The Unbelievable Gwenpool #23, by Christopher Hastings (writer), Irene Strychalski (artist), Rachelle Rosenberg (color artist), Clayton Cowles (letterer) - In an attempt to really make her win impressive, Gwen has opted to fight Dr. Doom after shrinking herself with Pym Particles! Or maybe she enlarged Doom with Pym Particles!Gwen's attempt to defeat the "real" Dr. Doom fails. Because Doom is not going to lose by being tossed into a weird dimension. Gwen eventually realizes she is entirely outclassed and tries to run, which doesn't work either. The current, "nice" Doom shows up and bails her out, leaving Gwen depressed at how little impact she's allowed to have, and her rapidly approaching mortality. Doom tries to give her some advice, but Gwen doesn't seem to have taken it the way he hoped.
So Gwen has to figure out how she fits in the Marvel Universe. Her early attempts at being a hero were not at all heroic. Her future self told her she was meant to be a villain, which Gwen rejected. She isn't succeeding at making herself important by trying to disappear villains, either. Which leaves what? Gwen doesn't want to be the person in the back of crowd scenes, who dies unceremoniously in some Big Event just because (fair enough). What's her solution? I doubt she wants to be some updated version of Forbush Man or Howard the Duck, popping up every 5-10 years to issue silly commentary on whatever's going on at the moment. It looks like she might be trying for the "rogue with a grey mortality", kind of a Black Cat/Gambit thing. Neither one sustains an ongoing for any extended period of time, but neither one gets killed or vanishes for too long, either.
I appreciated Hastings' writing for Evil Doom. 'You would open a dam because it is not satisfying enough to drown in a puddle,' is a pretty good putdown. 'But let us see how long you hold under a gaze as fierce and hateful as the Sun!' isn't bad, either. And Gwen telling Doom he's got a long fall coming, and a page later, he's been dumped into the void, with only his thought balloon still on the page (Strychalski gave Gwen a pretty good hardass glare on that page as well. Frank Castle would be impressed). After rereading Volume 1 earlier this week, it was funny to see Gwen trying the leg sweeps Batroc regretted teaching her against Doom.
Strychalski mostly works with 3-6 panels per page, and mostly straightforward squares or rectangles. Nothing too out there in terms of layouts (which would be worth exploring in whether that says anything about Gwen. Can she impact the design of the pages she's in?) But there's one 9-panel page, 8 of those panels as narrow vertical shots of Vic the Doombot struggling to process Doom's defeat, while Gwen moves through the same process much more quickly. Everything had been zipping along through the first 5 pages, but at that moment, it looks as though Gwen has actually beaten Dr. Doom. Two of him, no less. So the story pauses to let that sink in for the characters, even though we know it won't take (and Gwen realizes it as well a page later).
Also, I like Strychalski using what little is available in the Gutters to form panel borders when possible. She uses Doom's cape once, the outline of the pages Gwen is sitting on a couple of times. It's tricky, because how could there be panels in a place that exists outside the panels, but it still helps to have something to guide the flow of the conversation as it moves across the page (although for most of those pages, they go with a 3-panel layout most often, so things can just proceed vertically straight down the page).
I don't know if the book is actually dead two issues from now or not, but I hope not. It's got a good mix of funny and intriguing.
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