![]() ![]() Romance isn’t as important in Doreen Green’s life as eating nuts and kicking, but in “The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl” #8, she finds out that college study buddy and superhero cohort Chipmunk Hunk has to rush off after a team-up because he has a date. During the fourth-wall-breaking series, it’s Doreen and squirrel pal Monkey Joe providing the self-referential humour, delivering the recaps at the start of the book and interjecting with lines like “a vigilante operating as an urban myth only works for the first year of continuity, tops.” It’s slightly insulting that Squirrel Girl should be admitted into such an inauspicious fraternity, but she turns out to be more self-aware about how the comics reading audience sees her than her GLA teammates. ![]() ![]() If it wasn’t clear by the name, the GLA are a satirical super-team made up of Z-list heroes like Flatman, who can flatten himself.and that's it. There was a somewhat quiet period of downtime for Doreen following her debut, during which she made only fleeting appearances as a one-panel gag or as a super-powered babysitter for Jessica Jones and Luke Cage’s infant daughter. She finally got a consistent full-time gig in the pages of Dan Slott and Paul Pelletier’s relaunched “Great Lakes Avengers” series. With Squirrel Girl, it ends with a planet made of popcorn and a selfie. In your average Marvel comic book, an encounter with Galactus ends in some Roland Emmerich-level destruction, cosmic action and an against-the-odds victory. What she does instead is convince Galactus into letting her find a tasty alternative to consuming the planet Earth like a Thin Mint, getting him to admit that all the people and skyscrapers kind of hurt his mouth. Not that Kraven is the only misunderstood villain to receive some rehabilitation in the pages of “The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl.” A good couple of years before the planet-eater was transformed into a life-giver in the pages of Al Ewing and Kenneth Rocafort’s “The Ultimates,” Doreen hijacked a suit of her buddy Iron Man’s armor to head outside the stratosphere and face up against Galactus, the Fantastic Four villain whose appearance usually leads to a huge, planet-wide panic and the teaming up of every Marvel hero going to beat him back.Īgain, beating back isn’t really Squirrel Girl’s style. Kraven turns out to be a tough one, since all he wants to do is hunt, and she genuinely, hilariously considers just flinging him up into the air for the rest of her life to keep him out of trouble. She negotiates, befriends and works out people’s problems. Unlike most of her peers, though, Squirrel Girl prefers not to beat her foes into submission. “The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl” is switched on to this inherent ludicrousness, introducing Kraven as the first supervillain Doreen faces in her solo series. All of this ignores the fact that he’s a patently ridiculous figure: a member of the Russian aristocracy whose costume is a pair of cheetah-print orange tights and a jacket made out of a lion’s head. In “Kraven’s Last Stand” he came closest to any of the web-head’s enemies in putting him down for good, drugging the wall-crawler and burying him alive. Kraven the Hunter is one of Spider-Man’s most feared enemies, a big game hunter imbued with mystical powers who is always on the lookout for a new, challenging prey. All together now: “Squirrel Girl! Squirrel Girl! She’s a human and also a squirrel…” Disturbed during a hang out with her long-tailed friend Tippy-Toe, Squirrel Girl makes quick work of a group of crooks while singing her signature theme song, which turns out to follow the same tune as the classic opening titles to the ‘60s “Spider-Man” animated series. It also had a familiar rhyming structure. The song manages to provide a handy oversight of her power set (talking to critters, having a tail), career history and modus operandi. Really, all comic recap pages should be musical. Therefore Marvel released a prologue, which introduced the world not only to the creative team of Erica Henderson and Ryan North, but also their new favorite theme tune. A memorable ditty can boost your popularity, and simultaneously introduce newbies to all the key facets of your personality and abilities. The surprise announcement that Squirrel Girl, who until that point was an oddity known only to hardcore fans, would be getting her own solo book necessitated a quick recap on who exactly Doreen Green was. ![]()
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