As you would expect from a company that impersonates a headless chicken as often as Marvel does, many of the ongoing series canceled due to Secret Wars restarted before it was finished, and most of the books paid absolutely no attention to Hickman's event. Including this one!
Outside of Doreen now being a second-year computer science major and having Avengers' privileges, North and Henderson largely continue as they were before the first volume got canceled. Doreen alternates between spending time with her friends and fighting various criminals. The fighting does sometimes involve punching, but just as often involves computer science, helping the antagonist to see a different solution, or just generally talking things out.
So College Age Squirrel Girl can team-up with a version of herself that survived in a timeline that Dr. Doom ruled for decades, but ultimately win by communicating a plan with Nancy by using C++ computer language, since Doom only knows the computer he designed himself. Or Doreen can get Mole Man to stop trying to pressure her to date him by helping him see someone who's loved him all along. Or they defeat a guy who takes over the world with his power to split into limitless numbers of himself, which can combine into a gigantic version of himself, by applying Galileo's Square-Cube Law.
It's a rich and varied tapestry of problem-solving, is what I'm saying.
Henderson's still very good at getting cross the humor that North writes in, mostly by being excellent with body language. My favorite is probably the dating montage from the issue before this, where every date ends with Doreen kicking a can as she walks down the street. Every idiot potential suitor ends with the same frustration.
She also varies Squirrel Girl's look a bit. The costume above is the standard for Henderson's run as artist, but she also introduces a "flying squirrel" suit design which I thought looked pretty neat. Not many heroes can pull of a superhero costume with brown as the main color, but Squirrel Girl can't be defeated even by traditional standards of color theory! There's also a Savage Land, jungle outfit suit for when she has to contend with DINOSAUR ULTRON.
(I really wanted a splash page of DINOSAUR ULTRON, but the few there were didn't really provide the full effect. There was almost a double-page splash, but it had a bunch of tiny panels across the bottom of the page. So close.)
Most of the stories run two to four issues, but North and Henderson mix in the occasional one-shot, such as a Choose Your Own Adventure against the Swarm, or an issue about Taskmaster written from Nancy's cat's perspective. In addition to giving Nancy, Chipmunk Hunk and Koi Boi from the first volume some more page space and fleshing out, they also added Brain Drain a human brain placed in a robot body by remorseful aliens, who is delightfully poetic about his nihilism, and Mary, another computer science student who might end up becoming a super-villain one of these days. Or maybe not!
2 comments:
Hang on, hang on, Dinosaur Ultron?
Why did I not know about this before?
It only lasted for the duration of that story (issues 22-25). At the end, his body's dismantled and his core reset. Then Squirrel Girl's mom planted his parts in her garden so he could learn from more peaceful surroundings. He pops up again during the War of Realms tie-ins as a GIANT TREE ULTRON. Not as cool, but still pretty cool.
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