What I Bought 12/22/2015 - Part 3

There's this beer commercial that's supposed to be the founder of Coors trekking the wilderness to find the water he wanted to use for his beer, and every time I see it, at first I think it's a commercial for that new movie where DiCaprio tries to win an Oscar by fighting a bear. But it's not.

Ms. Marvel #2, G. Willow Wilson (writer), Takeshi Miyazawa (artist), Ian Herring (color artist), Joe Caramagna (letterer) - Oh god, Doctor Octopus is back! Dan Slott must be planning to wreck Kamala as a character, too! Someone call the Punisher!

Kamala returns to the new gentrification project and finds some purple goo, which she takes to Bruno. Bruno determines it's full of nanobots, but is nabbed by guys in suits soon after. Kamala tries to follow suspicious trucks, and winds up captured, in the process learning that the villain behind everything is Dr. Faustus. Kamala also got to meet a girl her brother is interested in, see her best friend is still anti-Ms. Marvel, and her mom is threatening to take the costume away.

At least Faustus admits the nanotech was basically needless. It'd be funny if he had to include that in there as the only way to get approval for the plan.

HYDRA Overlord: It's not a bad idea, but it's missing something.

Faustus: *nervously* Nanites?

HYDRA: *snaps fingers* Exactly!

Faustus: *sweating* Oh well, uh, I also had a, um, uh, mind-controlling beverage, yeah! Infused with nanites!

HYDRA: Sold! *uses big rubber stamp with "APPROVED" on proposal, because HYDRA is a stickler for paperwork* 

Nakia as a possible reverse-Flash Thompson, where she likes Kamala, but hates the costumed alter ego. I suppose Kamala could defuse that situation by telling her best friend, although maybe that actually detonates it instead. Wilson has a lot of balls in the air right now, so I'm not sure how they're going to play out, or when.

I just noticed, Bruno has the Baby Translator that Herb Powell designed on The Simpsons, sitting on the ledge outside his room. That and Aamir's happy little strut when he and Kamala are about to meet Tyesha were a couple of my favorite little touches Miyazawa put in this issue.

Unbeatable Squirrel Girl #3, Ryan North (writer), Erica Henderson (artist), Doc Shaner (trading card artist), Rico Renzi (color artist), Travis Lanham (letterer) - Doreen, don't hog all the other heroes' iconic moments! You have plenty of your own already!

The Dr. Doom that appeared before Nancy is from shortly after his first encounter with Doreen, and he's come to the future to appropriate future technology to advance his cause in his time. Nancy instead convinces him to help her recover Doreen from the 1960s, so she doesn't attack him at somepoint earlier in his career. They travel together to shortly after Doreen arrived in the past, just in time for her meeting with all the other people who had been sent back, who are all from her computer science class. Doom arrives and immediately begins trying to kill Doreen, who can't call squirrels for help because they're past squirrels. So Doom wins and conquers the world, much to the confusion of some college student who wakes up in our time to find a very different world. Looks like Mega-City One or something, which doesn't strike me as Doom's preferred aesthetic, but oh well. Maybe he went through an "urban wasteland" phase.

I can't understand Nancy's frustration with Doom's semantic argument. It's perfectly legit. He never said anything about not trying to kill Doreen once they found her, which is really the sort of thing Nancy should have made sure of. Yes, it's petty, but it's honest within narrow bounds, which is par for the course for Doom. I guess she's just pissed she wasn't as smart as she thought, trying to use Doom's ego to manipulate him. The gag where Doreen tries to get Nancy to calculate a trajectory and fails, because just because you can program a computer, it doesn't mean you can calculate like one, that was good. The random appearance of Jubilee, who is still a vampire, that was odd. Like, of all the heroes in the Marvel Universe to have show up, and act like they were going to try and fight Doom, why her?

I actually like Doreen's hastily thrown together crime-fighting outfit. It's at least got the right color scheme, in terms of the orange brown, and she added a domino mask, those are always good. She even picked one of the ones that makes you pupils disappear when you wear it. Excellent choice. Nice touch having her start to right "Sq" on her name tag, then cross it out and write "Doreen". She's worse at keeping a secret identity than Ultimate Peter Parker was.