I loved how Hastings actually made evil Gwen empathetic. And it’s anybody’s guess what happens next from then on as Gwen moves between panels, pages, timelines, commenting on the very reading process to the format itself! Brilliant, simply brilliant - refreshing, genuinely exciting, brain-tickling stuff. When Gwen reaches out and touches the panel borders? Chills! There’s an equally playful scene where Gwen experiments with caption boxes and stream of consciousness which reminded me of the kind of genius we last saw in a Marvel comic way back in Fraction/Aja’s silent issue of Hawkeye. In addition to mainstream superhero comics, I read a lot of indies and I’m sorry to say not a single one in the past year comes close to being as experimental as Marvel’s Gwenpool is. What starts out as a deceptively-mundane origin quickly takes a sharp turn into ultra-meta territory with a fake ending/letters page and Gwen noticing - and then picking up - the words “The End”! Hastings goes full-on ‘90s Grant Morrison mind-fuckery by having Gwen mess with the very book you’re holding. What makes it so good? The sheer inventiveness of the storytelling. After a mediocre third volume, Christopher Hastings and Gurihiru (the pseudonym of the two-women art team, Chifuyu Sasaki and Naoko Kawano) come back STRONG with this remarkable fourth book. YES - THAT’S more like it, Marvel! My first five-star rating of the year goes to The Unbelievable Gwenpool, Volume 4: Beyond the Fourth Wall, which it richly deserves. So what’s a girl to do: destroy the Marvel Universe, the thing she loves the most, or leave it behind forever and forget she was ever a part of it? Or is there another way… Both are trying to control her destiny because of what she becomes. Gwen Poole’s a Marvel fangirl from the “real” world who’s been transported into the Marvel Comics Universe and reinvented herself as the amusing anti-hero Gwenpool - but how did she get there in the first place? Finally, her secret origin is revealed! Also, Gwen discovers that she’s her own worst enemy - literally! - as her evil future self appears to her in the present, along with future Miles Morales.
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