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Squirrel Girl -- or Doreen Green, as her real name is -- is the example of how an Internet fanbase might shape the development of mainstream comics these days. She's a merry mutant from the not-so-merry-at-least-not-these-post-One-M ore-Day-days world of Marvel Comics, who has the proportionate power of a squirrel... in other words, she's strong, fast and agile, can climb almost any vertical surface, chew through hard wood (check out her buck teeth!), and she can communicate with squirrels. She's cute, cheerful, helpful and a bit of a wide-eyed innocent in an increasingly cynical world.



She's not the most famous Mavel character out there, but thanks to a Chuck Norris-type Internet meme status, she's been gaining quite a fanbase as of late, and is, in fact, the single most dangerous opponent in the Marvel Universe. Don't believe me? Keep reading.



Squirrel Girl made her debut in a one-shot Iron Man story back in the 'nineties, a silly and obscure story where she showed up out of nowhere, tried to become Iron Man's sidekick and ended up defeating Big Bad Doctor Doom by having tons of squirrels attack him. As Iron Man put it, it was probably Doc Doom's most humiliating defeat to date.



And this might have been the end of her story. This was the 'nineties, after all, when violent psycopath anti-heroes like Venom and the Punisher ruled the roster and any Marvel hero who didn't kill, maim and torture (or happened to be Spider-Man or on an X-team) was doomed to C-list status, poor sales and endless ridicule by even more ridiculous fanboys. For years, that single story was Squirrel Girl's only appearance... and paradoxally enough, that is probably the reason for her current star status. Because her story was so ridiculous and obscure, nobody ever bothered to retcon it. You see, Doctor Doom has all these robots who look and act exactly like him, which is a writer's cheat in order to make him seem more formidable despite constant defeats. The big bad supervillain suffered a particularly humiliating defeat? Oh, that wasn't really the big bad supervillain at all, just a robot who looked like him.



But nobody remembered Squirrel Girl's story, nobody retconned it, and so that humiliating defeat was never revealed to be anything other than Doom himself. Fast forward a few years, and the dawning of the Internet fanbase, when scans from the story began going around on fan pages, pointing out the ridiculous-looking girl who had defeated Doctor Doom once. Voila, a new Internet meme had been born: Squirrel Girl is awesome.



This sudden Internet fame was what made Marvel dig the nut-loving mutant out of their archives again, and she began by appearing in the parodic mini-series GLA Disassembled, a black comedy about the Great Lakes Avengers, a band of "joke" superheroes trying to gain fame and respect. Since Squirrel Girl, the newest and youngest addition to the team, was by far the most upbeat and cheerful character, writer Dan Slott used her to make satiric comments on the "darker and edgier" trend of comics today; Once every issue, in a special intro page, Squirrel Girl would jokingly address the reader about the contents of the issue with a "Don't try this at home, kids!" tone, and making observations about hos gruesome the world of Marvel had become in later decades.



Seemed like a lot of people found Squirrel Girl a breath of fresh air, and so she went on to appear with the team in a few more one-shots and cameo appearances, when her Internet meme status kicked in and she subsequently began defeating more and more powerful opponents that she logically wouldn't have a chance against -- all done in a jokey, tongue-in-cheek style that acknowledged how ridiculous it all was.



And so, this is where we find Squirrel Girl today, as Marvel's official Lethal Joke Character. (Deadpool doesn't count; he's an assassin in-universe.) At the time of writing, she has become a recurring supporting character in the New Avengers series, where she has been hired as a nanny for nanny for Luke Cage's and Jessica Jones' baby girl, Danielle. And, well, this makes sense -- after all, when a baby is so much at risk of kidnapping and targeting for supervillains, who do you hire but the one person who can defeat every bad guy you can throw at her?



Uh-huh.

