACKIE” McGEE

Do they also sidekick who mostly stand and watch? All the grandest heroes seem to be surrounded by observers — a bard, a Boswell, a president’s official biographer; Watson’s reports on Holmes, Jimmy Olsen’s photos of Superman. Jackie McGee, the investigative journalist in Al Ewing and Joe Bennett’s The Immortal Hulk (2018-21), does not follow after the protagonist so much as get pulled along in his wake — though this is not to say that that’s against her choice, or that she’s in any way subordinate to him. A childhood survivor of one of the Hulk’s rampages, which wiped her town from the map and rendered her and her widowed father without a foreseeable future or any proof of a past, McGee grew up seeking the why’s of a world that refuses to make sense. Pursuing the scoop of Hulk sightings a few years after Bruce Banner was believed dead, she’s resolved to look her worst nightmare in the eye when it recurs. Something is being resurrected in her name itself; nerds will recognize it as a variant of the tabloid reporter who hounded Bill Bixby’s Hulk in the 1970s TV show. Jack McGee was an embodiment of how far journalism had fallen in the few years since news-writers were the popular heroes of movies like All the President’s Men; Jackie is the product of an era when those in her profession are branded enemies of the state while being among the ones most risking their lives to shine a light and save it.

Over the course of the series McGee embeds herself with the Hulk’s shifting misfit circle — various fellow gamma-ray mutates, secret government operatives sent to hunt him and turned to his side, and several other of Banner’s segmented personalities — and comes to see more nuances and complexities (that is to say, additional unresolvably conflicted feelings) about his motivations, misunderstood actions, and multiple psychological wounds. Along the way she confronts even deeper and vaster what’s and why’s, going from space-stations and Area 51-like sites (each designed to monitor the Hulk while often trying to mint worse monstrosities for official use), to literally traveling to Hell and back (we learn that Banner’s first Gamma Bomb opened a rift to an underverse that allows him and similarly irradiated beings to transit repeatedly between life and death, whether or not they prefer either). She feels tied to the Hulk’s story, and unable to feel her own is resolved without understanding, and in that figurative way containing him.

This of course makes her (and her employers) question her integrity, and the 50-issue series (concluded just last fall) does reveal itself to be, more than anyone’s, the story of her — but that’s way beyond, and completely different than, “making herself the story” as journalists are admonished to dread. The Hulk’s original, unequivocal sidekick, Rick Jones, was a journalist of sorts, operating pirate-radio in the 1960s to mobilize a “Teen Brigade” of crimefighters and world-savers, then reinvented as a hacker, “The Whisperer,” speaking behind power’s back in the 2010s. But Jones used information as a weapon, striking from the sidelines; McGee is aboveground and on the frontline in her profession, and has busted into the frame from the margins in her narrative presence, regardless of who was ready for her. She’s there to tell the Hulk’s tale and figure out her own, but she has stepped out from the shadows, and stands in no one else’s.

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KICK YOUR ENTHUSIASM (5)

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