Sensational She-Hulk #5
The Doctor Is In!
She-Hulk is relaxing on a Saturday morning, watching some TV. She turns on "Big-Wig's Bungalow", but is disappointed that it isn't as funny as usual. After a "bong" sound Big-Wig stops his usual gags, and starts talking about reading at the local library. Jen changes channels to the Fab-Rat cartoon, but after a few moments there is a "bong" sound, and the cartoon characters disappear, to be replaced with a real mouse being chased and eaten by a real cat! Disgusted, Jen quickly changes channel, to a "3 Amusing Fellows" sketch, but after another "bong" noise, the goofiness is gone, and one of the characters gets his head sliced open with a chainsaw!
Jen starts flipping channels to try and figure out what is going on, but then there is another "bong", and suddenly she is no longer in her apartment--she is in the middle of a jungle! She-Hulk doesn't have a chance to worry about what happened--she soon hears a cry for help. Jen finds a young boy about to be eaten by a tyrannosaurus! She-Hulk grabs the dinosaur's tail, swings it around and tosses it away!
Jen goes to check on the kid, who introduces himself as Paul White. He tells her he was using his remote control to put on his favorite cartoon--and Jen finishes by asking if he heard a strange bong. Paul says yes, and Jen thinks this is starting to make some kind of sense. The two look around and find the characters from the "Stonesteins" cartoon, but they have become real Neanderthals. Jen still has her remote control, so she tries changing channels. Suddenly they are out of the jungle and on some high-tech platform!
Elsewhere, Fifi, a French-maid, duck-woman, alerts Doctor Bong that there is a power fluctuation in his machine. Doctor Bong checks the equipment, to see what is interfering with his educational recalibration field.
She-Hulk and Paul find a door, and go inside the futuristic apartment, to find a married couple stuck inside, listening to George and Jane O'Rocket lecture about equality of the sexes, safe uses of atomic power, etc. This couple also got trapped inside their TV program while using their remote controls. Jen tells them to hold on to her and Paul, while she uses the remote again.
Back in his lab, Dr. Bong has located She-Hulk and the others. He determines that She-Hulk's remote must be precisely attuned to his own instruments, which is how she and the others got pulled inside. Doctor Bong decides that he will have to go inside as well, to sort the problem out directly. He tells Fifi to watch the children while he is gone, and not to touch anything--especially not the emergency manual off switch. Bong then rings his helmet-bell and disappears.
She-Hulk and the others arrive in the Robot-Cop show. Robot-Cop mistakes the remote control for a weapon, so he shoots and destroys it! The cyborg then tries to place them under arrest, but Doctor Bong arrives and paralyzes him. Bong then introduces himself as the genius who invented Bongvision. He demonstrates his power, by bonging his helmet-bell, taking them through a few more channels. She-Hulk asks him why he has been warping all these shows into realistic versions of themselves. Bong tells her that it was to protect the minds of his cloned children, the Bong Quintuplets. He found them watching Saturday morning cartoons, and was afraid that programming would numb their minds. So, to protect them, he created a way to actually alter the programs that were being broadcast! He also discovered an unexpected side-effect...the ability to enter the transmission and become a part of it. She-Hulk asks why he didn't just turn off the TV, rather than do all this. He says that he was worried that it would have further damaged his kids' psyches. He tells them that they got accidentally drawn in because their old remotes operated on hypersonics. Since they are now trapped due to the destruction of their remote, Bong simply departs and leaves She-Hulk and the others trapped in the TV program.
She-Hulk decides that it is time to stop playing by Bong's rules and start playing by hers. She rips the page, and she and the other civilians escape into a comic book price guide. As they rush over to the next page, Bob skins his shin on the staple. She-Hulk then rips another hole through the page, and they re-enter the story, in Doctor Bong's lab. Their arrival startles Fifi so much that she stumbles back into the emergency shut off switch! Since Doctor Bong was still inside the program when it got shut down, he is now gone! There is no "on" switch--only Doctor Bong's chime could activate the system.
Even though the threat of Doctor Bong has been eliminated, Jen reminds them that they still have another problem--they still have to get home from Bong's fortress in Mongolia.
Flashback to 3 weeks ago...Taryn and a man named Buford are staying at the Launch Pad motel in Cape Canaveral. Taryn gets out of the shower and asks Buford how his studying is going. He tells her that it is going slowly. Despite his mutant ability to drive anything, he doesn't want to try and make their plan work without finishing his studying. Taryn worries if maybe she is asking for too much; if her scheme is too crazy. Buford tells her that nothing is too crazy when love is involved. He assures her that he wouldn't have stuck around for the past few weeks if he didn't feel that this was worth doing. "An' if Ulysses Solomon Archer is still alive out there in deep space...you and me is sure enough gonna find him!"
Recurring Characters
She-Hulk, Doctor Bong, Fifi, Razorback, Taryn O’Connell, Lester Jr, Chester, Nester, Fester, Howie
Continuity Notes
When Paul White makes fun of the RoboCop: The Animated Series She-Hulk tells him that it's a "Marvel Show". At the time of this story, Marvel Productions was producing a short-lived RoboCop cartoon based upon the movie. Even though this is a case where She-Hulk is breaking the fourth wall it should be considered a topical reference per the Sliding Timescale of Earth-616.
She-Hulk complains that both the Fantastic Four and Spider-Man got to battle Doctor Doom in their fifth issues, whereas she has to fight Doctor Bong. She is correct, as seen in Fantastic Four #5 and Amazing Spider-Man #5.
