What do you get when you try to write a story with no main plotline, and instead focus entirely on a bunch of hardly connected side stories? The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl: Squirrel You Know It’s True is what. I should have known I wouldn’t like this much since the first volume annoyed me, but I wanted to see if things got any better; they did not.
My biggest problem with Doreen and her companions (now she has several, and I’m not totally sure how all that happened) is that she’s presented more as a parody of the Marvel universe. Or at least that the stories and gags require too much detailed knowledge for me to fully appreciate what’s going on. And I even read the footnotes; I believed in footnotes, and they let me down here. They were hard to read thanks to font, color, and location, and they were not consistently useful. Or funny.
I’m all for lightening of serious hero stories; I love Drew Hayes’ novels for this very reason. I also enjoyed Patsy Walker aka Hellcat. However, I still want some plot coherence and character continuity, and relevant side bars and inter-chapter notes and insert pages.
Maybe I was hoping too much for a traceable plot, like there is for most of the first book. Here, there’s a story of a group of citizens awaiting rescue coming up with Squirrel Girl stories, Squirrel Girl with some help from Chipmunk Hunk (same as Doreen except chipmunk themed) and Koi Boi (fish-themed of course) defeating a Hippo man by convincing him to go into demolition instead of a bank-robber career, and defeating Ratatoskr who is giving squirrels a bad name by wreaking havoc in Midgard, and a Christmas story short. While the brief appearance by Thor and Loki was at least entertaining, the rest had very little in terms of actual action adventure, which is really the main reason for Marvel stories to exist.
Thankfully the final story, involving The Thing hosting a Marvel poker party was actually entertaining, and still had Squirrel Girl doing her Squirrelly-ness which can be irritating if the story tries to take it too seriously. The power of friendship does not work very well as a major force in the Marvel world, since unlike My Little Pony or even the likes of My Hero Academia, it is to some extent based in contemporary reality.