Marvel Pick Of The Week - April 22, 2015 [SPOILERS]

Pick Of The Week:

Unbeatable Squirrel Girl 4, by Ryan North and Erica Henderson (with a cameo by Chris Giarrusso!)

The mission Doreen Green began in last month’s Pick Of The Week, to take her best squirrel Tippy Toe to the moon to punch Galactus in the face and take a triumphant selfie, thus preventing the annihilation of all life on Earth, reaches joyous, hilarious completion in this issue. This team has gelled, with writing and art and editorial working together to tell a string of winning jokes. The book’s structure itself plays into this – the summary page is a funny Twitter parody (and may be the first time I’ve ever strung those words together in a sentence about a Marvel book, and yes, I read Gillen’s Young Avengers, and no, I didn’t think the social media parodies worked). After that, we get a splash page of Doreen taking a selfie over Galactus’s prone form, then we get two pages of legitimate letters pages. It’s a terrific commitment to a joke, and it sets a terrific tone for the rest of the book.

With the rest of the book, Doreen takes out Galactus, but she does so using a combination of charm, wit, philosophy, compassion, strength, strategy, and grammar. Galactus stories are usually pretty dull in their own right. He’s a giant force of nature who flies around space eating planets, but we usually only see him threaten to eat Earth and then get repelled. Ryan North’s take is that he’s a fairly lonely guy enslaved by hunger, and though he still wants us all dead and in his belly, he’d respond really well to a person who genuinely wanted to get to know him. Strange as it may seem (or normal, because this book is off the wall), I really hope I see Galactus return in the future and hang out with Squirrel Girl a little more. Her dynamic with him is markedly different from that with her awesome roommate or scrappy squirrel sidekick, and the book prospers because of it.

Honorable Mentions:

All-New X-Men 40, because yeah, this happened. And it was sweet and slow and accepting. They throw around plenty of theories about why (or even whether) Teen Iceman’s sexuality doesn’t seem to match Adult Iceman’s sexual expression, but they’re also okay with just sitting with the idea that this version of Bobby is gay, for whatever reason. The rest of the issue was good, too (Teen Angel loves X-23 and it’s adorable!) but when creators make a point to increase diversity representation, I make a point to get it in my column.

Inhuman Special 1, because in an issue full of really good jokes, Spider-Man knows that his own history makes for the best humor.

Amazing X-Men 19, because wow, that’s how you do a great punching scene.

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Marvel Pick Of The Week – April 22, 2015 [SPOILERS]

By Matt Conner | Apr 22, 2015

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