Marvel’s Unbeatable Squirrel Girl Could Not Defeat Watcher Villain
The following contains spoilers for Fantastic Four # 43, now on sale from Marvel Comics
While the Marvel Universe has plenty of world-shattering powerhouses in its roster, some of the most exciting stories focus on those heroes with more down-to-earth abilities. These heroes are still faced with galactic monsters or universal threats, but it allows them to overcome these challenges and establish themselves as unique sort of heroes.
But sometimes, that just isn’t enough, such as in Fantastic Four # 43 (by Dan Slott, Rachael Stott, Andrea Di Vito, Jesus Aburtov, and VC’s Joe Caramagna) where it turned out even the unbeatable Squirrel Girl can not convince the Cormorant to relent in his attack on the universe.
“The Reckoning War” has been a cataclysmic event for the Marvel heroes, who’ve been scrambling to contend with the chaos caused by the ancient force known as the Reckoning. The agent of the mysterious Helmsman, the Cormorant decimated The Fantastic Four when he confronted them in Fantastic Four # 25 by Dan Slott and RB Silva.
The Cormorant possesses a level of power that allows it to contend with reality-warpers like Franklin Richards (with their fight even costing him the last of his powers). Their agents have proven capable of holding their own against the Thing and other powerhouse heroes. This even extended to Doreen Green, aka Squirrel Girl, who has gained a reputation as Marvel’s most unbeatable hero.
Squirrel Girl was introduced in Marvel Super-Heroes # 8 by Will Murray and Steve Ditko. Despite her seemingly basic power set, she proved crucial to defeating Doctor Doom. When she returned from obscurity to be a part of Dan Slott and Paul Pelletier’s GLA miniseries, the creatives leaned into her unlikely defeat of Doom by having her rack up more unlikely victories. Squirrel Girl even found a way to defeat Thanos off-panel. By the time she got her own series, The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl by Ryan North and Erica Henderson, Squirrel Girl’s seemingly unstoppable status became a major aspect of the character. While she may not be able to outpower her enemies, the new series codified the idea that she could overcome any challenge through either her wits or (more likely) her friendly demeanor, turning plenty of enemies into friends.
But she finally seems to have found an opponent she could not convince to lay off. While the Reckoning War spreads across the Marvel Universe, Cormorant has been making his way across the Earth, reclaiming pieces of his armor that had ended up in the hands of others. This includes the Great Lake Avengers, where Grasshopper was using the lower half of the armor to assist in combat. Among the GLA members who failed to stop the Cormorant and are left beaten down in a crater is Squirrel Girl. While she seemed to have fared the best of her allies, she still struggled to remain conscious as the alien casually noted that no one is “unbeatable” before him.
It’s a pointed moment, and it gains an additional layer when considering it’s Slott himself who helped push Squirrel Girl back into the limelight by making her more or less undefeatable. But even Squirrel Girl seems unable to defeat or reason with the Cormorant, highlighting just how powerful and uncompromising he is. This leaves it to Doctor Doom to earn a victory that, ironically enough, feels more akin to a Squirrel Girl plan: an offer of friendship instead of the typical Doctor Doom onslaught. So even if she has been beaten, Squirrel Girl’s tactics were seemingly the key to stopping the villain’s rampage, it just took someone of Doom’s power level to get to the circumstance where that could work.
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