The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl #6-8 and Howard the Duck #6
Originally released in 2016
Written by Ryan North, Chip Zdarsky (USG #6, HtD #6)
Art by Erica Henderson, Chip Zdarsky (USG #6), Joe Quinones (USG #6, HtD #6)
The writing and art remain a ton of fun, and the stories are fairly short and disconnected. Issue 6 of Squirrel Girl (and issue 6 of Howard the Duck) are a crossover where Howard is searching for a missing cat (and doing an awful job of it, kidnapping random cats from around New York City until he finds the one that he's looking for, even if the cats that he's kidnapping look nothing like the cats in question), which leads him and Squirrel Girl into a plot to hunt the most dangerous game. (or rather, the second most dangerous - hunting humans is illegal, but hunting humanoid animals or animal-like humans is a legal gray area)
Howard's a fun addition to the series, with his caustic personality bouncing humorously off of Squirrel Girl's upbeat one. The catnapper, a Southern belle named Shannon Sugarbaker who's really into cosplay, has also kidnapped Rocket Raccoon, Beast (who keeps insisting that he's not an animal and this is his natural mutation, though she ignores him), the cat that Howard is looking for (who's a cyborg with a giant metal body, raising even further questions of how Howard can't tell the cat apart from an ordinary housecat), and Weapon II, a squirrel who was put through the same experiments that made Wolverine. Beast is written like a parody of himself rather than a fleshed out character, but the others are well-written.
Kraven the Hunter, who has been capturing these people and animals for Shannon, is also thrown into the hunt, causing him to rethink his role in life now that he's the predator rather than the prey. He comes out of this with a desire to hunt hunters, leading to the absurd final page of this crossover:
It's just a ton of fun. Issue 7 of Squirrel Girl is a choose-your-own-adventure book, which doesn't work quite as well in digital form, but it leads to some downright nonsensical (and incredibly entertaining) writing. At one point, you have to choose whether Squirrel Girl will stop a mad doctor in Times Square from unleashing a deadly virus upon the world or if she'll stop a tentacled monstrosity from beyond space and time that showed up in Central Park.
No matter which one Squirrel Girl stops, the other one is defeated by the power of good ol'-fashioned police work, which creates a ridiculous image of ordinary police officers arresting something out of an H.P. Lovecraft story. Following suit with choose-your-own adventure books, there are some bad endings depending on what you choose, played entirely for laughs:
Issue 8 has Squirrel Girl try dating, with disastrous results. Writing a dating profile is enough of a trial in and of itself, but when it comes to the dates, they're somehow even worse.
It all culminates in a frat bro who somehow believes that superheroes don't exist, despite living in New York, in the Marvel universe, where superhero battles happen on a regular basis.
I suppose I shouldn't be surprised, given the existence of flat earthers and people who deny that major historical tragedies really happened in our own world, but it's a concept that I hadn't thought about before. He's treated with all of the respect, seriousness, and dignity that people like that deserve. (that is, none whatsoever)
This series is a blast. So many panels put a smile on my face that I couldn't fit them all here, and the short storylines mean that the comedy can go in all sorts of different directions and never feel old (at least, from what I've read of it). Since I can't find anywhere else to put it, I'll end off with this panel from the end of the choose-your-own-adventure issue:
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