Art: Erica Henderson
Colors: Rico Renzi
Letters: Travis Lanham
Logo: Michael Allred
Squirrel Girl created by Will Murray & Steve Ditko.
One of the pleasures of reading The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl is how the series has made no concessions to alter its offbeat tone to better fit into Marvel’s regular churn of crossover events. The Squirrel Girl comic is better characterised as Marvel Universe adjacent. And that’s fine as long as Ryan North and Erica Henderson can get to keep producing one of the best, not to mention the funniest, comics being released by the beleaguered publisher. So while every other series feels like it’s getting sucked into the dark vortex that is Secret Empire, our titular character is vacationing in the Savage Land and hanging out with dinosaurs, because dinosaurs are the best!
The reason Doreen Green and her roommate/fellow computer science major Nancy Whitehead get to hang out with dinosaurs is because they entered an online programming contest which claimed to award its winners “unspecified fabulous prizes.” Well, that doesn’t sound suspicious at all. No siree. For the reader expecting some kind of twist, it’s delivered at the very last page. But North and Henderson spend half the book carefully ratcheting up the anticipation of their arrival at the Savage Land, so the real emotional payoff is watching Doreen and Nancy geek out and identify every species they set their sights on, all the while dropping knowledge about the Mesozoic era. See, comics are educational.
The comic is naturally a playful subversion of the Lost World trope. It turns out that the Savage Land is now accessible via commercial airlines (even to airlines arriving from Latveria). The Land itself (or at least part of it) is being run as a wildlife preserve, complete with the usual tourist amenities such as hotels and tacky gift shops (which Doreen just loves). More importantly, everything seems to be running smoothly with nary a rogue dinosaur in sight eating any of the staff or guests. Suck it, you incompetents who run Jurassic Park!
So the mayhem promised by the comic’s Frank Frazetta-inspired cover has yet to be delivered here. But we do learn two significant things. Nancy likes cute boys who know their dinosaurs (even if they hail from Latveria). And Squirrel Girl will definitely get to ride a pterosaur (I'm envisioning the mighty Skybax rider) at some point, because it’s what she now wants out of life.
One of the pleasures of reading The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl is how the series has made no concessions to alter its offbeat tone to better fit into Marvel’s regular churn of crossover events. The Squirrel Girl comic is better characterised as Marvel Universe adjacent. And that’s fine as long as Ryan North and Erica Henderson can get to keep producing one of the best, not to mention the funniest, comics being released by the beleaguered publisher. So while every other series feels like it’s getting sucked into the dark vortex that is Secret Empire, our titular character is vacationing in the Savage Land and hanging out with dinosaurs, because dinosaurs are the best!
The reason Doreen Green and her roommate/fellow computer science major Nancy Whitehead get to hang out with dinosaurs is because they entered an online programming contest which claimed to award its winners “unspecified fabulous prizes.” Well, that doesn’t sound suspicious at all. No siree. For the reader expecting some kind of twist, it’s delivered at the very last page. But North and Henderson spend half the book carefully ratcheting up the anticipation of their arrival at the Savage Land, so the real emotional payoff is watching Doreen and Nancy geek out and identify every species they set their sights on, all the while dropping knowledge about the Mesozoic era. See, comics are educational.
The comic is naturally a playful subversion of the Lost World trope. It turns out that the Savage Land is now accessible via commercial airlines (even to airlines arriving from Latveria). The Land itself (or at least part of it) is being run as a wildlife preserve, complete with the usual tourist amenities such as hotels and tacky gift shops (which Doreen just loves). More importantly, everything seems to be running smoothly with nary a rogue dinosaur in sight eating any of the staff or guests. Suck it, you incompetents who run Jurassic Park!
So the mayhem promised by the comic’s Frank Frazetta-inspired cover has yet to be delivered here. But we do learn two significant things. Nancy likes cute boys who know their dinosaurs (even if they hail from Latveria). And Squirrel Girl will definitely get to ride a pterosaur (I'm envisioning the mighty Skybax rider) at some point, because it’s what she now wants out of life.
