My favorite Derek Charm-drawn images from Unbeatable Squirrel Girl Vol. 10

1.) X-23 All-New Wolverine X-23 Laura Kinney holding up her pet wolverine Jonathan at Squirrel Girl's funeral. This is part of a two-page sequence in which various Marvel characters all get a panel in which to eulogize the seemingly dead Squirrel Girl. It's a great passage that shows off not only Charm's abilities to draw, like, everyone in the Marvel Universe, but also writer Ryan North's abilities to fire off jokes like a machine gun (The Jessica Jones/Luke Cage panel was particularly great. "She was baby Danielle's nanny, and then adult Danielle traveled back in time from the future to team up with her and fight crime," Jessica says. "No other nanny offered this service," Luke says.)

As for what makes this above panel so great, well, come on, look at that wolverine. I love the fact that Charm drew Jonathan as if he didn't have any available reference for what a wolverine looked like and, in fact, that he had never even heard of a wolverine, but someone had just tried to explain to him what it was as he was drawing that panel. Like, "I guess it's kind of like a mix of a groundhog and the rancor monster from Return of The Jedi? You know that's what the X-Man with the claws is named after, right? So it probably has long claws too..."

2.) Ghost Rider's Triscareatops. When Squirrel Girl chides Tony Stark for thinking she was really dead even though she's named "The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl," he replies that he doesn't tak anything for granted, as he works "with a guy named 'Ghost Rider' who's never ridden a single ghost." Which leads to the above panels.

The greatness of this image doesn't really need any explanation, but I would like to reiterate how great Charm is at drawing not only in the fun, cute, Charm-ing style that is so appropriate for Squirrel Girl (and Jughead and Star Wars Adventures), but he's also really good at just drawing straight Marvel superheroes doing superhero stuff. Like, that doesn't look like a "funny" version of Ghost Rider; it looks exactly like Ghost Rider (the current one, if you haven't been reading Ghost Rider comics or the latest volume of Avengers.)

And by the way, I can think of no better example of how good North is at coming up with jokes that he has taken a brilliant name like "Triscareatops" and used it for what is essentially an extra random throwaway gag within a random throwaway gag (Like, the "He would be so much better if he actually just rode around on ghosts" joke would have worked just fine were Ghost Rider depicted riding any kind of ghostly steed there, or even this particular bad-ass burning fossil one, whether or not he announced its He-Man vehicle-like name).

3.) Tippy-Toe eating pizza. I love the way Charm draws Tippy, and I particularly love how huge her bow is. Charm draws her bow the way Kelley Jones draws Batman's ears and cape (Oh God, I want to see Kelley Jones draw Squirrel Girl and Tippy now!). During the funeral scenes, wherein all of the heroes break out there all-black (and/or gray and/or white) costumes, Tippy replaces her pink bow with a black one.

Anyway, in this panel she's using her tiny squirrel paws to shove a giant piece of pizza into her mouth.

4.) The Avengers vs. Skrulls. This is just a too-small portion of what is actually a two-page spread in the arc, depicting what looks to be an early 1970s Avengers line-up battling Skrulls (I think this is form the Kree-Skrull War storyline, but I've never read that, so it's just a semi-educated guess). It's a great image of superhero combat, with nine different heroes all battling Skrulls in an action-packed scene that displays their various powers and, to some degree, their personalities (The look on Quicksilver's face, for example, is perfect). Because it was too big for my scanner, I just focused on The Wasp, who seems to be attacking the scariest, nastiest looking of the dozen or so Skrulls on the spread.

Charm does not draw the entire book himself, just the four issues in which Squirrel Girl and friends must try to figure out what a Skrull is up to on Earth this time. There's also an issue drawn by Naomi Franquiz, and, as per usual, a guest artist draws the art on the relevant Deadpool's Guide To Super Villains trading card employeed in the story. Here, that's Rico Renzi, and he draws a card devoted to The Skrulls. For whatever reason, he decided to work a visual shout-out to Jim Rugg's Street Angel into the image:

 

I can honestly say I never expected to see anything resembling Street Angel in a Marvel comic book. Not that I would mind seeing a comic in which she saves Daredevil's ass by kicking The Hand's ass once and for all or steals Night Thrasher's skateboard and makes him cry or something...

Some recent Marvel trades I read, um, recently:

Daredevil: Back In Black Vol.3--Dark Art

After a really rather rough second volume (discussed in this post), the current, Charles Soule-written volume of Daredevil is back to the level of quality of the first volume. This likely has a lot to do with the fact that pencil artist Ron Garney is back, drawing all five of the issues collected herein. It may also have a lot to do with the fact that, like the first volume and unlike the second volume, Soule apparently wrote these issues as a single arc. It's not quite complete enough to read like a distinct graphic novel, as it does pick up on at least one event from volume two (Elektra having broken Blindspot's arm), and there's a pretty dramatic cliffhanger ending regarding the fate of Daredevil's new sidekick, but otherwise this is a pretty self-contained comics story.

Our heroes are doing their thing, lawyering and/or law assistancing by day, fighting crime by night, and they are forced to face a sinister new villain. The papers have dubbed him "Vincent Van Gore," which is pretty good, but he personally prefers "Muse," which isn't quite as good. He's a serial killer/artist, and his first major piece being a gigantic Guernica-esque mural painted with the blood of dozens of different victims. He's also got some weird and, frankly, ill-defined powers that make him a match for Daredevil in a scrap, particularly since Daredevil can't "see" him.

And that's pretty much that: Hero vs. villain, with the latter being a brand-new villain. There's something you don't see much anymore!

Complicating matters is that Muse's second piece involves killing of several Inhumans*, and so Daredevil and Matt Murdock try to work with Medusa and New Attilan. There's another new character introduced here--a former New York City Police Department detective who got Inhuman-ized, given a neat but subtle power and who now works as a liaison between the country and the city's police--who spends the most time with DD and/or MM, but the climax of the Inhumans' involvement seems to be to have Medusa be kind of a jerk and let Karnak and Daredevil fight. As I was reading one scene, in which neighborhood toughs attempt to murder an Inhuman, it occurred to me that this story arc may seem quite dated in a few years' time, as the scene is written almost exactly as if Soule had simply replaced the word "mutant" with "Inhuman."

I'm not crazy about Muse's mask, which appears to include a tight-fitting knit cap like the kind of a cartoon burglar might wear, and his tiny little backpack, but otherwise his design is visually striking, and of the sort that fits into the book's unusual coloring scheme (which color artist Matt Milla manages).

I can't say I'm terribly excited about what I imagine may dominate the fourth volume, based on the last, climactic pages of this arc, in which Blindspot is forced to take on Muse solo in order to save many lives, but it's quite possible that Soule will end up zagging instead of zigging.

Again, after a choppy second volume, Daredevil is again pretty tightly written super-comics, with great art and a somewhat unique visual hook to its telling that separates it from the scores of other superhero comics on the shelves at the moment (the vast majority of which are also published by Marvel).

Deadpool: Too Soon?

If Deadpool's current state of popularity is such that his presence can not only goose interest and sales in books he appears in, than this four-issue miniseries operated on almost reverse logic. This is a Deadpool comic filled with a large cast of guest-stars, most of them relatively minor characters, but ones with strong fan bases.

Writer Joshua Corin (whom I have never heard of**) sends The Forbush Man, The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl, The Astonishing Ant-Man, Rocket and Groot, Howard The Duck, The Punisher and Peter Porker, The Amazing Spider-Ham and, um, The Punisher to a mansion, each following a similar mysterious letter. There they are greeted by Deadpool and his apparent wife, a demon named Shiklah (I had heard he was married, although this is the first time in my extremely sporadic reading of Deadpool comics that I learned to who).

Deadpool has invited them all there to pose for his Christmas card photo with him, and has dug up enough blackmail material on each of them to force them to comply. Why this particular assortment of characters? Because, he explains, they are the funniest characters in the Marvel Universe. If The Punisher seems particularly out-of-place among this group, I suspect that is the joke regarding his presence.

This set-up leads to a locked-door sort of mystery, as when the lights briefly go out and come back on, Forbush Man is found decapitated! Is this the end of the Forbush Man, the most expendable of the guests, in that he's not currently starring or co-starring in a comic book? Looks like! At his funeral, attended by all (dig Tippy-Toe's little black ribbon), Deadpool vows to find the killer, criss-crossing the country to investigate the other suspects in the room that night (he naturally dismisses himself and his wife).

Joined against his will by Squirrel Girl, he travels to California, to Miami and then back to New York City, pursued by "Squirrelpool," a hideous clone monster created accidentally when he and Squirrel Girl share an old teleporter (I was pretty disappointed in this design by artist Todd Nauck; it suits the purposes of the story fine, although I'm not sure why it's a hulking monster-sized creature instead of being Deadpool-sized, or even just Deadpool-plus-Squirrel Girl-sized, but man, it would be so easy to amalgamate those two characters into a cool design).

When the beheadings start to pile-up, and include clearly-not-going-to-get-killed-off-for-long characters like Rocket and Groot (and, a little more shockingly, Squirrel Girl's besties Nancy Whitehead*** and Tippy-Toe), the stakes are lowered and, when the murderer is revealed and defeated with some help of Marvel's latest movie star Dr. Strange, it should come as no surprise that everyone is restored to life in some particularly random deus ex machina. (To be fair to Brad Meltzer, whose Identity Crisis is pretty much the worst murder "mystery" in comic book history, I should note that the killer is not a suspect introduced at any point in the comic, and so as a mystery, this doesn't work...not that the mystery set-up was ever meant to be anything more than a premise, of course).

Nauck is an artist I sometimes have some trouble evaluating entirely impartially, given the amount of affection I have for his work on account of his years on Young Justice. His ability--and tons of experience--balancing light-hearted supehero comedy with concinving superhero action serves him well in this particular series, though, and it's certainly interesting to see so many diverse characters translated though his particular visual style, even if they don't all seem to work (Squirrel Girl, for example, is a character that some artist seem to nail a particular take on, while others flounder a bit, sometimes for reasons I have a hard time pinning down. Nauck's version just looks like a typical super-girl character with a few Squirrel Girly features, rather than looking like Squirrel Girl.)

I was a little surprised to find a back-up, the story "Deadpooloween" taken from the Gwenpool Holiday Special: Merry Mix-Up #1, and I was more surprised still to find that it was both written and drawn by Chynna Clugston Flores. I guess it was included because it prominently features Squirrel Girl, as does the Too Soon?. It's been a good long time since I've read a Chynna comic, although I can hardly overstate how much I loved her Blue Monday in Action Girl and then from Oni (Image is currently reprinting it, and you should buy it and read it). While I'm sure she's done something for Marvel since, the last Marvel comic she drew that I read was that issue of Ultimate Marvel Team-Up from the earliest years of the Ultimate line, when Brian Michael Bendis had Peter Parker and pals run into the X-Men at the mall.

In her story, Deadpool belatedly realizes it Halloween, and suits up to cruise the town near Empire State University. There he finds that Squirrel Girl is hosting a Deadpool costume contest, which he angrily enters, irritated that the success of his movie has spawned so many college bros dressing up like him this Halloween.

Remember what I said about certain artists seeming to do a better, truer Squirrel Girl than others? Chynna nails hers. Her style is so different than that of Erica Henderson, but Chynna is just an all-around expert when it comes to drawing geeky young people, I guess. I would love to see more Chynna Clugston Flores Squirrel Girl somewhere in the future.

Doctor Strange Vol. 3: Blood in the Aether

With Doctor Strange's magical powers and resources utterly exhausted by his two-volume battle against the magic-destroying interdimensional entity The Empirikul, he is at one of his lowest, weakest points in Doctor Strange #11, by writer Jason Aaron and guest-artists Kevin Nowlan (who draws the scenes set during Strange's origin) and Leonardo Romero (who draws the scenes set in the present). That means there's blood in the water and the sharks are starting to circle.

And by "the water" I guess we mean "the aether," and by "the sharks" I guess we mean an assortment of villains, including Doctor Strange's arch-enemies and a few newer or more random threats.

So after the prelude chapter that the 11th issue serves as, the rest of the collection is a sort of week-in-the-life story, in which Doctor Strange runs a gauntlet of foes new and old, all the time being forced to rely on his wits, his allies and what new sorcery he can invent on the fly to save himself...and everyone else.

So in rapid succession Strange faces Mister Misery (the name the thing from his basement assigned itself), Baron Mordo, Nightmare, Satana and Master Pandemonium**** (and Pandemonium's hands), the post-Original Sin version of The Orb and, of course, the dread Dormammu. Their motives range from the dire to the petty to the idiosyncratic, and if you're at all familiar with any of these characters you can probably assign each of them to those categories without any help from me, but it all adds up to a pretty dramatic, almost arcade-like fight, with a few lighter moments to stop and exhale.

Regular pencil artist Chris Bachalo manages the bulk of the five issues that make up the actual "Blood in the Aether" story arc (with a pair of pencilers getting "with" credits on the last two issues, and eight different inkers credited on these issues...speaking of credit, it's to Bachalo and company's credit that the story actually looks pretty great, and all those different artists work together well enough that their collaboration is, if not seamless, than relatively seam-light).

It's really difficult to overstate how well-suited Bachalo is to the material, and not just to the Steve Ditko-conceived world of Doctor Strange in general, but to writer Jason Aaron's world-weary, joke-heavy conception of the character and his story specifically. As I've said before, Bachalo handles weird well, and he manages to make old characters like Dormammu, Mordo and Nightmare his own, while the characters that are his own, like Mister Misery, are hard to imagine under anyone else's pens.

Probably the best example of his work is the issue devoted to Satana, however. She plans to open up her own hell, one in which the damned can spend time with "cool" dead people, like dead rockstars and superheroes, like Doctor Strange. She pitches him over a bizarre meal in a bizarre diner (Pandemonium is both her short order cook and her muscle), filled with elaborately, cartoonishly designed creatures. To save himself, Strange must use his astral projection form in a pretty unusual way, which I'm not sure if he's ever done before, in order to achieve a particular goal I'm quite positive he never has.

I'm not sure if Bachalo has completely redesigned Satana here, or if his and colorist Antonio Fabela's version is just strikingly rendered, but this is maybe the coolest I can remember her looking. I think Bachalo draws Pandemonium's hand demons a little too gitancially, but, like Swarm, there's really no way to screw up the drawing of this crazy-ass Marvel villain.

Bachalo's Orb is another pretty great character. I don't believe I've seen him since Original Sin, nor do I quite understand how either he or Nick Fury Sr. "work" in the Marvel Universe anymore, but Aaron's conception of The Orb works well here for the purposes of a Doctor Strange comic, and Bachalo seems to have a lot of fun selling this new life of the character's menace as well as inherent humor.

This volume is really strong enough to stand on its own, independent of the two preceding it, as the only things one really needs to know from the previous ten issues get summarized in the three sentences following the Doctor Strange logo on the title page.

Power Man and Iron Fist Vol. 2: Civil War II

Here's another in the too-long line of pretty good books that got derailed and/or destroyed by Civil War II. In the case of the David Walker-written Heroes For Hire revival, I say "and/or destroyed" because the book is no longer around. That may have simply been Marvel trying to more closely tie their comics to the various Netflix series, as after this book's cancellation Walker went on to write a Luke Cage solo title sharing the name of his TV show, and a new Iron Fist series launched. Or it could have been because of this dumb-ass story arc, that takes over issues #6-9 of the then-new book, almost the entirety of this second collected volume of the series (there's also a fun, holiday annual included in this collection).

For trade-waiters like me, the other unfortunate aspect of Civil War II? Because that book was so delayed, and expanded after solicitation, it meant I couldn't read any of the tie-in trades like this until I read the main series, but so many of the tie-ins were published prior to the Civil War II collection, that basically meant holding off on reading any (or at least many) Marvel collections for a few months longer than I might have otherwise. (As it turns out though, one really only needs to have read the first few issues of Civil War II to understand what's going on here; War Machine's dead, She-Hulk is in a coma and Carol Danvers is a big, stupid immoral idiot and...that's it, really).

Now, this arc is bad, but it's still fun, and maybe as good as a tie-in to such a dumb event series could be if it really did try to honestly engage with the event instead of simply side-stepping it as fast as possible. Walker writes these characters extremely well, and has a lot of fun with Luke's refusal to swear and in recovering the often very goofy characters from Cage's deep past, and other failed or half-forgotten street-level characters from Marvel's past, and reintroducing them, often portraying their past portrayals as youthful indiscretions, or perhaps trying to be something they weren't...or, in at least one case, trying to hang on to something they never were in the first place.

The artwork by Flavianao and Sanford Green is great, and I could look at those two guys' drawings of the two guys in the title all damn day; I particularly like, as I believe I mentioned when discussing the first volume, how huge this Luke Cage is drawn, in relation to Danny, Jessica, Danielle and the whole world around him. He's a literally bigger-than-life character.

Walker's way of dealing with the Civil War II plot is interesting, and I find myself wondering whether the plot for this arc, which isn't quite concluded in this volume, is one he would have written anyway, and he was just forced to fold Carol Danvers in, or if his non-Civil War II plot was an intentional echo of Civil War II, inspired by its plot.

So the first issue opens with Luke Cage, Danny Rand, Jessica Jones and a clueless Danielle watching news footage of the battle with Thanos that took place in Free Comic Book Day 2016, which the Civil War II collection puts between Civil War II #0 and Civil War II #1 (That event series, by the way, makes an excellent case for trade-waiting, as it's really hard to tell where and when it actually starts; there are basically three different starting points, one of which isn't terribly relevant. Better to let a collections editor curate it, I think). This is the battle that ends with War Machine James Rhodes dead and She-Hulk in a coma, and the two heroes are pretty shaken for obvious reasons, with flashbacks giving less-obvious, more personal details: Cage and Rhodey's last conversation was an intense argument, and Danny thinks about the time he kissed She-Hulk. Four more pages are devoted to Civil War II: They attempt to visit Shulkie at the Tri-Skelion but are turned away, and they are warmly greeted by Carol, who then asks if they can give her a minute of their time so she can explain what's going on.

Jump to the two of them walking to their car, reiterating that Civil War II is dumb and they hope they can avoid being in it (they can't!).

"What was all that 'predictive justice' stuff Carol was talking about?" Danny yells. "Sounded like a bunch of fiddle-faddle to me," Luke says, and they agree to sit this one out, as they are also sick of hero vs. hero fights. On a two-page spread, between two tiers of them talking about it, there's a nice big spread of the Luke Cage-lead Avengers (from the second volume of the Bendis-written New Avengers, I want to say) fighting the Carol Danvers and Iron Man-lead Avengers (from the pages of the Bendis-written Mighty Avengers). Cage, who sided with Captain America in the pages of the first Civil War, was basically in a kinda cold war with the government-sanctioned Avengers between the end of Civil War and the post-Secret Invasion "Heroic Age," I think.

Walker then returns to matters related to his book, as a bunch of reformed criminals and their family members attempt to hire the Heroes For Hire to find a bunch of ex-cons who have since gone straight but disappeared shortly after encountering a group of mysterious vigilantes. And then those vigilantes attack! Followed by the police!

This ends with Danny Rand in jail for assaulting some officers, where he tries to figure out the disappearances. Many of those who have disappeared are also in jail there, and they ended up there without officially being charged or getting trials. Outside prison, Luke calls in favors from many friends to try to figure out the one clue they have, a mysterious device that mixes facial recognition software with the ability to manipulate and falsify criminal records. This is what the vigilantes were doing to bust their victims.

So you can see how this thematically kinda sorta ties in to Civil War II, as innocent--or at least innocent-until-proven-guilty--people are being attacked, arrested and punished for crimes they didn't actually commit. Civil War II comes back to the fore when Ulysses--the prophesying Inhuman that Carol Danvers is using to predict possible future crimes to prevent before they happen--has a vision of Luke Cage leading a break-in at Ryker's to free the incarcerated Danny.

In fact, a confused and frustrated Cage calls Songbird and Centurius to join him as he looks at Ryker's, in the hopes that they can talk him out of doing something stupid and figure out this whole mess, and then "Sweet Christmas, Easter and Hanukkah," in swoop Danvers, Mockingbird, Puck, Spectrum, Storm, Deathlok and a whole bunch of SHIELD troops. They are there to stop Ulysses' vision from coming to pass by arresting Luke first and, just as in All-New Wolverine Vol. 2: Civil War II, Carol's intervention is exactly what causes the vision to come to pass (slow learner, I guess).

Luke's not having it, of course, he tells off Carol in such a way to piss her off, and everyone fights, with the fight eventually spreading inside the prison after Carol punches Luke through its walls and a couple of errant energy blasts and explosions continue to escalate the situation.

There's a lot of fighting between all parties. I particularly liked the fight-then-team-up sequences involving Mockingbird, who Walker writes close enough to Chelsea Cain that she sounds like the same character, and Songbird, because they have similar names. And I'm always calling Songbird Mockingbird by accident.

It ends with Cage making a couple of speeches in Carol's direction, and then Danny making another one, and she's eventually shamed into dropping it and they help round up the prisoners and clean up the jail. (I'm not sure this all lines up perfectly well with Civil War II, by the way. In that book's third issue, Luke and Danny appear to be working with Carol and SHIELD, at least according to one big panel of a series of three images that run across a two-page spread while New York City Assistant District Attorney examines Carol Danvers, but in issue #4, Luke is allied with Iron Man on the "cool" team that shows up at the Triskelion to fight Carol's lame team.)

But just as in the pages of Civil War II, the tie-ins seem mostly designed to demonstrate that Carol is dumb and keeps making the same mistakes over and over and over again.

As for the A-plot, which becomes the B-plot, Luke's team is just about to crack where the doohickey being used to find and incarcerate people came from, when a very powerful person in a hoodie teleports to his safehouse and steals it from the hands of his allies.

As I mentioned earlier, the rest of the collection is devoted to an annual, or, to be specific, Sweet Christmas Annual #1. Walker writes this as well, but Scott Hepburn provides the art. It's Christmas Eve, and Luke, Danny and Danielle visit a toy store to find the Pokemon-like hot toy of the season. Also there is Spider-Woman Jessica Drew and her baby. And Daimon Hellstrom, Son of Satan, in an open-coat Santa suit. And The Krampus. And the real Santa Claus. It is every bit as awesome as it sounds, and Hepburn draws a hell of a Krampus, as well as a pretty sweet warrior version of Santa that isn't as over-the-top as the one in the Grant Morrison-written Santa vs. Krampus comic, Klaus.

I'm really glad it was collected here, even though the storyline preceding it didn't really reach its conclusion, because it at least means the book ends on a high note, rather than being another example of the Civil War II storlyine stumbling into an already perfectly strong title, upsetting all the furniture and then stumbling back out.

The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl Vol. 5: Like I'm The Only Squirrel In The World

This volume takes for its cover that of Unbeatable Squirrel Girl #13, i.e. the one where Squirrel Girl is hauling back to throw Tippy-Toe, who is herself hauling back to throw Ant-Man, who is all curled up like a ball in her tiny squirrel fist. Is this modified Fuzzball Special just something for the cover, or does it actually occur within the pages of the comic itself?

It does!

The Squirrel Girl/Ant-Man team-up takes place during a story arc that dominates this trade, occupying the first three of the five issues collected herein. Doreen, Nancy and Tippy-Toe join Doreen's mom at a cabin in Canada for a rather boring vacation, which is interrupted by a bid to conquer the world by a character who can split himself into many different versions of himself. His name is Enigmo, and he is apparently a pre-existing Marvel villain (The Internet said he debuted in 1994 issue of Avengers). Brain Drain, the disembodied brain in a jar atop a powerful robot body that has been hanging around with Doreen and friends for a while, teleports to Canada to help her, and he does so with the only hero he could find who was small enough to fit in the teleporter at the same time as him: The Astonishing Ant-Man, Scott Lang.

As per usual, Squirrel Girl is able to save the day, with the help of her many friends and the help of science knowledge, which writer Ryan North applies to the comic book world of the Marvel Universe as charmingly as ever. For example, there is a flashback to physics class, where in Doreen and Nancy remember their teacher's lecture on "Galileo's Square-Cube law," which explains why giant mice are impossible.

"And yes, you can get around this restriction with certain cosmic rays or other exotic particles. I am aware of Pym's work, thank you," the professor continues. "It's hard not to be when he published journal articles like 'Ha Ha, I'm Giant-Man Now: Screw You, All Other Physicists.'"

That sounds like a fantastic journal article! Should I be reading scientific journals, for laughs?

This very full arc, which actually feels a lot longer than three issues, contains not only a team-up with a very grumpy Ant-Man--who was kidnapped into participating--but lots of jokes based on Brain Drain's nihilistic view of the universe and the humor inherent in Canada, and how it is different than America.

I mention that the arc felt longer than it actually was, not as a criticism, but as a compliment. Not only does artist Erica Henderson draw lots of panels per page when called on to do so, but North clearly spends a great deal of his writing-time think of how to pack as many jokes into each page as possible. Not just the bonus jokes that come in the alt-text like sentences below most of the pages, but, for example, this panel, in which Doreen surveys her choices for magazines to read in the cabin:

North easily could have stopped at the titles of the magazines themselves, but he went above and beyond, to include several jokes on each cover, detailing the contents of those magazines.

Unbeatable Squirrel Girl has got to have set some kind of record for the most jokes per square centimeter of page-space.

The remaining two issues of the collections are done-in-ones. The first of these is a comic told entirely from the perspective of Nancy's cat Mew, which I believe the solicitation for blamed on Matt Fraction and David Aja doing that Pizza Dog issue of Hawkeye a few years back (In fact, there's a dog that appears in this that I'm fairly confident is supposed to be Pizza Dog, although he's not named, and I didn't see either of the Hawkeyes among the many super-heroes running around). In the background, The Taskmaster is using his awesome skills to take on a whole mess of superheroes--Iron Man! A The Hulk!***** Captain America! Spider-Man! Ms. Marvel! Ms. America! Hellcat!--in addition to Squirrel Girl, but she ultimately proves unbeatable, thanks to the fact that she has something Taskmaster can't master. This issue contains several pages by Zac Gorman, in which he draws comic strips that replicate Mew's dreams. Apparently cats dream in comic strips? Who knew?

The final issue is devoted to celebrating the 25th anniversary of Squirrel Girl's introduction by creators Will Murray and Steve Ditko in 1991's Marvel Super-Heroes Winter Special #8. It's a kinda sorta origin of the character, although not in the "how she got her powers and became a super-hero" kind of way as much as a "where, specifically, she came from" kind of story (That is, it opens with her parents meeting, and the title page is her mom holding her just after giving birth). From there it jumps around in five year increments, and we meet the late Monkey Joe, watch 15-year-old Squirrel Girl help The Hulk take down The Abomination and, finally, enjoy a birthday party with her pals and some Avengers, a party which The Red Skull foolishly attempts to crash.

While the issue is mostly another North and Henderson joint, Murray writes the 15-year-old Doreen sequence, and a piece of Ditko art is repurposed to get something from the great artist into the issue.



*Oh hey, in all those recent discussions of the source of Marvel's current sales woes--you know, whether it was diversity of characters or event exhaustion or them renumbering their books twice a year or whatever--did anyone theorize that maybe it was just that everyone hates the Inhumans, yet Marvel seemed to go ahead and keep publishing Inhumans books constantly, while shoehorning them into pretty much everything they publish? Could that have been a factor? Did Marvel comics readers so hate the Inhumans that they stopped buying Marvel comics to avoid reading about the Inhumans?

**At least not until googling him. He's a prose writer and playwright, and this was his first comics work, which would explain why I had never heard of him. It should be noted that he writes like a comic book writer here, and doesn't display any of the typical flaws one sees when writers fluent in another medium tackle comics-scripting for the first time.

***I was a little surprised that Corin didn't include a joke of any kind referring to Nancy Whitehead as Nancy Whiteheadless. He is a stronger man than I am, I guess.

****I just went to check the table-of-contents of Jon Morris' The Legion of Regrettable Super Villains, the companion book to his earlier League of Regrettable Super Heroes and, to my surprise, Master Pandemonium was not included. Nor was The Orb. Swarm was however, and there's actually a pretty good showing from Marvel villains overall: Stilt-Man, MODOK, Angar the Screamer, Black Talon, The Headmen and others.

*****Not a typo! I'm just not sure which The Hulk it is, Amadeus Cho or Bruce Banner, the latter of whom I'm fairly certain wasn't temporarily dead-ish at the time that issue of Squirrel Girl was pubished.

These are some of the Marvel collections I've read lately:

All-New Wolverine Vol. 1: The Four Sisters: Thor is a white woman now. Captain America is a black man. The Hulk is a still a big green guy, but now he's a Korean-American teenager when he's de-Hulked. Spider-Man is still a white guy, but there's also a second Spider-Man, who is a half-black, half-Latino teenager (and there are, like, three female Spider-People, each starring in their own comic book series). Pretty soon, Iron Man is going to be a black teenage girl.

While one could argue the merits of the particular method for increasing the diversity of Marvel's heroes–I've personally never thought that simply handing the codenames and costumes of middle-aged white guys to black characters, for example, was the best way to go about creating compelling superheroes of color–but Marvel Comics has clearly been devoted to creating a line-up of heroes far more reflective of the world we live in today, rather than the world of 1960s pop culture, from which all these characters originally sprang (or re-sprang, in Cap's case). As far as I've been able to tell, it's all worked pretty well so far, in large part because so many of those comics have been so good.

The one example of this diversification-through-legacy trend I personally was the most ambivalent about, however, was that of turning Wolverine into a teenage girl.

Marvel killed/"killed" Wolverine quite a while ago, in a sort of temporary death that seems way too easy to come back from to create even the illusion of semi-permanence (He lost his healing factor, and then was encased in molten adamantium, which cooled around him, not unlike a fly in amber. It doesn't take much imagination to think of ways to get him out of that situation and back into circulation when it becomes desirable to do so).

Wolverine may have been popular, but he wasn't the sort of hero who played a big, symbolic role within the Marvel Universe (like Captain America), nor did he have a particular job that couldn't be left vacant (like Doctor Strange, The Sorcerer Supreme), nor did he have a particular turf that needed the protection of a particular superhero (like Daredevil or Spider-Man). In other words, Wolverine is not a character that anyone would need to replace for any reason upon his death.

Marvel replaced him with two Wolverines, though. The first is an alternate universe version of himself from the pages of Old Man Logan, who, given the fact that Wolverine is already an immortal character, is basically just Wolverine with different hair. And then they made Laura Kinney, Wolverine's clone with the always lame codename X-23, Wolverine, giving her Wolvie's blue-and-yellow X-Men costume.

In the broadest sense, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense in-universe, and I don't think there was a very convincing rationale ever offered in-story, although in terms of marketing it makes perfect sense. It gives Marvel a literally "all-new" Wolverine to star in All-New Wolverine, it finally gives Laura a superhero name rather than a number (Sorry anyone who was hoping she would eventually take the name Wolverine Girl or Wolverina) and it makes for an interesting juxtaposition with the time-lost, teenage X-Men that Brian Michael Bendis introduced to the modern Marvel Universe during his All-New X-Men/Uncanny X-Men run (Laura appears alongside most of them in the pages of the rebooted second volume of All-New X-Men).

All that said, and given my general apathy towards Marvel's mutants (surpassed only by my apathy for its Inhumans), I was prepared to skip this series entirely–until my friend pretty much insisted that I read it, as it was such a great comic book and, in her words, maybe her favorite comic book of the moment (Of course, she doesn't read Transformers Vs. G.I. Joe, the actual greatest comic book of the moment*).

So writer Tom Taylor is teamed with artists David Lopez and David Navarrot (with Nathan Fairbain on colors) and tasked with turning X-teen X-23 into the new legacy version of Wolverine. The first six issues comprise a rather tidy single story arc, with just the last two pages of cliffhanger providing any kind of loose end. Tear that page out of the trade, and this reads like a complete graphic novel.

Taylor wisely makes this story more about Laura's past than Logan's, and our first, issue-length adventure features her attempts to take down an assassin in Paris, debuting her new Wolverine costume and getting an assist from fellow All-New X-Men and boyfriend Angel (the teenage one from the past, now with fire wings, not the grown-up version who...actually, I lost track of him again. Sorry).

It's a pretty great issue–although it would have annoyed the fuck out of me if I paid $4 for an action scene and had to wait a month for the next scene–detailing Laura's common powers with all-old Wolverine and a major thing that will separate them. This Wolverine, though built to be a weapon just like the original, won't kill. As a hallucination of her clone-daddy tells her, "You're the best there is at what you do...but that doesn't mean you have to do it." It also illustrates the thing that makes the book a worthwhile read: Its sense of humor (The scene where Angel expresses his relief that Laura did not die was pretty priceless, and the point at which I felt the book hook me).

The assassin, it turns out, is a clone of Laura...of sorts. She was part of a series of Laura clones, all of whom look like her, and all of whom were trained to be killers like her, but none of whom have the claws and healing factor. They've also got a fast-approaching expiration date, and they've formed a sort of terrorist cell to lash out at the world before they go.

Meanwhile, the shady company that created them, Alchemax, wants them back, and they want Laura's help in doing so. Naturally, she's torn, but agrees to help, seeing as how her clone sisters are a terrorist cell assassinating folks now.

The rest of the volume then is concerned with Laura's attempts to find and save her sisters, and her trying to figure out who the worse of the two groups of bad guys are, and which she should throw in with. Spoiler alert: She sides with the clones, who have been through the same horrible stuff she has but want to fight back in a proportion greater than that which Laura does at this point in her life.

In a sense, it's almost a cliche sort of Wolverine story, despite the fact that this Wolverine isn't the old one, but Laura's struggles to be better than the weapon she was made to be, than the weapon she's been and than the weapon Wolverine himself all-too willingly was, gives this a somewhat different spin. As does its sense of humor, much of which comes from the very welcome (if early) guest-star appearance of first Dr. Strange and then The Wasp. And the near-constant presence of Gabby, the youngest and most innocent of Laura's clone sisters, who is to this book as Molly was to Runaways. (Taskmaster also makes an appearance, and I've gotta call bullshit on how thoroughly and how quickly Laura kicks his ass. I'll buy his inability to see the foot-claw coming, but the rest? I guess we'll just put that down to Laura having home-book advantage...as well as being a hero fighting a villain).

On the subject of foot-claws, one of the many things I never really liked about the character was that in what seemed to be a rather random differentiation from Logan, she had two rather than three hand claws, and one claw in each of her feet (Similarly, Wolverine's biological son Daken, who I have also lost track of, had two claws in each of his hands, and one in each of his wrists.)

Taylor and company rather consistently make good use of those foot claws throughout, essentially retroactively justifying the character's original design. If you have a super-power, however weird it might seem, than you have to use that super-power pretty regularly, and it has to make sense within that story. In fact, I'm pretty sure Anton Chekov wrote something about foot-claws once...

Captain America: Sam Wilson–Not My Captain America: Remember the last collection Marvel released featuring the newer, Sam Wilson version of the character? The entire six-issue, 2015 run by Rick Remender, Stuart Immonen and company? (Sure you do; we talked about it right here fairly recently.)

Well, you can go ahead and forget about it. That "ongoing" was canceled with the rest of Marvel's line for a few months last year as part of Secret Wars, and then came back with a new number #1 issue–and, in this case, a new creative team, new title and new direction–and is all but ignoring the last comic featuring this character with a big "1" on the spine.

It's not that writer Nick Spencer is contradicting or ignoring the events of Remender's run miniseries All-New Captain America, exactly. Former Falcon Sam Wilson is still the new Captain America. His avian partner Redwing is still ambiguously vampiric (just like Jubilee!). Sam is still working with Misty Knight. Rather, Spencer is ignoring the cliffhangers that Remender's All-New ended with.

Those cliffhangers? First, that Hydra had so thoroughly infiltrated the world that there was now a Hydra agent on every single superhero team. That's a fun idea, and could have had the makings of a fun crossover story, leaving fans to wonder which member of The X-Men, The New Avengers, The Pet Avengers, etc were secretly bad guys working for the Nazi analogues. The other? SHIELD told Sam that Misty Knight, who had claimed to be working for them throughout the entire story arc, was not an agent of SHIELD, implying that OMG she too might be Hydra!

It takes Spencer and Daniel Acuna, who draws the first three issues of the new series, all of two issues to set-up the new status quo which, to be fair, does have Wilson quitting his formal affiliation with SHIELD after they tied up all the Hydra business (Whatever Remender had been planning then seems to either happened off-panel in the months that passed between the end of All-New Captain America and the launch of Captain America: Sam Wilson, or Remender plans to go forward with it somewhere else at some point).

None of that is necessarily a bad thing, just a rather odd thing, and it further makes reading (certain) Marvel comics difficult. Like, Marvel's frequency of reboots have gotten to the point that it's quite possible for a book to leave an interested reader before the reader can even consider dropping the book.

All that said, I really rather liked Spencer's take on the character, which involves not only writing Sam Wilson as a very, very different Captain America, but one who doesn't really struggle with the legacy in a way that too few comics starring (let's face it, temporary) legacy characters ever do.

Spencer also rather boldly has his Captain America, and his Captain America comic book, wade into politics. At least, that seems like a pretty bold move considering Marvel's general reticence when it comes to publishing anything that can be seen as political, and thus offensive to some (I'm thinking especially of the scene in the first issue of Fear Itself in which writer Matt Fraction seemed to be discussing the so-called "Ground Zero Mosque" nonsense without actually using any details, just enough to imply that he was writing about it).

Sure, Spencer is still somewhat coy about Sam's specific politics–he never uses the words liberal or conservative, Democrat or Republican–but it's not too difficult to see where Wilson stands on many issues, and to figure out what those positions are in contrast to the people who are opposed to him, be they passersby, TV talking heads or villains.

There's a pretty great passage in which Sam narrates the hell out of the dawning realization that America was just as divided as ever, and that even though Steve Rogers may have stayed above the fray, that doesn't mean he has to: "If I really believed I could make a difference–If I really believed I could change some minds, do some good–then wasn't I obligated to try?"

And then there's this great transition from the last panel on one page to the first on another. In one panel, Sam is calling a press conference, and stands at a podium, saying "Good evening, I'm gonna read from a statement–"

And in the next, we see a bunch of headlines reacting to that statement, like "Cap Versus The Constitution?," "Sam Wilson: Captain Anti-America" and so on.

Of course, in other places, it's much more clear exactly what Sam might think about certain issues. His first case is busting The Serpent Society (The Marvel Universe's KKK stand-ins), who are attacking illegal immigrants trying to cross the southern border (although, this being a superhero comic, it's a little more complicated and weird than it at first seems). Later, the major villain of this first volume, a ruthless businessman literally dressed like a snake, expresses a bunch of Randian/Republican economic philosophy, culminating with "someone has to make America marvelous again–"

So yeah, not too subtle. And all the better for the (relative) lack of subtlety.

These six-issues basically constitute one big story arc, establishing the still new-ish Cap's new status quo.

Without SHIELD funding, he's set up shop with a small team that includes Misty Knight, former D-Man Dennis Dunphy (in a new, "cooler" costume with no mask, but a sweet beard; I liked the old look better, and with Wolverine dead and Wolverine II rocking the yellow and gold, this is the perfect time for Dunphy to bring back his Wolverine mask!), what appears to be another comic book analogue to the hacker group Anonymous (here it's The Whisperer**) and...Redwing, sometimes ("Redwing Approval Still Sky High At 93 Perecent" a headline shortly after the panel revealing all Cap's bad press assures us).

Not unlike what he was doing with Luke Cage's Mighty Avengers, this Cap is trying to be a little more of the people, and is fighting crime and injustice via hotline tips. The first takes him to Arizona, where he encounters the Sons of the Serpent.

Turns out they are working with a minor Marvel mad scientist who is splicing people with animal DNA, which will gradually bring about the new Falcon...and, awesomely enough, brings about the return of Capwolf. Even more awesomely, Sam Wilson temporarily being a werewolf is here treated like little more than if he had a head cold. It's nothing to angst about, it's nothing to even worry about, Sam Wilson is just randomly going to finish off the story arc as a giant werewolf, giving Misty something to make fun of him about for the remaining four issues of the book.

And it turns out the mad scientist is working for Serpent Solutions, snake-themed supervillain Viper's reconstitution of The Serpent Society as a slightly-more-evil-than-average corporate entity with a finger in everything, leading to plenty of fun visuals like Viper on the golf course, cartoon golf clothes on over his snake suit, and the line about how America needs someone to make it great marvelous again, "and I say I'm just the super villain in a snake suit to do it."

It is fantastic.

Spencer's script is funny, to the point that I would be tempted to call the book an outright comedy, but when compared to some of the other books Marvel is currently publishing (i.e. most of the rest of those in this post), it has more in common with their traditional fare. Rather, this is a superhero comic book with a sense of humor...as well as a rather unique point of view. It's Spencer's take on the Marvel Universe (previously seen in books like The Superior Foes of Spider-Man and Ant-Man/Astonishing Ant-Man), only here applied to one of the characters at the center of that universe.

The artwork is a bit of a step down from what Stuart Immonen was bringing to Sam Wilson's adventures in the previous Captain America comic. It takes four-to-five artists to draw just six issues; Acuna handling the first three (with a "with" credit on #3 going to Mike Choi), Paul Renaud draws #4 and #5 and Joe Bennett and Belardino Brabo pencil and ink the sixth issue.

Based on their past work, I'm not a huge fan of either Acuna or Bennett, but in both cases this is by far the best work I've seen from either. Surprisingly, it all kind of flows together remarkably well, too. I prefer a comic like this to have a single artist, with a strong "voice" that allows the artist to make the book as much theirs visually as the writer might make it theirs verbally. That's gotten harder and harder to find these days, and sometimes the best we can hope for is a single artist per arc. We don't really get that here either, but, like I said, everyone involved in drawing or coloring this book does a pretty remarkable job, and they all blend together better than expected.

I'd highly recommend this volume...to anyone who likes fun and/or funny superhero comics, regardless of how they might normally feel about Captain American and/or Sam Wilson.

Howard The Duck Vol. 1: Duck Hunt: Because Marvel just can't help but relaunch their books at an alarming frequency, the second collection of writer Chip Zdarsky and artist Joe Quinones' Howard The Duck comic is labeled "Volume 1." Whatever happened to Howard The Duck #1-#5, the first Howard The Duck #1-#5 of the Zdarsky/Quinones run, not the second Howard The Duck #1-#5, which also exist? They are in Howard The Duck Vol. 0: What the Duck. Wouldn't it be easier to label the first volume with "Vol. 1" and the second volume "Vol. 2"? Yes!

But if there's one thing that Marvel, as a publisher, is opposed to, it is the logical use of numbers. If there are two things they are opposed to, the other is making it easy for readers to find and enjoy their comic books.

And so welcome to the second collection of the Zdarsky/Quinones Howard The Duck comic, Howard The Duck Vol. 1.

I'm going to go lie down for a few minutes.

...

Okay, I'm back.

So it's eight months after the events of Secret Wars, and there are several changes in Howard's life, although Zdarsky and Quinones will explain those in the course of this volume. It opens "three months" ago, at the conclusion of the Howard The Duck/Unbeatable Squirrel Girl crossover, which is the last story in this collection.

Not feeling as fulfilled in his new life as a private investigator, even with the help of "Aunt" May Parker as his administrative assistant or Skrull-shape-shifted into a tattoo artist Tara as his friend, Howard decides to try and return to his own dimension. To do this, he consults with Doctor Strange (who really gets around, it seems) and then takes The Abundant Glove to The Nexus of All Realities in Man-Thing's Citrusville swamp.

Things...don't go well, as Howard and Tara encounter first The Wizard and Titania, and then female clones of Howard and Rocket Raccoon (made to be breeding partners for them by The Collector when he briefly had the pair of them in the previous collection) and then they all get involved in a big, weird, epic space adventure that ultimately includes The Silver Surfer, a would-be Herald of Galactus named Scout, Galactus himself, The Guardians of The Galaxy (now up one Thing and down one Peter Quill) and, of course, a fight with The Collector.

It's all as weird and wild as one might expect, especially since all of that takes only about four issues. As he proved so able of doing last issue, Zdarsky manages to fill just about every panel of every page with a joke, deeply embedding Howard in the Marvel Universe without ever really resorting to parody of the characters and the setting as the source of the humor. The Marvel Universe, particularly after so many decades of existence, is such a weird place that one need not make fun of it to find the humor in it. One need only have its characters observe that strangeness as they wander around in it.

Zdarsky also does a fine job of nailing Howard's particularly jaded voice, which makes the character a particularly good guide to the universe (And, as annoying as Marvel's renumbering practices are, Howard, like The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl, at least observes that as well; Quinones' variant cover for the first issue replaces the new tag-line "Trapped In A World He's Grown Accustomed To", itself a riff on the original tag-line, with "Trapped In A Renumbering He Never Asked For!" A tiny little "Again" appears beneath the "#1").

Howard's attempt to get home, which takes he and Tara and their allies to a high-stakes battle in outer-space, is interrupted by a one-issue origin story of the new humanoid duck and raccoon characters, drawn by Vernoica Fish. Quinones draws the rest of the book...except for the Erica Henderson-drawn Unbeatable Squirrel Girl #6, which is included herein, as it is one half of the "Animal House" crossover between the two.

It should perhaps prove unsurprising that a crossover between two of Marvel's three best comics at the moment (Patsy Walker, obviously), is pretty great.

Howard is hired to find a missing cat, and since all cats look the same to him, he tries to abduct Nancy Whitehead's cat...but Nancy is the roommate of Doreen Green, AKA Squirrel Girl. Then Kraven the Hunter rolls up in the Kra-Van, tosses Howard in a sack and takes him to the estate of an eccentric, superhero memorabilia-collecting lady who would like to hunt "the most dangerous game."

But since hunting people is illegal, she's decided to hunt potentially-dangerous game that falls into a legal gray area, like people-ish animals or animal-ish people. So when Squirrel Girl goes to rescue Howard, she finds him imprisoned alongside Rocket Raccoon, Beast of the X-Men, a not-even-disguised version of the cat from Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely's We3 and Weapon II, which is basically Wolverine, if Wolverine were a talking squirrel rather than a mutant (He's got the little Barry Windsor-Smith eye-piece and wires and everything).

Squirrel Girl and Kraven find themselves in the hunt as well, and it is awesome. There's so many great things in this, but probably my favorite part is the gag on the last page, which comes after Kraven has decided to re-think his life, and becomes a hunter-of-hunters. It sure seems easier than hunting Spider-Man!

The crossover spans an issue of each of the titles, and they are each done by their respective creative teams. It's pretty damn weird to see someone other than Henderson drawing Squirrel Girl these days, since her version of the character is so incredibly distinct (especially compared to the Barbie doll figured-version of the older Great Lakes Avengers comics), but I enjoyed seeing the characters in the hands of the other creative teams and, especially, seeing Zdarsky trying to do those weird "alt-text" style jokes that Unbeatable Squirrel Girl writer Ryan North does in his book.

As I read both Howard and Squirrel Girl in trade, I guess that means I'll be paying for the same content twice, but heck, at least the content is good content.

Ms. Marvel Vol. 5: Super Famous: Good news! While Marvel may have idiotically rebooted the Ms. Marvel ongoing after Secret Wars despite the fact that nothing at all about the creative team, the cast or direction of the book had changed, when it came time to collect the second issues of Ms. Marvel numbered 1-6, they kept the number of the collections, meaning that Ms. Marvel's sizable collection-reading audience need not do the mental gymnastic required of readers of, say, Mark Waid's run on Daredevil. Huzzah!

This volume picks up months after the end of Secret Wars, as each of the post-Secret Wars books did. There were two big changes in Kamala Khan's life during that time, one of which took up so much of her time and mental energy that she barely noticed the other. That first is that she joined the Avengers (the All-New, All-Different squad, which was and still is the flagship team at the moment), while the other is that her best friend-with-an-unrequited crush on her went ahead and fell in love with a classmate. That Bruno now had a girlfriend is something that Kamala was literally the last person to know about, which is a neat, somewhat sly way to handle the time-jump Marvel's books were all forced to incorporate, and of illustrating the confused world of teenage relationships (Despite having rebuffed him and all but encouraged him to find someone else, Kamala is nevertheless hurt, annoyed and confused that Bruno actually went ahead and did just that).

These six issues, drawn by regular artists Takeshi Miyazawa and Adrian Alphona, plus Nico Leon, roughly divide into two storylines. In the first, drawn by Miyazawa and Alphona, we are introduced to Kamala's new, Avenging status quo (Tony drops her off at her house after missions, and gives her advice on her physics homework) and her slow-dawning realization that Bruno has a new girlfriend. Meanwhile, she fights the forces of gentrification–quite literally, since this particular case of gentrification includes mind-control and is being carried out by a villainous organization (G. Willow Wilson does a pretty great job on this story, making the driving conflict that is at once both a real-world concern and a silly supervillain plot, in the best tradition of old-school "relevant" comics).

In the second, Kamala gets still more obligations when her older brother seeks to marry, and she decides the best way to try and be in several places at once is to 3D printer clones of herself. It obviously goes completely wrong, but in a rather amusing fashion that can only be sorted out by the intervention of her hero Carol Danvers and a hug from Iron Man. In this story, Wilson gets to simultaneously work Kamala's family dramedy with superhero shenanigans about as hard as she has yet during her run on the title (Er, including the previous volume, not just the first six issues of the new volume).

The artwork is a little more all over the place than I'd like, but all three artists are really great ones. And color artist Ian Herring, who handles all six issues, does as good a job as possible of making it look as if all of the pages herein belong together. I most enjoyed Miyazawa's contributions. Not only do we get to see him draw the whole All-New, All-Different Avengers line-up in his particular style, but he does a fine job of presenting a frazzled Kamala visually; her hair is a mess throughout the first issue, and she looks delightfully out of it.

Leon, however, probably gets the most fun bits, as it's that second half of the book devoted to Kamala's ever-increasing number of dim-witted, barely functioning clones, all of which are drawn with an emoticon-simple expression, gifted with a word or two of vocabulary, and subject to horrifyingly melt at the most inopportune times.

Marvel's got so many high-quality funny books these days, but Wilson and company's is perhaps the best of those that keeps one foot in the serious supehero genre. Ms. Marvel is the Spider-Man of the 21st Century. Which I'm fairly certain I've said about at least one other super-character before, but unlike that character, Ms. Marvel is a Marvel character. So maybe I should say instead that "Ms. Marvel is the publisher's Spider-Man for the 21st Century."

Whatever. It's fun, it's funny, it's melodramatic, it takes superheroics more seriously than the publisher's outright comedic titles, it's always well-drawn–it's pretty much exactly what one would want from a superhero comic book.

Patsy Walker, AKA Hellcat! Vol.1: Hooked on a Feline: I think a great deal of the delight I took in this comic book came from the fact that unlike every other book on this list, I had no idea what to suspect from it. I wasn't familiar with the work of either writer Kate Leth or artist Brittney Williams, and while I liked Hellcat because of her weird, real-world origin and her association with various Marvel characters I've liked over the years (Son of Satan, The Defenders and She-Hulk, whose last title she was featured in), the last Hellcat comic I read was the baffling Kathryn Immonen miniseries.

As it turns out, Leth is a hilarious writer, who packs the book with jokes broad and subtle, and takes the same approach to Marvel Univers humor that Chip Zdarsky takes in Howard The Duck. As I said above, the setting is so weird that it's pretty much inherently hilarious; one need only frame it correctly to mine it for comedy. And mine Leth does.

And as for Williams, she is an amazing artist, her style looking akin to a compromise between those of Erica Henderson and Gurihiru, retaining flexibility to be tweaked in either direction as needed, so that the characters can occasionally become even more cute than they are usually designed, or even slip into super-deformity.

And as for Hellcat? Leth incorporates her real-world origin as the star of a pre-Marvel, Archie-like teen gag comic into the present storyline, incorporating characters from those comics into this one (Her rival Hedy Wolfe has control of those comics, and is re-publishing them to great financial success, which Patsy is unable to share in; in a perfect world, Marvel too would be doing so, or at least publishing a story per issue as a back-up, just as Archie Comics has been doing in their rebooted line). The story picks up right where we last saw her, working as a freelance P.I. for She-Hulk's firm...until she's not.

She has a business plan, though, a sort of staffing agency for super-powered people who don't want to use their powers to either fight or commit crime, but, in the meantime, she takes a series of low-paying jobs that she is terribly suited for. Meanwhile, an obscure Asgardian villain is in town, and it's up to Patsy to take her down.

While she reconnects with old friends and makes new ones, She-Hulk, Valkyrie, Doctor Strange (him again!), Howard The Duck and Tara all guest-star, and a bunch of supeheroines put in cameos when Patsy invites them to lunch.

That accounts for the first five issues. The sixth and final one collected here is a done-in-one drawn and colored by Natasha Allegri, who has a perfectly darling, manga-inspired style that makes everyone look simultaneously completely adorable and like they are from modern fan art from some lost 1970s children's cartoon from Japan no one's ever heard of.

In that story, Patsy and her new friends cajole She-Hulk into joining them for a day off at Coney Island, where they run afoul of Arcade, and must best him in various deadly amusement games or forfeit their lives. As darling as Allegri's Pasty and company might be, it's her Arcade and her Jessica Jones that are really mind-bending, given the fact that those aren't characters anyone ever sees in a style anything like this. Also, She-Hulk reverts to her Jen form, which...I can't actually remember the last time I saw her not Hulked out.

The only thing wrong with these first six issues? Williams' cover for the sixth showed Hercules on a float in The Mermaid Parade, and yet Herc is nowhere to be found in the interiors. Something to work into future issues, ladies.

And speaking of covers, the variants filling up the final pages of this collection include variants by some of my favorite artists: Sophe Campbell, Erica Henderson, George Perez, Marguerite Sauvage and Kevin Wada.

If you're a fan of any of the books covered in this post and haven't read Patsy Walker yet, please do so. You'll love it.

The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl Vol. 3: Squirrel, You Really Got Me Now: Despite the cover of The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl #1 (Vol. 2), which Marvel also used for the cover of this particular collection of the series, The Avengers team that dominates so much of it don't really appear within the book much.

Squirrel Girl may (rather incongruously) be part of Robert Da Costa's A.I.M./Avengers merger team (the one appearing in New Avengers at the moment), but that is really only acknowledged at the end of the first issue herein, in which Dorreen takes her friends Nancy, Chipmunk Hunk and Koi Boy with her to Avengers Island's food court, which is full of restaurants with Avengers pun names (Soup Thor Salad, for example, or Foods That Are Rich In Iron, Man). So if you were hoping to see artist Erica Henderson draw the hell out of all those new New Avengers, sorry. (Speaking of the cover for the second Unbeatable Squirrel Girl #1, it bears the words "Only Our Second #1 This Year So Far" on it; again, at least they have a sense of humor about it...and at least Marvel put the numeral "3" on the spine rather than "1," making this an easy book to read in trade.)

The first issue finds Doreen Green getting a new, Nancy-designed costume and a visit from her mom. The last 40-pages are devoted to the "Animal House" crossover with Howard The Duck, which I mentioned above. In between them is a fantastically convoluted time travel story involving Squirrel Girl's first and perhaps greatest enemy: Doctor Doom. Through a series of weird circumstances, Squirrel Girl finds herself marooned in the 1960s. She quickly discovers that she's not the only person from her time period there, and not only must she find away to return to her own era, but she must save the time stream itself from Doom, who is armed with Doomipedia, which tells him exactly how he conquered the world...and, of course, proceeded to name everything after himself.

It's...complicated. But Ryan North sure writes a hell of a Doctor Doom, his arrogance both perfectly, hilariously demonstrated and, here, the key to his defeat. It's buried in one of those computer programming jokes I don't really get, because I am dumb, but unlike every other computer-smart person, Doom never learned a traditional programming language, but rather invented his own, where all of the components are variations of "Doom," meaning a bunch of computer programming students speak a language he can't comprehend.

It is awesome, and there is so much good stuff in the Squirrel Girl Vs. Doctor Doom story arc that it rewards multiple reading. The first time is, after all ,full of some very weird, very unexpected surprises.

I remain convinced that the "Unbeatable" in the title doesn't refer to the character Squirrel Girl herself, but the comic book Squirrel Girl itself, which really can't be beat.


While I'm at it, I suppose I should link to reviews of other recent-ish releases I recently read (and reviewed) that are also Marvel collections. I covered Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur Vol. 1: BFF and All-New, All-Different Avengers Vol. 1: Magnificent Seven for School Library Journal's Good Comics For Kids blog. They're both pretty good, the former more so than the latter, as the Avengers book has some slight structural problems. All in all though, Marvel seems to be in a pretty good place creatively these days, at least with books for younger readers and lower-tier characters (Other parts of the line are, of course, a mess).



*Please note that Transformers Vs. G.I. Joe was still being published both at the time my friend said that and at the time I wrote this review, which has been sitting around in a draft for a while now. I suppose that I could change that now that Transformers Vs. G.I. Joe has ended, but why pass up an opportunity to remind everyone that Transformers Vs. G.I. Joe was pretty much the best thing ever?

**Whose true identity was revealed during the "Standoff" crossover story, which I read after I wrote the Captain America review above, but before I posted this post.

On the last 50 pages or so of Marvel's Original Sin hardcover collection

Last week I discussed Original Sin, the eight(-ish) part miniseries by writer Jason Aaron, artist Mike Deodato and colorist Frank Martin that dominated the 390-page Original Sin hardcover collection. Tonight I wanted to look at all the supplementary material included in the collection, almost all of it from the pages of the five-issue tie-in anthology entitled Original Sins...which is only one letter's difference from the main series, because comics are weird and dumb and evil. There are also two issues of Original Sin: Secret Avengers Infinite Comic, which I believe was a digital-first comic, which might offer an explanation for why it has two people (?) named "Mast" and "Geoffo" credited as "storyboard artists" rather than with more typical "layouts."

Almost all of these stories, which range in length from Ryan North, Ramon Villalobos and company's 40-page Young Avengers story to a handful of two-page gag strips, deal with the fall-out of a single event early on in Original Sin, The Orb's use of one of the Watcher's gouged-out eyes as a secret-disseminating "truth bomb" to disorient the heroes gathered to apprehend him and his accomplices.

The scene is actually a very small, not terribly important part of Original Sin, but it is the part that allows for other comics to tie-in to the "Original Sin" brand and try to stretch Aaron's story into something that could—at least theoretically—sustain a line-wide crossover. Original Sins—with an "s"—allowed Marvel the chance to check-in with a bunch of other, mostly book-less heroes and, in the process, give a bunch of other creators a chance to play in Marvel's sandbox.

I can't imagine Original Sins was a very satisfying read if read as it was serially published. Each $4, 20-page issue contained a trio of stories—a 10-page lead feature, 8-pages of the five-part Young Avengers story and a 2-page gag comic. If you wanted to just read that Young Avengers story, you were stuck paying $20 for it, and getting little else that would interest you. If you wanted to see favorite, unlikely creators like, say, Richard Geary or Chip Zdarsky drawing Marvel characters, you'd be paying $4 for 2 pages of comics, and getting a lot of stuff that likely wouldn't appeal to you in the process.

The way they're packaged in this collection, the Young Avengers story kicks off this section, and then the rest seem to follow as they were published.

Let's take them one at a time.

"Young Avengers: Hidden In Plain Sight" by Ryan North, Ramon Villalobos and Jordan Gibson

By far the highlight of the book, I don't want to say too much about this here at the moment (As I talk about it here). The Ryan North who wrote it is the same Ryan North who writes Dinosaur Comics and Boom's Adventure Time comics, and, as with the latter, he includes little alt text like gags along the bottom of most of the pages. It is a very funny comic, but funny within the bounds of the Marvel Universe (that is, no one breaks character or the fourth wall in the way some of the other, shorter, comedic pieces in Original Sins-with-an-"s" do).

Hulkling sees, via social media, that all the superheroes seem to be fighting Noh-Varr's ex-girlfriend in Manhattan, so he texts Prodigy, they go to space to pick up Noh-Varr, and head to Manhattan to see what they can do. The fight is over, but they stumble upon a post eyeball zap adventure that pits the three Young Avengers against The Hood (The rest of the team is present, but they literally text in their appearances).

It's seriously great stuff, and made me wish Marvel hadn't ended the last volume of Young Avengers when its creative team of Kieron Gillen, Jamie McKelvie and Mike Norton departed, but rather kept it going under North and Villalobos.

"Terminus" by Nathan Edmondson, Mike Perkins and Andy Troy

This one is a bit of an odd story out in that rather than checking in with a book-less character, it's a 10-pager starring the new Deathlok, who has a new series, and it therefore seems to be here to remind readers of Original Sin that there's a new Deathlok comic they might want to read.

Henry Hayes, a former soldier who now works for Doctors Without Borders, is accosted by an off-duty SHIELD agent who explains he was there when "The Watcher's eye exploded downtown," and now he knows Hayes' secret. That secret being that he's secret Deathlok, a cyborg assassin who doesn't seem to be half-zombie in this iteration, and who now more closely resembles the one from the TV, I guess. Oddly, Hayes himself doesn't seem to know the secret, so I guess that's the premise of the new take on the character.

Mike Perkins draws this sort of realistic, espionage-style action comic very well, as he's proved in the past, and while there's not much here, and nothing that really piqued my interest in the series, it's a pretty effective pitch for that series.

"Lockjaw: Buried Memory" by Stuart Moore, Rick Geary and Ive Svorcina

At just 16 silent panels over two pages, this is a very fleet read. There's only a single joke to it—Lockjaw suddenly has a memory, and seeks the aid of a Marvel superhero—and it's not that funny a joke, really, but if you ever wanted to see Rick Geary draw not only Lockjaw, but the current versions of Luke Cage, Iron Man, Emma Frost and others, then this comic certainly fulfills that desire.

Kamala "Ms. Marvel" Khan appears in one-panel of this story, as one of the several heroes to deny Lockjaw help, and it constitutes her only appearance in Original Sin, despite being depicted, along with a bunch of other heroes who weren't drawn there by Deodato, at ground zero of the eyeball bomb in Manhattan on the cover of Original Sins #1.

"Black Legacy" by Frank Tieri, Raffaele Ienco and Brad Anderson

Is Marvel Studios developing a Black Knight film, or is he going to appear in the third Avengers movie or on Agents of SHIELD or something...? For the life of me, I couldn't figure out why this story existed at all.

The Black Knight, who I was fairly certain was based in England (I only read the first half of the Revolutionary War trade; am I misremembering his presence in it?), is holed up in his apartment, which he hasn't left in what appears to be a long time, wearing only his briefs and clutching his ebony blade (Should I rewrite that last bit to make it sound less suggestinve? Nah). A writer and expert on the Black Knight legacy and the ebony blade is knocking at his door, saying she knows his secret, which is that the blade is addictive and makes folks who wield it crazy, eventually killing him.

I'm not sure why The Black Knight, who seemed to be in a pretty good place last time I remember seeing him (If not in Revolutionary War, then definitely in Captain Britain and MI:13) is made all Howard Hughes for the sake of a ten-page story which, incidentally, has nothing at all to do with Original Sin except, perhaps, thematically. During my first read-through, I thought the Knight was caught in the blast—which would have mandated his presence in Manhattan, not England—but on rereading, I see that not only was he not in the blast, it's not clear which city he's in during this story. Also, the writer, who knows his secret, knows it from research and inference, not because she was caught in the blast.

So either Tieri's got a Black Knight series on the horizon, or Marvel's got a Black Knight media adaptation on the horizon, or man, this is one out-of-left field page-filler.

"Before Your Eyes" by Ty Templeton and Paul Mounts

Templeton writes and draws this Howard The Duck two-pager, in which Howard finds himself ejected from his car by a faulty—and apparently very powerful—air bag, and his mind races through what he recently learned from "the eye of a dead Watcher".

Howard The Duck's troubled history, and his existence as a sort of flashpoint regarding a big comics company and a creator in conflict over who owns what and who gets and deserves credit and money for what, makes Howard The Duck comics incredibly difficult to read, something that will never change now, given the fact that Howard's creator Steve Gerber has passed away.

I'm a big fan of Templeton's work, and while this isn't really a great example of it—consisting as it does of only 14 panels of Howard in a suit—it ends with a pretty charged, I-can't-believe-Marvel-published-that statement: "You are Howard The Duck. The greatest example of wasted potential in the known galaxy."

I suppose there are a couple of different ways to read that, but there's only one way I could read it.


"Whispers of War" by Charles Soule, Ryan Browne and Edgar Delgado

This is the only story in this book I couldn't read all the way through...I made it onto the fourth page of the ten-page story before giving up. It opens with a spiky headed guy who I at first took to be Iceman, with a goblet in a penthouse hot tub, talking to a trio of faces that are merging from his body, one of which is that of a frog.

I guess this is what The Purple Man looks like now, which was a bit of a surprise, given that the last time I saw him (Alias, maybe?) he just looked like a man. Only purple. On page four, The Inhumans appear, so I then assumed he might have gone through some Terrigenisis mutation or whatever and then I got so bored I had to stop reading.

The cover for the particular issue of Original Sins appeared in has Blackbolt and The Purple Man on the cover, and says there's an "Inhuman" story within, so I suppose this has something to do with the ongoing u series. Lockjaw's in four panels of it, but that's just not enough Lockjaw to get me to give a shit about The Inhumans. Sorry.

"Bury The Lead" by Dan Slott, Mark Bagley, Joe Rubenstein and Paul Mounts

This two-pager is teased as a J. Jonah Jameson story on the cover, and it is. There's only one joke in it, and it's a fairly strong one if you know the character at all from any medium, but that also means I can't really say anything about it here without ruining it. Suffice it to say that it's a fun little piece by a writer and penciler strongly associated with Spider-Man and his supporting cast and, I suppose, that this is another Original Sin tie-in that has nothing at all to do with Original Sin—it involves someone discovering a deep dark secret about JJJ, but not through a Watcher eye-blast or anything like that.

"Checkmate" by James Robinson, Alex Maleev and Cris Peter

This is a Dr. Doom story written by current Fantastic Four writer and drawn by Alex Maleev in his signature realistic, but grittier style. The actual protagonist is a scummy, investment advisor Wall Street type—someone you won't mind knowing gets killed by Dr. Doom, essentially—who learned some of Doom's secrets from the Watcher eye-bomb, and makes elaborate plans to blackmail Doom.

It goes about as well for him as you might expect.

Maleev's Doom is very cool-looking, despite only appearing in the splash pages that book-end the short story. He gives Doom red eyes, which is a small but effective tweak of the design. His protagonist is much less well-drawn, however, and I found myself being repeatedly distracted by trying to place the Hollywood actor he seemed to patterned after in any given panel: Here he looks like Ben Affleck, there Chris Evans, ooh in this sequence he looks like Eric Balfour...interesting choice.

The backgrounds and establishing shots, on the other hand, appear to just be traced or mildly manipulated photographs, which is pretty disappointing. But it's only ten-pages long, so it's hard to get too disappointed in the artwork either way.

"Catharsis" by David Abadta, Pablo Dura and Erica Henderson

This is another two-pager, which thus far has meant a funny story, but there isn't really a joke here, just a premise so unusual that it would only really fit in a gag format strip. Well, I think there's an attempt at a joke in the final panel, but I didn't think it really worked.

This does give a nice preview of what upcoming Unbeatable Squirrel Girl artist Erica Henderson's Marvel work could look like though. Verdict? Pretty nice!

"How The World Works" by Al Ewing, Butch Guice, Scott Hanna and Matthew Wilson

Billed as a Nick Fury story, this is as much a Dum Dum Dugan story as it is a Fury one, and the revelation that occurs in it seems to me to be at least as big a one as any of those regarding Fury in the main Original Sin series (i.e. that he's really old now for real, that he has a small army of super-LMDs of himself as a strapping young man, that he assassinates space monsters in his down time, that he almost blew a hole in Spider-Man's head, etc).

It's also the story that most directly ties in to the events of Original Sin, in terms of content and visuals, with Guice's pencil art, inked by Hanna and colored by Matthew Wilson, most closely resembling that of Deodato. It takes place during the time in which The Orb is in custody, and involves Dugan confronting Old Man Fury about all the shitty things Fury's been doing, only to discover a super-shitty thing Fury's been doing, a sin that seems a lot worse than some of his other sins.

"The No-Sin Situation" by Chip Zdarsky

Probably the best two-pages in the whole book, regardless of how much I might have talked up that Young Avengers story, this Zdarksy strip is billed as starring "Everybody Else." It's only two-pages long, but it has 28 panels in it! It opens with Nick Fury sitting down Gambit in an interview room and telling him that there's a situation where everyone's secrets are being revealed and that "I just want to get aheaed of it and see what we should prepare for." Fury assures the ragin' Cajun that "Everyhing you say here will be off the record and not in continuity."

The rest of the strip then consists of single-panels featuring a different Marvel character, introduced in a narration box naming them and defining them in a manner similar to Original Sin, revealing a deep, dark secret about themselves (The Black Panther and Namor, The Sub-Mariner are exceptions...they get two panels).

They are mostly very, very funny. For example:

I found two elements of the strip striking in that they paralleled Andrew Wheeler's "Original Spin" coverage of Original Sin for Comics Alliance. The first was that Zdarsky introduces The Watcher as "Moon Creep;" the first headline in the first installment of "Original Spin"...? "Moon Creep Murdered! Sex Games Gone Wrong?"

Also, Dr. Strange reveals that he changed his surname to Strange because he wanted to be in a metal band, which also explains his hand gestures. One of Wheeler's running gags for the Dr. Strange/Punisher team-up plotline of Original Sin was that the pair were a "retro psychedelic prog rock" band called Strangecastle.

"Original Sin: Secret Avengers" by Ales Kot, Mast, Geoffo, Ryan Kelly and Lee Loughridge

This is the apparent digital-first comic, referred to in the table-of-contents, where it is misplaced as coming before the issues of Original Sins rather than after them, as "Original Sin: Secret Avengers Infinite Comic #1-2." As I said, I'm not entirely sure what it's doing here; I suspect Marvel wasn't sure where else to put it, but then, the back of a Secret Avengers trade seems like the more obvious place, doesn't it?

It's only tangentially related to the goings-on of Original Sin—odd, since it stars two of SHIELD's "name" characters, one of whom is Nick Fury's namesake—as "The Event" (as the eyeball attack in Manhattan is here referred to) reveals the fact that this scientist guy that this Nick Fury—the young, black one who looks more like Sam Jackson then the old, white one does—and Agent Clark Gregg thought was dead is actually still alive, and he needs to be captured and stopped. Preferably before this guy with a weird face wearing a SHIELD uniform but commanding Hydra, a guy who no one ever names, gets his hands on him. As for the scientist, he developed a way to manipulate the universe through code, which he plans to have go open source. It is all apparently following up on plot points from comics I have never read, so I never really understood the exact nature of the conflict or the impetus for it, but I did manage to read all 32 pages of it, so it wasn't as boring and confusing as that Inhumans/Purple Man story was...