PAGE ONE
SG singing her own theme song was part of my original pitch – I had the idea while repeating her name in my head, and found how quickly thinking “Hmm… Squirrel Girl… Squirrel Girl…” can easily segue into the first lines of her theme song. I like putting music into comics and that’s tricky! But here it worked really well because the Spider-Man theme is a song that most everyone knows, AND it’s a song that has a structure wherein you can identify the song by its lyrics and rhythm. It’s basically an ideal candidate for something like this!
PAGE TWO
The theme song was slightly updated in every draft to make it EVEN BETTER, but the first few verses never changed. Later on though, in my first version we don’t have “who’s her friend? / don’t you know / that’s the squirrel Tippy-Toe” but instead have “Can she talk to a squirrel? / Well, her name’s Squirrel Girl!”. This was dropped because we’d hit the “she can talk to squirrels” note already, and Tippy is awesome!
This may reveal too many “I’m not the smartest man” secrets, but it was very late along that I realized “hey wait a minute, SG singing her theme song also works as a unique, fun and very efficient introduction to this character, her abilities, her personality, and the tone of this book” instead of just “I think a theme song would be fun so I’ma write a theme song”.
Dan Slott (writer of many previous SG adventures!) got sent an early proof of the comic and suggested a few alterations to the lyrics, and IIRC he suggested changing my “All the powers of the squirrel!” to “Powers of both squirrel and girl” which I COMPLETELY LOVED and use all the time now. Thanks Dan!
PAGE THREE
The character heads with bios used to be a thing in vintage comics and I always loved them, but my inspiration for it here was actually my friend Joey Comeau’s work on the Bravest Warriors series. He did it in his first issue, and then his second issue, and I was like “Joey you can’t do this every issue” and he was like “Why not? I’ll make up different stories for them each time” and I was like “um actually that’s a great idea and I’m gonna do that too”. How long can it last? WHO CAN SAY??
PAGE FOUR
The SG / Tippy exchange of “Who doesn’t like you?” “I dunno… jerks, I guess?” originally had a part afterwards where SG told Tippy not to tell anyone about her secret identity, Tippy said “I only talk to other squirrels anyway, so we’re cool” and SG checked herself out in the mirror and said “Man… we ARE cool”. I dropped this because a) come ON, Squirrel Girl, slow your roll b) we were already hitting those notes in a much more satisfying way elsewhere on this very page! I said it in my somewhat-detailed review of “Steven Spielberg Presents: Back To The Future: A Robert Zemeckis Film: The Novel by George Gipe based on a screenplay by Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale” but it remains true: first drafts are where you get all your ideas down, and second drafts are where you make sure those ideas are Actually Good.
PAGE FIVE
This page didn’t change at all from the very first draft, but I remember adding in the “casually stop a mugging with an acorn earring” bit because otherwise it would just be SG and Tippy walking and talking, and it showed up what I love about SG: her ubercompetency. She’s just SO GOOD at being Squirrel Girl.
PAGE SIX AND SEVEN
Again, no changes from the first draft! Tomas was always intended to be Chipmunk Hunk, but I thought it’d be fun for these people to meet without knowing they both have powers first. SG first realizes what’s going on in Issue 6!
PAGE EIGHT AND NINE
Nancy was originally inspired by my friend Lucie, and that “there are three things you can do to get me to hate you” line that she leads with – and that so defines her character for me – is something Lucie actually said to me once. Lucie also has a cat named Mew. Apparently the secret to writing is just to have interesting friends.
Don’t tell anyone.
PAGE TEN
SG’s Deadpool cards! I swear that originally it was just intended as fun little callback (in an older appearance she referenced having Iron Man Battle Series Vs Cards, but you couldn’t read them), but later on I realize, hey wait a second, these cards actually function as The Most Efficient Backstory Exposition Device Ever In Time. One panel and everyone knows who Kraven is, what he wants, where he comes from, and what his deal is, because the cards tell you exactly that! I wanted the comic to be accessible to new readers, and these cards do that with peak efficiency. Thanks, Deadpool cards!
PAGE ELEVEN
EMBARRASSING STORY: my first draft for this book was 22 pages long, when it was only supposed to be 20! So I am a big dummy. As part of fixing that mistake, the SG / Kraven fight got condensed from two pages down to one. Originally, DOREEN ran to confront Kraven while pulling out the Deadpool card, got mad at him, said “I’ll be right back”, ran to the bathroom to change, and then SG came out to fight him. Needlessly convoluted, and easily condensed down to a single page by just having Doreen change into SG at the start! All that was lost was a conversation between SG and Kraven over what the word “hirsute” means (it means hairy, it was no great loss).
PAGE TWELVE – THIRTEEN
Erica drew the heck out of this fight scene, and I love that later when people were like “oh wow, you drew Kraven sexy, I love that” she was like “oh I always thought he was supposed to be sexy”. HE’S PRETTY SEXY, NOT GONNA LIE.
PAGE FOURTEEN – FIFTEEN
SG needing a moment to figure out how to beat him mirrored my writing process here. In the first draft, she just throws him up, realizes what to do, catches him, and solves the problem. It worked okay, but after cutting out some material elsewhere, we were able to draw SG imagining other ways she could defeat him, which ended up being one of my favourite parts of this issue. Yay editing! And Erica drew it just beautifully - the panel of SG thinking surrounded by squirrels is still one of my favourites - and Rico brought amazing colours to the “what if” sequence.
The “stuff squirrels down his pants” idea was how she was going to beat him way back in my pitch, before my editor Wil was like “I always saw SG as being someone who’s good at solving people’s problems” and I was like “Um holy crap you have just encapsulated SG perfectly”.
PAGE SIXTEEN – SEVENTEEN
This reveals this whole conflict happened because Kraven angrily kicked a squirrel while musing about his current fate, which I thought was fun. My original idea was “Kraven is tired of losing and so starts re-training himself in hunting, starting with the smallest animals and working his way up to the top”, which would have had him actually hunting squirrels on ESU campus. That seemed a bit like gilding the lily, and him just angrily kicking a squirrel is so ludicrous that I liked it better.
PAGE EIGHTEEN
This page got compressed in a later draft too (there were six in total, not counting the one I marked “FINAL – not final”, but all we really lost was a beat where Nancy said she was okay with Tippy living with them if Mew was too. I think it’s reasonable that Nancy wouldn’t allow it if Mew didn’t like it, but decided it was SO reasonable that Nancy didn’t have to say it, and we’d just make it clear that Mew and Tippy got along fine.
PAGE NINETEEN – TWENTY
In the first draft TT and SG had this “Galactus is coming” conversation in front of Nancy, but Nancy couldn’t understand Tippy’s parts and so just assumed SG was talking to her pet squirrel the way she talks to Mew. That seemed to imply Nancy wasn’t as clever and good at seeing through people’s crap as she CLEARLY IS, so I rewrote it to what we have now: Tippy leaps onto SG’s face and stays there until SG excuses herself to go to the bathroom to talk out of earshot, which was way better.
The last “Galactus is coming” cliffhanger ended up being a single panel, but we tried SO MANY THINGS before that, each with their own page. First it was Galactus flying to Earth in space. Then on his ship (where he was looking at different planets, including an lava one (too hot) and ice one (too cold) and Earth (just right). Then he was on his ship talking to weird robots called “Punishers” that hadn’t been seen since the sixties. Anyway they were all silly and undercut his threat, and the single panel works way better! And I’m really glad we did it, because if we went with the “Galactus choosing Earth because of its temperature” than the big reveal about Galactus’s REAL motivations around coming to Earth in issue 4 wouldn’t work.
And that’s the issue! Now you are familiar with the way worse version of this comic that could’ve been, if only we’d all stopped working on it part-way through. I hope you enjoyed it!
North, Ryan (24 December 2014)
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