Kick butts, eat nuts.

I think I actually got this book free from Amazon. They sent me an email for some reason saying, here, pick a free book! I don’t remember why, but this was the one I picked. I potentially imagined this and actually bought the book while it was on sale, but either way, I’ve had it on my Kindle app for a while. (P.S. Reading comics on your Kindle app is surprisingly great. I still prefer hard copies so I can get as close to the art as humanly possible, but comics on e-reader do all these fancy zoom things that walk you through the comic. I did Fence #5-12 that way.)

And as is nearly always the case with this books I have on my shelves (tangible or not) for years, when I finally get to them, I regret not picking them up sooner. This is a bubbly, meta little comic with a kick-butt, positive heroine. Doreen Green, aka Squirrel Girl, is a Mutant with squirrel blood, and all the powers of a squirrel (as Iron Man says in her origin comic, “so you hop around?”). She is pretty strong (proportionate strength like a squirrel) but she can talk to squirrels also; they tell her secrets, and she can summon an army of them to do things like hold villains hostage in a net made of squirrels, or create a squirrel body suit so as to foil bank robbers.

This comic is written by Ryan North, whom you might know from a little webcomic called Dinosaur Comics, which is still going strong apparently. Oh, also he wrote How To Invent Everything: A Survival Guide For The Stranded Time Traveler but I have not read that book yet. If you have previously enjoyed Ryan North’s sense of humor, you will probably enjoy this book, but Doreen is a lot sometimes, so if you’re not on her wavelength, you’re not going to like this.

Mostly, she’s just incredibly sure of herself and who she is, and defeats bad guys by kicking butt, yes, but doing so unconventionally (see: squirrel suit) or by kicking butt only metaphorically, as she does in this first volume with Kraven the Hunter and with Galactus the Devourer of Worlds himself (the resolution of this fight made laugh out loud).

If you like superheroes, or tongue-in-cheek silliness, or meta stories where girls are part squirrel and have squirrel friends and are also going to college for the first time and kicking butts and eating nuts all the while, you should check this out.

I would also like to note that in the back of this first trade is included Squirrel Girl’s origin story from 1991, and can I just say that I am extremely thankful that she has gotten a makeover since then.

Terrifying.