Squirrel Girl Masters Time Travel

When Marty McFly found himself stranded in 1955, he went straight to Doc Brown for help. If I;m ever lost in the past, I’m going to try to track down Ryan North. The current writer of the Fantastic Four quite literally wrote the book on time travel. Well, a book anyway.

“How to Invent Everything: A Survival Guide for the Stranded Time Traveler” was written by North and published in 2019, but I feel certain he was already working on it, or preparing to, in 2015.

That’s when issues 2-5 of “The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl” (vol. 2*) were released

And that's the focus for my entry into the latest Super Blog Team-Up: In Time.

All four issues – released between Nov 25, 2015, and Feb 24, 2016, were written by North, drawn by Erica Henderson and colored by Rico Renzi, with lettering by Clayton Cowles and Travis Lanham. Henderson also provided the covers**

In January of 2015, this creative team launched Squirrel Girl from interesting character whose first appearance I'd received as a gift during a bout of food poisoning to a hilarious new player in the Marvel Universe. By the time this story arc came around, the character and series were en route to becoming my favorites in all of comicdom.

Yes, Squirrel Girl is a funny concept and the fact that she defeated Doctor Doom in her debut while trying to convince Iron Man to take her on as a sidetrack is a magical bit of oddball comic trivia. But my affinity for this plucky heroine is in no way ironic. I'm always laughing with her – and I did laugh with every issue, including these as I re-read them.

Although the long-awaited rematch with Doom is promised on the cover of issue 2, we don't get it right out of the gate. Doreen and faithful squirrel pal Tippy-Toe instead find themselves plunging onto the street after her bed is transported from its 21st century Empire State University dorm room into the middle of a busy street in the 1960s – before the building was constructed.

Right away, we see Squirrel Girl is able to roll with any punch, identify her predicament and start working to minimize the temporal damage. When she realizes people have noticed her squirrel tail, she announces that she's “an actor practicing for a play, which is a popular form of entertainment throughout the entire 20th century.” She sets to work trying to blend in by securing some period-appropriate clothing and, oh yeah, stopping a robbery, because no matter when she is, she's still a hero.

Back in the present, her roommate and best friend Nancy Whitehead seems to be the only one who's noticed Doreen is missing. That includes their pals Tomas and Ken, aka Chipmunk Hunk and Koi Boi.*** Since she also sprung from North's mind, Nancy quickly surmises time travel is to blame and presumes Doreen will have left her a message, which she did.

Doreen learns she's not alone when she spots another young woman wearing ear buds way ahead of schedule. It turns out Mary is a fellow computer science student who recently woke up in the past. Doreen places an ad in the newspaper to try to attract any other chronological castaways, but it's right over another one advertising the creation of the Individual Portable sOng Device, or I.P.O.D. While she tries to figure out who's attempting to rewrite history, Nancy searches for a time traveler to help her our, only to have Doctor Doom finally enter the picture.

In issue 3, Nancy learns this isn't just any Doom, but the one who was just embarrassingly defeated by Squirrel Girl back in the 1991 “Marvel Super-Heroes” Winter Special. He's come to the future in search of new technology to aid him in a rematch. Nancy defuses potential confrontations between Doom and both Jubilee and the Punisher before convincing the ruler of Latveria to take her back in time to prevent Squirrel Girl from defeating him in the past.

That's where Doreen has assembled her group of time-tossed fellow computer science students. Having Doreen study computer science gives North the opportunity throughout the series to drop in what I presume are real-world bits of information on the subject that I understand about as well as many examples of un-real comic book science.

Because Doom is the best at time travel – just ask him – he and Nancy arrive in the room. Doreen, protecting her secret identity, changes into her '60s Squirrel Girl suit. Without the squirrel army that helped her defeat him in their first encounter, Squirrel Girl only manages to fight Doom to a stalemate, tossing Nancy and the other students into a rooftop pool using her squirrel strength and mad math skills.

But Nancy's phone has transformed into a Doom-branded device, and a glimpse of the present on the final page shows Doom is ruling the world – again. We get a better look at the equivalent of the Biff Tannen-ruled Hill Valley as issue 4 kicks off, including a man who seems to know everything is not as it should be.

Back in the '60s, Squirrel Girl, Nancy and the other students try to come up with ways to defeat Doom, finally settling on taking his time platform. This leads to a host of laugh-out-loud proposed plans of attack, eventually settling on Squirrel Girl down the time machine, while Mary and the others build electromagnetic pulse generators. Neither approach is really working out until the mystery man from the start of the issue arrives with a Doombot who removes its mask to reveal – a senior citizen Squirrel Girl!

Before we get her story, issue 5 introduces us to Cody, the mystery man who knew something was wrong with the timeline. He inherited a weird ray gun from an eccentric aunt he'd never met that turned out to be a one-way time machine. Cody is another ESU computer science student, who decides to use the device to … improve the grading curve by sending the better-performing students into yesterday.

Squirrel Girl and her future self tackle Doom while Nancy and the other students work to contain any potential alterations to the timeline by telling witnesses they're filming a movie. We learn that Old Lady Squirrel Girl lost to Doom in the '60s, then waited until she aged into the present and tracked down Cody, who did want to repair the timestream when he realized what happened.

Even with the support of her future self, and her trademark efforts to reason with villains before punching, Doreen can't turn the tide. But if two Squirrel Girls are better than one...

Here's where Doreen proves Bishop, Cable and even Rip Hunter got nothing on her as a time traveler. She tells Nancy to blast her with the time gun, which sends her back in time a little over a day.

“I've gone back a day, but the me from a day ago is still here too!” she tells a guy who North's bottom-of-the-page notes inform us is named Pete McFleet. “I just need to stay out of her way for a day, then both of me can fight Doom a day from now!”

She continues to repeat the pattern, having Nancy blast an ever-increasing number of Squirrel Girls back in time, where they avoid altering the timestream until the battle begins.

Finally, the bad Doctor is overwhelmed and agrees to send everyone back where they belong – if Squirrel Girl never speaks of this encounter. Doreen and Mary use the time-ray-gun-thingie to send her past selves back in time again to prevent paradoxes. Then, Old Lady Squirrel Girl takes the device from Mary, who has and will in future issues show some shall we say villainous tendencies, and announces she'll be retiring in the past.

We get some tidying up exposition in which Doreen provides both a plausible theory for why Nancy could remember her when no one else did. Then, in a post-credits and letters page scene, Doom prepares to send Doombots back into the past to undo Squirrel Girl's victory, only to be thwarted by Old Lady Squirrel Girl – who, North points out in another note,was the mysterious aunt who left Cody the time ray in the first place, thus ensuring events would play out as they were meant to.

All in all, I think the resolution definitively answers this debate between Doreen and Tippy from issue 2:

There are many comic book writers who unfold complicated storylines in such a way that I trust they know what they're doing but I have no idea if they really do. It could be narrative brilliance or false bravado. With North, I'm not sure I follow everything, but I feel like I can keep up and, at the very least, he wouldn't make fun of me if I couldn't. So, yes, if I'm ever trapped in the past due to mishaps involving Libyans and a time-traveling car or a ray gun fired by a jealous classmate, I will be looking him up.

It took me a while to reread these issues because they're so packed with hilarious and clever dialogue and details, plus I kept taking screen shots from Marvel Unlimited and sending them to various friends. This is a longer-than-usual post, and there are a ton of moments I haven't shared. I didn't get into Doreen's Secret Squirrel disguise or what Nancy thought about doing to a baby Doctor Doom.**** I'm just trying to giver you a taste of why I love this series so much.

Aspects of the Unbeatable Squirrel Girl might be hard for some comic fans to swallow, and I get that. Henderson's art style isn't necessarily what I would pick for a superhero comic, but it fits this series perfectly. And some people might think the tone and some of the comedic dialogue is a little too light for the mainstream Marvel universe. But by issue 4 of the first volume, when Squirrel Girl's epic clash with Galactus*** was over, I had made a decision – Squirrel Girl didn't need to follow Marvel continuity; Marvel continuity needed to follow Squirrel Girl.

If this is your first exposure to Squirrel Girl, I'd encourage you to read more. For 58 issues and one original graphic novel, this series never failed to make me laugh and smile.

And for more time travel adventures and shenanigans, check out these other offerings from the assembled Super Blog Team-Up: