The Abomination’s She-Hulk cameo is a classic MCU Easter egg

The premiere episode of Disney Plus’ She-Hulk: An Attorney at Law made a point of proving to viewers that the titular hero isn’t your old-school kind of Hulk. Unlike her big cousin Bruce Banner, from whom she acquires her gamma-irradiated blood, Jen Walters doesn’t struggle with repressed egos or monstrous alternate personalities. During her transformations into a green-skinned, occasionally costumed brawler, she’s still the same clever, sarcastic, and periodically hotheaded lawyer she always was.

Pity the same can’t be said for her enemies. The sharp-eyed observer of the She-HulkTrailer A certain tall, fin-eared and British-accented beast may be what you have just spotted. He occasionally turns into actor Tim Roth’s rakish look. Its the long-awaited return of the Abomination, last spotted in 2021’s Shang-Chi & the Legend of the Ten Rings. And despite his long absence from the MCU, he’s a character with a surprisingly storied history on both the page and the screen. So who is he, and what’s his (I’m so sorry for this) Abominexplanation?

A Hulkier Hulk

Image by Stan Lee and Gil Kane/Marvel Comics

To answer that question, we need to look to the glory days of Marvel Comics, where writer Stan Lee and penciler Gil Kane first introduced the wiry, scheming Communist spy eventually dubbed Emil Blonsky in the pages of 1967’s Stories to Astonish #90. In that first appearance, Blonsky is depicted as Marvel’s favorite go-to Cold War cliche: a military infiltrator from deepest Russia who stumbles on a gamma machine built by Bruce Banner, and deliberately turns it on himself to acquire strength, rage, and a green-hued and muscled-up appearance equal to the Hulk himself.

Blonsky, then, existed to make a cracked mirror the Hulk. Banner, self-loathing and detestable, was on a mission to discover a way out of the curse that is gamma radiation. (In a surprisingly grim Comics Code-approved move, Blonsky learned that the machine he discovered was originally built by Banner in order to kill himself). But Blonsky’s self-dubbed Abomination reveled in his newfound size and grotesque physique: “No longer need I resort to being a furtive spy,” he shouts to no one in particular. “Now I have only to desire a goal… And I possess the strength to make it mine!”

But the real key to the Abomination’s enduring success wasn’t his deep psychology, but his ability to out-Hulk any Hulk on the block. Lee had wanted a character “bigger and stronger than the Hulk” who could do the unthinkable by knocking the Big Guy flat on his back in their first fight, and for the better part of three decades, that’s exactly what he got. It wasn’t until the storied run of writer Peter David beginning in the late ’80s that Blonsky’s character (and appearance) went through a series of surprising transformations.

The first was his transformation into an even. Continue reading hideous gamma creature (courtesy of some inconveniently spilled nuclear waste, which is a hazard you’d think more people in the Marvel Universe would look out for at this point). Then there was the revelation of Blonsky’s poignant origin: Before his mutation, he had a wife, Nadia, who believed he had died, and whom he now could only gaze at from afar.

Under David’s pen, the Abomination became not only a physical reflection of Banner, but an emotional one, too; he was what the Hulk might have become, if he didn’t have the love and loyalty of people like his cousin, Jen, or his wife, Betty. Since then, Blonsky has followed a rocky road through his comic appearances, sometimes a tortured antihero looking for redemption (he adopted a community of homeless sewer dwellers in the late ’90s), but more often just a full-on evil SOB (at one point he killed Betty Banner, but in his defense, she did get better).

[Ed. note: The rest of the piece contains spoilers for She-Hulk episode 2. And, like, Shang-Chi and the Ten Rings and The Incredible Hulk. Yes, the one from 2008 with Edward Norton.]

The MCU Abomination

Universal Pictures

When it came time to adapt Blonksy to the big screen for 2008’s The Incredible HulkHowever, Marvel Studios’ brain trust knew which Marvel Studios character they wanted. It was the giant, green, grunting, and gamma-irradiated, grunting slugger that could lay Bruce Banner out. Blonsky’s comic version is played by Tim Roth. Rather than a sneaky Commie spy, he’s a British Royal Marine, enlisted by General Thaddeus Ross to destroy the Hulk — only to be battered and traumatized while trying. Blonsky is humbled by this experience and agrees to participate in an experiment that will recreate the Hulk with predictable, chaotic outcomes.

It’s a take that brings an interesting angle to Blonsky’s origin, even as it preserves the basic elements of the comics (violent weirdo sees Hulk, decides he’ll have what he’s having). This Abomination lusts after the Hulk’s mutation not Simply because he’s jealous of his limitless strength and power (though casting the wiry Roth in the role was something of an inspired choice when it comes to that), but because he sees him as the ultimate weapon: a big, green muscle cannon that every soldier wants, but no one else can get.

Movie Abomination’s original design was also leagues away from his comic book origins, discarding bright green scales and flappy ear fins for a look more akin to Dennis Hopper as King Koopa — a change that did not sit well with early MCU fans. But changes aside, once Blonsky’s transformation was done, it was all over but the punching. The movie’s climax finds the Abomination wrestling with the Hulk throughout Harlem, before being brought down, captured, and put on ice (literally) by his military handlers.

And that’s where things stood for more than a decade, since the entire Hulk franchise found itself inconveniently put on ice, too. That is, until a surprise cameo appearance in 2021’s Shang-Chi & The Legend of the Ten Rings, where the Abomination pops up in an (apparently friendly) fight club match against Dr. Strange’s partner in magical crime, Wong.Blonsky appears to have undergone major changes outside of the screen, both mentally and physically. It’s been too late for his youth. Super Mario Bros.-esque form, replaced with an appearance far closer to Gil Kane’s illustrated design. His personality appears to have mellowed and he has a more friendly relationship with his hero combatant.

All of which serves as setup for the character’s forthcoming appearance in She-HulkThis season. In episode 2 we find out that Blonsky is up for parole — and who better than his fellow gamma-impaired person and cousin of his enemy who is You can also see it hereTo make his case for rehabilitation, a lawyer? The episode’s cliffhanger shows that Jen has her work cut out for her, though, as footage surfaces of Blonsky at that fight club. Escaping your supermax prison to punch the Sorcerer Supreme is not generally considered “good behavior” by any parole board. The show’s head writer, Jessica Gao, recently told an interviewer that the whole first season was originally going to be About the Abomination’s trial, before the writers realized it would require a David E. Kelley grasp of scintillating legal drama.

And that suggests that we’ve come full circle, back to some of the themes the comics had always emphasized in the first place: not only Emil Blonsky’s halting desire for redemption, but the fear both Bruce Banner and Jen Walters have of becoming as lonely and uncontrollably violent as Blonsky himself. This is In She-Hulk’s first episode, her cousin Bruce ominously warns her, “When people start seeing you as a monster, that never goes away.” It looks like Tim Roth’s Abomination is about to put that claim to the test.