This is "How Can I Explain?", which is a feature spotlighting inexplicable comic book plots.

Today, we look at the completely inexplicable situation with She-Hulk when the heroes returned to Earth following the events of "Heroes Reborn."

Okay, to start our story, we have to explain how the Onslaught crossover ended. Onslaught was a being made pretty much entirely out of malevolent psionic energy. It was the dark sides of Xavier and Magneto merged together with Xavier's psionic powers to form a sentient being of pure energy. It used a special armor to give it form and its plan was to merge with the powerful telepath, Nate Grey, to give itself a human body and then it would, I dunno, take over the world? Destroy the world? Onslaught's ultimate goals were a bit hazy. I think it was something like transform the entire human race into energy or something like that. So everyone would be united as energy? Maybe? Well, whatever it was, it was bad news for everybody involved, so the X-Men tried to stop him.

They were trying to stop Onslaught and were not getting very far when, at the end of the Onslaught crossover (in Onslaught: Marvel Universe by Scott Lobdell, Adam Kubert, Joe Bennett and a bunch of inkers), the Avengers and the Fantastic Four showed up to help out...

Oh, and the Hulk was there and so was Doctor Doom.

Reed Richards figures out that the only way to defeat Onslaught (once the Hulk got so angry that he got strong enough to crack open Onslaught's armor) was to absorb Onslaught's psionic energy with their bodies. The problem was that since Onslaught began life sort of as a mutant, when mutants entered his energy field, it just made him stronger. He could feed off their bodies, while with Homo Sapiens, he was drained into the bodies (but it would destroy their bodies in the process). So all the heroes got together and figured that they had to sacrifice themselves to weaken him and absorb enough of his energy that the X-Men could then destroy him once they were all gone. The heroes knew that they would die, but this way they would save the world.

In reality, this was all just a way to take a few of Marvel's characters off of the board when Jim Lee and Rob Liefeld (and their respective studios) would relaunch the "dead" characters in an alternate universe.

The reveal was that Franklin Richards saved all of the heroes' lives by simply transporting them to another Earth (not an alternate universe). They were seemingly new people, but they were alive.

However, here's an issue. She-Hulk? Wasn't with the heroes that day. She hadn't been a regular Avenger in a few years at that point, so she wasn't there when they sacrificed themselves.

She was also clearly still on Earth while the other heroes were on the alternate Earth, as seen in this page from the short-lived Heroes for Hire series out during the period where the Avengers and Fantastic Four were gone...

That should be simple enough, though, right? Not every hero was there. However, it was complicated by the fact that She-Hulk WAS in the Heroes Reborn universe, in the pages of Iron Man!

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One of the recurring plots in the Heroes Reborn universe was that everyone involved was trying to deal with the Hulk.

Well, in Iron Man #11, Iron Man seemingly succeeded in getting the Hulk under control, only to learn (as other heroes were learning in their respective #10 issues) that Galactus was coming to destroy their Earth. So Hulk notes that he will help, and he has friends, including SHE-HULK?!?

While this is a bit of a shock, it is not that big of a deal to realize that there was a version of She-Hulk on this Earth. After all, there was an entire other population on this Earth and obviously they wouldn't normally exist, so Franklin created a lot of people - why not an alternate version of She-Hulk? That's simple enough to get.

What ISN'T simple enough, however, is that Marvel then did a miniseries by Peter David and Salvador Larroca, where the heroes discover their original lives and then they all returned home together in a special spaceship (after Spider-Man, the Hulk - who split into two while the heroes were gone, one went with the heroes and one stayed behind - and Franklin Richards are transported to the other world courtesy of Man-Thing's Nexus of All Realities)...

. While a bit odd, it all tracks...except guess who was along for the ride?

Yep, She-Hulk!

After Doom tried to betray everyone, they got back on track and they crossed over into their original Earth and everyone regained their memories of before Heroes Reborn...

But since She-Hulk never sacrificed herself, her copy was returning to a world in which she already existed! The same thing went for the Inhumans who went along for the ride, as well (except Crystal. She sacrificed herself in the Onslaught event).

This has never been explained in the comic books, but at least one encyclopedia claimed that she (and I guess the Inhumans, as well) just merged into their other selves. It's a possibility, but it is bizarre that this has never been addressed either way in the comics.

So, theoretically, there's a whole other She-Hulk running around the Marvel Universe! But in practice, she just went back to normal despite, you know, never leaving!

If anyone else has a similar inexplicable comic book plot (it can be any comic book plot that did not have a good explanation for it, like the X-Men never letting anyone know that they were alive after surviving the explosion of Magneto's Antarctic base despite multiple opportunities to do so), then drop me a line at brianc@cbr.com!