Comic Info
Comic Name: Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur
Publisher: Marvel Comics
Writer: Brandon Montclare/Amy Reeder
Artist: Natacha Bustos/Ray-Anthony Height
# of Issues: 6
Release Date: 2017
Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur #15
Reprints Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur #13-18 (January 2017-June 2017). Lunella has solved the Banner B.O.X. which is an unsolvable puzzle…meaning she’s the smartest person on Earth! As Lunella deals with her new found claim to fame, Thing, Ironheart, Hulk, Doctor Strange, and the X-Men are out to help Lunella try to understand what being a hero is all about. Lunella’s claim that she is the smartest person on the planet isn’t sitting well with some including Doctor Doom who intends to prove he’s the smartest, and Lunella could pay the price.
Written by Brandon Montclare and Amy Reeder, Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur Volume 3: The Smartest There Is! follows Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur 2: Cosmic Cooties. The collection features art by Natacha Bustos and Ray-Anthony Height.
Lunella is an interesting creation. She is a substitute for the original “Moon-Boy” who seemingly perished in the first issue of the new series (people in comics rarely die) and she is an attempt by Marvel and other publishers to broaden the world of superheroes to create heroes that are more inclusive. Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur gets the concept right.
Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur #16
The problem with modernizing many of the heroes is that it completely writes out the past character or just replaces them with new and undeveloped heroes. In Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur, it seems to work better in that Moon-Boy wasn’t the most popular Marvel character of all time and Brandon Montclare and Amy Reeder have worked to make Lunella more rounded and “real”. She’s smart, but she’s still a kid.
This collection is essentially a series of team-ups with Lunella joining forces with other heroes after a flashforward to a potential future where she is the leader of Earth’s heroes. While some team-ups feel gratuitous like the X-Men, other team-ups fit right like Ironheart. Ironheart is an example of a poor roll-out of a Marvel character that deserves better. She was introduced as the new Iron Man, took over Iron Man’s title, but wasn’t given Iron Man’s name…Unlike Lunella, Riri was facing an uphill battle and was being set-up to lose. It is nice to see her in this title where she is allowed to be more like Lunella and less like another Iron Man fill in.
This volume of the series however feels like it is a little too late and should have happened earlier in the run. It feels like a lot of set-up for future issues, but in the competitive comic book market, I don’t know how Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur will do since it is a smaller book with a character that isn’t a name among the non-comic book readers that Marvel attempts to woo. Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur 3: The Smartest There Is! is followed by Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur 4: Girl-Moon.
Related Links:
Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur 1: BFF
