Tagged: You Know: For Kids

Hey! Remember when I said that I thought Kristen Gudsnuk’s middle-grade graphic novel Making Friends  was a lot of fun, but that I missed the random background goofiness in the world that Gudsnuk brought to her previous book (for adults, as much as any book about superheroes is) Henchgirl ? Sure you do!

Well, Gudsnuk had a sequel to Making Friends a couple of years ago – I just found out about it recently, since I guess I don’t spend as much time keeping track of comics for middle-graders as I should – and I’m happy to report that Making Friends: Back to the Drawing Board  shoves the Weird Stuff meter way over into the red zone before it’s done, in a very integrated and fun way. So I do hope to keep using Gudsnukian as an adjective and looking forward to the day when everyone does.

Making Friends followed seventh-grade motormouth Dany – seriously, she’s one of those people (I was intermittently one of them at a slightly later age) who cannot shut up to save their lives even though she knows she’s saying things the wrong way – as she adjusted to life in middle school, where her old friends had a completely different schedule. She thought her life would be perfect if she just had one really good best friend, so, when a magic sketchbook fell into her life from her deceased Great-Aunt Elma, she made herself the perfect friend, Madison Fontaine.

(See my post on the first book for more on where it went from there.)

It’s now a little later in the school year: there’s still a gaping hole in the gym ceiling from , and Dany has been using her reality-warping powers in lots of ways, none of which could ever backfire on her…as far as she’s ever foreseen. But Madison is now even better friends with Cara McCoy , another cheerleader, and Cara is not Dany’s biggest fan. Cara isn’t a “mean girl,” though she does get mean in the ways middle-schoolers do. Honestly, it’s pretty clear than Dany can be annoying regularly, and is exhausting nearly all the time.

So Dany thinks: I just need to use the notebook again, to make things better. I’m too busy and too lazy to get everything done – what if there were two of me? So she uses the notebook to create “Cloney,” a version of herself with a ponytail who lives in a “Pikkiball.” And it actually seems to go OK at first: the two Danys get along with each other, Cloney is happy to take original Dany’s place at school, and nobody is an evil twin or from the dimension of death.

But there’s other stuff going on in the background. Dany’s parents have mysteriously won the lottery. Her mother has lost a lot of weight suddenly. Some other relatives, we see later, have had equally surprising life changes. All soon after Great-Aunt Elma passed and her stuff was bequeathed to her family – interesting!

Gudsnuk doesn’t underline that; the reader has to pick up on it. Or maybe it’s that Dany doesn’t pay much attention to it, since she’s self-absorbed in the ways only a twelve-year-old can be, and the book is from her point of view.

But Back to the Drawing Board is a book where things get even nuttier than in the first book. It builds slowly at first, but the back half of this one is full of all kinds of weird magical powers and events: it is (he said approvingly) deeply Gudsnukian and lots of fun. There is an even bigger magical conflict at the end of this book, and, this time, it’s not all Dany’s fault – though she and her friends do need to be the ones to make everything right.

Gudsnuck has a slightly looser line here than in the previous book, as if she’s drawing at white-hot speed and trying to get to all of the good stuff in her head. I found it a bit too loose here and there, but it works almost all the time. And her people are energetic to a fault: she’s particularly good at a cartoony open-mouth pose when they run into yet something else bizarre and unexpected.

Obviously, the core audience for this book is middle-school girls. But I’m about as far from that demo as you can get, and I’m looking forward to Book Three later this summer, so take that as a recommendation. If you’re an adult, I’d still start Gudsnuk with Henchgirl, but, if you like that, you’ll get a hoot out of these books, too.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

There’s something deeply pure about a middle-book about middle-schoolers. The characters are in a point of their lives where they’re growing and changing – not still the people they were as kids, and not even the teenagers they will be in another year or two, much less the actual adults they will eventually become – and the story is similarly middle, starting from another book it hopes we’ve already read and handing off at the end to a book the author may not have even planned out yet.

It’s very thematically appropriate, is what I’m saying.

That’s how I think about All Together Now , Hope Larson’s new graphic novel for 2020 and a sequel to 2018’s All Summer Long . It picks up soon after the end of the previous book: Bina is still thirteen, it’s still the same year, and she still wants to write and play music. But the entanglements and problems are different, because it’s not summer anymore – All Together Now begins in September and runs through nearly the end of the year. So Bina is back in school, has formed a band with her new friend Darcy, and hardly sees her neighbor and one-time best friend Austin, who has a punishing travel-soccer schedule.

So the Bina-Darcy band needs a drummer, and gets one, which changes everything, and keeps changing things. And Austin eventually circles back, with a different opinion of Bina than he had before.

Things change. They can change really quickly when you’re thirteen.

Together is the same kind of book as Summer: episodic, quiet rather than flashy, introspective rather than dramatic. It’s about how Bina feels about what’s happening as much as it’s about the things that happen…and, to be honest, Bina isn’t really sure how she feels about the band-drama and the next-door-neighbor drama a lot of the time.

Books about people this age often have the young people bemoaning the changes, and wanting things to stay the way they were, forever – Bina had a bit of that, in Summer. She’s still not thrilled with all of the changes now, but I think she’s happier, or maybe just resigned, about the changes. Maybe she’s starting to see the places the changes could take her, and those are thrilling and frightening, like all adult life is. That’s a good sign for her: life is change , and the earlier people realize that, the better off they will be.

All Together Now is another fine, deep, naturalistic graphic novel by Hope Larson, following a long string like Chiggers and Mercury . I’m not as plugged into that world, so I hope the reason I don’t hear about her work as much is because I’m not part of that conversation, and not because she’s little-known. This book, in particular, should be in every middle-school library in the country: it has a lot to say to other actual and aspirational thirteen-year-olds.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

I’m trying to figure out how far behind I am on Unbeatable Squirrel Girl, and it is surprisingly difficult, since this is a Marvel comic. The series ended in late 2019 with issue 58, but the trade paperbacks are still dribbling out, since they’re all slim. I believe Marvel has only managed to emit Vol. 12, which probably collects issues 47-51, meaning there’s one or two more books yet to come.

But none of this is simple, and places like Wikipedia and the Grand Comics Database and the Marvel Database fail to list those trades at all. But, I am behind, though the series has now ended, so I won’t get any further behind from this point.

Anyway, I’m here to talk about The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl, Vol. 8: My Best Friend’s Squirrel , written by Ryan North, drawn by Erica Henderson, colored by Rico Renzi. It collects issues 27-31 of the second series (let’s not get into that) and Not Brand Ecch #14, which appears to be a 2018 one-shot continuing the numbering of the 1967-69 series, which is exactly what you want to do for a story about a girl who likes squirrels and computer science and whose core audience are six-year-old girls. (Marvel, once again: there’s nothing they can’t make more complicated and difficult for no good reason.)

It follows the previous collections one and two and three and four and the OGN and five and six and seven ; see my posts on those if you’re feeling particularly bored today.

Squirrel Girl is still Doreen Green, second-year computer-science student at Empire State University, and her super-powers are (most obviously) being super-strong and talking to squirrels and (most usefully) actually being a thoughtful, friendly person who can talk out problems, unlike every other human being ever extant in the Marvel Universe. And this volume, as usual, collects a big four-issue plotline in which she defeats a Major Threat (less Major this time, since she’s already run through all of the big Marvel supervillain names) and then a single issue in which odder things happen.

The four-issue story sees Doreen’s best friend, Nancy, and her sidekick, Tippy-Toe, whisked away to a world on the other side of the galaxy where a race of intelligent squirrels (well, squirrels on Earth seem intelligent enough when Doreen talks to them, so maybe I mean civilized?) are under threat from a shakedown from Galactus’s herald the Silver Surfer. The SS says he and his similarly-shiny buddies – all of whom are stereotypically “surfer” types – will leave this planet along if they give all their valuables to the SS and compatriots.

Long-time readers of Marvel comics may well be confused, since the actual SS is more prone to zooming around on a surfboard, emoting at great length in bad pseudo-poetic prose about how sad his life is and how anguished he is and how he desperately needs to find a nice snackable but uninhabited planet or else his master will slaughter billions yet again, oh the misery. They may suspect this is an impostor, and they would be correct.

Eventually, Doreen makes her way to the squirrel planet, along with some allies, and there is a series of confrontations, which all end peacefully, because this is Unbeatable Squirrel Girl. (Doreen does fight the actual SS on sight, which I think is the first time that very hoary superhero trope actually happened in this comic.)

The one-off story is a kind of timeslip tale: an accident with a villain’s weapon strands Doreen and Nancy in hypertime, living much faster than everyone else in New York City. So, over the course of one weekend, they live the entire rest of their lives, leaving written messages for their friends , saving everyone in the city from everything for three whole days, and working on a time machine to save themselves before they die of old age. And maybe doing something else, which is hinted at but not spelled out in this book larger for pre-teens.

Squirrel Girl by North and Henderson was dependably fun and positive and kid-friendly and just about every appreciative adjective I could think of: it was nice down to its core, creating a world that was equally nice, which has never been common in Marveldom. I think these were the last Henderson-drawn issues, so, if I continue, I’ll get to see if whoever came next was able to maintain that sweetness.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

I am bad at reviewing books in a timely fashion. And that can lead to being bad at reviewing books, period. I’m going to keep this post short, but I reserve the right to decide it’s pointless to begin with and delete it all.

(If you’re reading this, I didn’t.)

5 Worlds is a young-readers graphic novel series, coming out roughly annually. I missed the first book, The Sand Warrior . If any of what I type below sounds interesting, go check out that book. I did look at the second one, The Cobalt Prince , during my 2018 Book-A-Day run. I’ve now just read the third book, 2019’s The Red Maze . Last year there was a new book, The Amber Anthem . And the finale, The Emerald Gate , is coming this May, but doesn’t seem to be available for pre-order yet.

I didn’t remember Cobalt well when I dove into Red, and I obviously never went back to Sand, and won’t move on to Amber or Emerald. So most of what I could say about this book is beside the point – and that pains me, since a publicist actually sent this to me, back in the spring of 2019, in the hopes I would give a little attention to it when it was new and shiny and looking for an audience.

The five worlds are an interesting, mildly complex soft-SF universe, with five habitable spheres (I think four are actually moons, though it’s not super-clear if they’re moons of the same thing or not) and different governments and people on each of them. It’s all pitched at a level for young readers, but these stories are about ecology and corruption and believing in yourself and doing the right thing and finding the people who can make things better. All good things, obviously.

I read this too quickly, and I’m not going to get into plot details. There is a mild case of Chosen One-itis in our heroine, Oona Lee, and maybe almost as much in her friend Jax Amboy. Actually, the third major character, An Tzu, might be equally chosen for other things.

This isn’t really a book for me: I try to engage with YA graphic stories, since I love their energy and the sense of possibility in great books for young readers. But I somewhat bounced off of this, after not quite clicking with Cobalt. So all I can do is point to it, say that it looks to be quite good for what it is, but that I’ve been reading it half-assedly, and that’s not good for me or the book.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

No media property is “real” until it becomes as big as it possibly can be, until it becomes a movie. Every novel, every comics series, every TV show, every webseries, every nonfiction book, every song, every TikTok sea shanty aspires to turn into a big budget motion-picture that will dilute and adulterate what was special about the original thing while making vast amounts of money for the same few global multimedia conglomerates and making the newly shiny, market-tested and subtly stupider thing vastly better known among people who would never bother to pay attention to the original thing.

This is yet another sign that our world is inherently flawed, and that, if there are any gods, they hate us.

Norman Bridwell wrote and illustrated over fifty books about Clifford the Big Red Dog, using first his own imagination, his wife’s stories of her childhood imaginary playmate, and his daughter’s name (Emily Elizabeth). As the years went on, those books were influenced by the generations of kids that grew up with Clifford between the original book in 1963 and Bridwell’s death in 2014.

Those books still exist, and are the real Clifford. Nothing else will ever replace or tarnish them. (Though plenty of them are pretty minor: ABCs and other unexciting series entries. If there’s fifty of anything, not all of them will be gems.) Since then, there’s been a couple of animated TV shows, with either the usual gigantic Clifford or the equally canonical tiny puppy Clifford.

And, of course, people tried to make a movie at various times. Over the past two years, they finally succeeded: a live-action movie with a CGI Clifford was released this past November. Since line extensions are a thing, there was eventually a book of the movie of the books, Clifford the Big Red Dog: The Movie Graphic Novel , adapted by Georgia Ball from the screenplay and story, and drawn by Chi Ngo. It featured a more cartoony Clifford and a modern comics-rounded versions of the movie actors, rather than trying to be photo-accurate.

(I like cartoony, and think cartoons should be cartoony. So I’m inclined to like this better than the movie anyway.) 

I don’t quite see why the movie exists in the first place, but I like what Ball and Ngo have turned it into here. There’s a movie-level story here, as there must be, and they have to roll that out. But they have a light touch with character and Ngo in particular has a knack for open, expressive faces. So this is pleasant even as it hits all of the same kid-movie story beats that all of us will see coming from miles away.

In this story, there is a girl named Emily. Her middle name is Elizabeth, but she doesn’t use it on a daily basis. She lives in New York City: her mother is a harried paralegal and her father is mostly out of the picture, forgetful and divorced and away. We’re a far way from the nuclear suburban family of 1963; Emily is also mildly bullied at her fancy school, since she’s the scholarship kid and clearly not rich like the others. And she’s going to be in the care of her Uncle Casey for her birthday, as mom has to jet off to Chicago for a big case.

And, elsewhere in the city, there’s a little red puppy looking for a home, and a mysterious man named Bridwell who helps and cares for animals. That latter is a very nice touch: I can forgive a lot of the generic plot of this story because it clearly has its heart in the right place.

I regret to inform you that there is also a rapacious corporation that wants to profit from big-red-dogness, since a Big Movie must have a Big Movie Villain, and this one is no exception. From the graphic novel, it looks like this element is handled about as well as one could hope, given that it exists at all.

This is the book of a movie for kids, so of course there is a happy ending. Everything must come out for the best in the best cinematical worlds. And I am deeply cynical, but this is a nice story that a lot of kids, I hope, will enjoy. Whether they need or want the story in graphic-novel form rather than the movie, I can’t say: I have no interest in seeing what this story would look like with John Cleese as Bridwell (!!!!??? which I discovered while typing this), but I am not ten and have not been for a long time.

So: this is a thing. It exists. It is derivative of the movie, which is probably somewhat derivative of the John Ritter TV show, which was clearly derivative of the Bridwell books. But it’s pretty nice, for all that. You could definitely do worse.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

The thing to remember about young readers is that they’re young. Maybe not everything in the world is new to them (“Wow! Breakfast is oatmeal! I’ve never seen that before!”), but they’re seeing and experiencing new ideas and concepts and situations all the time.

It can be hard for those of us who haven’t hit that concentrated dose of newness for years to remember what that was like, but the best stories for young people embody that sense: they’re stories for people who are living newness all the time, building their selves day by day and figuring out what they think and feel about lots of things all the time.

So I try to keep that in mind with books for that audience: to think they way they would, and not the way I do. I’m probably not as good at it as I think I am, of course. But you always have to try.

Allergic  is a graphic novel for young people. If you’re dismissive, you could call it an “issue book.” But everything’s an issue book if it resonates with something in your life: an issue is just a thing that actually touches you. And this is a book that will touch a lot of people — there are a lot of kids who suddenly realize they’re allergic to something, when that something comes into their lives for the first time.

It could be peanuts or pollen or penicillin or a bee sting. It could be life-threatening, or annoying, or barely noticeable, or anywhere on that spectrum. It could be obvious, or sneaky and hard to track down. It could be something that kid loves, or something that kid wasn’t that interested in anyway. 

So it’s a big “issue,” that a lot of people need to worry about on a daily basis.

Writer Megan Wagner Lloyd and artist Michelle Mee Nutter have taken those facts, and an understanding of that young audience, and built them into a story about one girl — because we all respond better to good stories, we all want to see someone else working through things to understand how we could do it ourselves.

Maggie is young — just turning ten as the book opens. She’s wanted a puppy for a while: she’s planning to be a vet when she grows up; she loves animals, though entirely from afar up to now. And you can guess that it doesn’t go the way she wants. She has a strong allergic reaction to pet dander. After a few tests, it turns out she reacts badly — rashes, swelling, itching — to just about any animal with fur.

So she goes through all the usual stages: anger (at her parents, at the world), denial (which doesn’t last long; her skin gives her away if she’s near a furry animal), bargaining (as she runs through a list of non-furry animals and finds them all wanting), and finally acceptance. She meets other young people, at her school and elsewhere, who are allergic, to other things and in other ways. She learns what we all learn: you need to find the ways your life can go around the roadblocks and detours every life throws up, to make the life that’s the combination of what you want and what you can get.

Maggie’s in a good position; she should have a good life. She has a loving family, good medical support, a new understanding of this annoying way her body works. And her story will resonate with a lot of other young people, struggling with allergies or other issues — Lloyd and Nutter tell her story well, and tell a wider story than I’m focusing on. Maggie has twin younger brothers and her mother has a new baby on the way; she has friends at school and other activities. She has a life, and Allergic is about her life, not just this annoying skin reaction she has.

This is obviously mostly for young people: that’s what it’s for, that’s what it does well. But if you have the care of a young person with an allergy, or any medical/personal issue that could be similar, you might want to take a look at it for yourself, and for that young person.

Note: I’m actually ahead of publication on a review, for the first time in a long time. Allergic officially goes on sale this coming Tuesday, March 2nd. If you order it right now, your bookstore will probably be able to have a copy for you that morning. (Or you can use my link and have a exploitative hegemonic megacorporation deliver it directly to your home: your choice.)

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

A note to copyeditors of the future: the radio story from 1946 is “The Clan of the Fiery Cross,” styled in roman within quotation marks and spelling Clan with a capital C. The 2020 graphic novel loosely based on that radio play is Superman Smashes the Klan , in italics and spelling Klan with the K used by its namesake.

One suspects the relative political power of that real-world Klan, and possibly of the corporate entities that owned (then) National Periodical Publications and (now) DC Comics, are responsible for the switch from C to K. But that’s outside my remit here.

That radio story has been mentioned as a major factor in the waning power of the real-world Klan in the post-war years. I’m not a historian, but it makes sense to me — they are not generally called out as strongly active during the main civil rights era beginning the next decade, so the timing, at least, makes sense. And it’s a comforting message to superhero fans: See! we can do good work in the world, and not have to make any effort at all! Just being a fan of Superman makes the world better!

This graphic novel is not driving that message. Stories themselves generally don’t; stories are about action, not feeling good about yourself for liking those stories. The active verb in the title is there for a reason: this Klan of the Fiery Kross needs to be smashed, and it will not go away quietly by itself.

And, while Superman is the subject of the title sentence, he’s not alone here: Superman alone cannot smash the Klan. That takes more people: a Black police detective, some familiar reporters named Lois and Jimmy, the members of the Lee family at the center of this story, and even a local white kid at first hostile to his new neighbors. One might even say it takes a city, or a village.

The Lee family are moving to a leafy Metropolis neighborhood in 1946 at the beginning of Smashes the Klan, moving out of Chinatown largely because the father, Dr. Lee, is taking a job as chief bacteriologist of the Metropolis Health Department. They meet their new neighbors, who are mostly friendly — especially once it’s clear son Tommy will be a big asset to the baseball team fielded by the local interfaith Unity House. But our viewpoint character in the Lee family is daughter Roberta, who is less sure about their new neighborhood and home.

Tommy’s rocket arm dislodged Chuck Riggs, previously the star pitcher, from that position, which does not leave Chuck happy. Chuck’s Uncle Matt is also coincidentally — this is a Superman story — the local Grand Scorpion of the Klan of the Fiery Kross, so he seizes Chuck’s grievance and the Lees mere presence in their neighborhood as reason for an old-fashioned cross-burning and fire-bombing.

The Lee’s house is saved by quick action by Tommy and by neighbors, including that Black detective, Inspector Henderson. (Whose help Dr. Lee at first does not want, when he thought Henderson was just a random local Black man.) Daily Planet reporters arrive the next morning to report on the situation — of course it’s Lois Lane and Clark Kent, since the Planet has never had any other reporters in seventy years of operation.

But Superman is dealing with assimilation issues of his own. The day before, he fought a Nazi would-be supervillain, Atom Man, and kept him from destroying the Metropolis Dam. But Atom Man is powered by a strange green crystal — anyone who has ever consumed any Superman story is nodding right now — and that gives Superman first a strange wave of nausea and weakness, and then continued hallucinations of two figures who claim to be his real parents, aliens who rocketed him to Earth from  the doomed world Krypton. (Well, they’re not that succinct and specific to begin with. But we know the story, and it is the same story.)

Tommy gets in more danger, the Klan continues to foment violence, and that green crystal will of course come back. Dr. Lee’s employer, and some of his co-workers, turn out to be quite different than what we had expected.

In the end, Superman Smashes the Klan. But he can’t do it alone. And he can’t do it without confronting his own past and understanding who he is: without publicly claiming his place as an immigrant and alien. His story — an immigrant, coming to a new place, and wanting to be friendly and helpful — is explicitly twinned with Roberta’s, and with all of the other people the Klan hates.

This is a story for younger readers, and a story about Superman, so you can be assured everything will work out for the best, and only the most unredeemable will be smashed — anyone who can be brought around will be. Writer Gene Luen Yang will make sure of that, as he also makes his story deeper and more resonant than a Superman tale for pre-teens had to be. Art team Gurihiru gives it all a modern, clean, manga-lite look — easily readable and dynamic.

This is a book a lot of Americans should read: there are far too many Chuck Riggses out there, unthinkingly racist and led by family members or friends or media to believe evil things and, in far too many cases, to do evil things. This story says that most of them are redeemable; I would like to believe that. But they have to want to be redeemed. They have to want to smash the Klan.

For those who do, this book is there for you. And if you’re in a position to put this book in front of a Chuck Riggs, someone who might be amenable to it but does not, right now, want to smash the Klan — doing that would be a very good thing. 

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

This is volume seven of something, I’m coming to it about two years later, and I’m typing this on Christmas day between other festivities. [1] So I expect this will be a short and perfunctory post — those of you who care about Squirrel Girl likely read this book a while ago, and I don’t have high hopes of convincing any of the rest of you at this point.

So, first up, this comes after the previous collections of the Unbeatable Squirrel Girl comic: one and two and three and four and five and six . And also the OGN , which slots in around volume four or so.

The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl, Vol. 7: I’ve Been Waiting for a Squirrel Like You  is written by Ryan North (except one short story in issue 26), drawn by Erica Henderson (except issue 26, though she wrote one story there) and colored by Rico Renzi (who only did part of issue 26). It collects issues 22-26 of the comic of the title and something called A Year of Marvels: The Unbeatable #1 — which is actually written by Nilah Magruder with layouts by Geoffo and final art by Siya Oum — that I think was part of some series of one-offs (maybe to introduce new talent?) that I have never heard of before and which is unconnected to the main story.

The Unbeatable is a perfectly OK sixteen-page story in which Squirrel Girl’s sidekick Tippy-Top (a squirrel) teams up with Rocket Raccoon (from the Guardians of the Galaxy) to defeat a villain in New York’s Central Park, who has brought trees to life and intends to Conquer the World! So, yeah, that’s a thing tacked on the end of this book.

The aforementioned issue 26 is a jam issue — I suspect it was also the “help Henderson stay on track with monthly deadlines” issue, since drawing twenty-plus pages of girls and squirrels monthly is relentless and time-consuming — featuring stories drawn by Madeline McGrane, Chip Zdarsky, Tom Fowler, Carla Speed McNeil, Michael Cho, Razzah, Anders Nilsen, Rico Renzi, and Jim “Garfield” Davis. It has a lot of clever stuff, but — since it’s all officially stories told by characters from the Squirrel Girl comic — it’s also pretty inside-baseball, amusing and fun but slight and entirely for fans.

The main bulk of the book, though, is a five-part story in which Doreen Green (also known as the Unbeatable Squirrel Girl) and her best friend and roommate Nancy Whitehead win a computer-programming contest to go to the Savage Land, the alien-created area of Antarctica where dinosaurs still roam. Complications ensue there, not least the discovery of “Ultron, who is a dinosaur now.” (One might be surprised that it took North, famously creator of Dinosaur Comics, to get dinosaurs into this book.) If you are wondering if Doreen and her friends — including a supposedly-unfriendly programming team from Latveria, Doctor Doom’s homeland — defeat Ultron and save the world, please see the title again.

As always, this is fun and zippy and does not take itself entirely seriously. It is a comic set in a superhero universe featuring a young woman who is a bit zaftig, has sensible hair and a reasonably sensible costume, and prefers to talk to people rather than punch them. Of course it ended: how could such a thing last? (Has she been rebooted with peekaboo cutouts and a tragic backstory yet?)

[1] Not a whole lot of festivities, since it is 2020, but small, sensible, socially distanced festivities.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.