9 things I was still thinking about the day after I saw Deadpool & Wolverine (Spoilers, obviously)

I saw Deadpool & Wolverine during a Monday morning matinee immediately following the film's opening weekend. I'm glad I didn't wait any longer to see it, as by Monday evening my too-regular doom-scrolling on Twitter and Facebook was already revealing to me images from the film unbidden, images revealing certain actors who appeared in the film, the costumes they were wearing and, in one instance, even a still from the film's climax. 

I'm not normally very strict about avoiding spoilers in comics or films (especially not the former, which I generally flip-through before reading, as I  am usually far more concerned with the execution of a comic rather than the precise content of it), but here it was obvious the filmmakers and the marketing folks went to rather great pains to keep certain elements of the film as surprises and, I confess, it would have definitely altered my viewing experience if I saw those images I saw on social media before I had actually seen the film. 

I hope you've managed to see it already too, if you are the sort of viewer who doesn't like spoilers. Not just because I am assuming it is now becoming increasingly difficult to avoid spoilers (I was just at IMDb.com looking for an image to use atop this post, and noticed that all of the guest-stars, from minor characters to cameos, are listed in the credits for the film there). But also because I don't want to be the one to spoil the film for you. 

So let me say once again here that this post will contain spoilers for the film and is being written by someone who has already seen it, for an audience of readers who have also already seen it. 

The film isn't a great one, but, nonetheless, it stayed with me throughout the day and throughout the night, and I found myself still thinking about it the next day, when I decided to start this post (Obviously I'm not actually posting it until a few days later, as it takes time to type paragraphs and paragraphs, and I have a day job).

 Not all of my thoughts were necessarily positive ones, mind you, but I think the fact that I was thinking about it at all after the now-mandatory end-credits scene says something good about the film—its ambition, its scope, its eagerness to provoke a reaction. 

I mean, I certainly didn't leave either of the first two Deadpool movies still thinking about them in anyway, nor can I say that any of the Marvel movies I've seen since Endgame—and I've missed a few—left me pondering them at all.

So anyway, these are the things I was still thinking about Deadpool & Wolverine in the hours and days after I left the theater...

1.) The timeline doesn't really make any damn sense at all, does it? The premise of the film, which you know because you have already watched it, is that when a timeline's "anchor being" dies, the entire universe that being calls home begins the process of slowly deteriorating. 

This is what is currently happening to the timeline/universe called home by Deadpool (Ryan Reynolds), as Mr. Paradox (Matthew Macfadyen) of the Time Variance Authority explains, because it's anchor being, Logan/Wolverine (Hugh Jackman), has in fact died. Remember, Deadpool shares his timeline/universe with all of Fox's X-Men movies, despite the fact that he never seems to get to interact with any of the X-Men, with the exceptions of Colossus (voiced by Stefan Kapicic) and Negasonic Teenage Warhead (Brianna Hildebrand), a fact that was joked about in previous installments of the Deadpool trilogy.

Now when, exactly, did Logan/Wolverine die? 

Well he died in 2017's Logan. You remember. You saw it. He nobly sacrificed himself at the end to save Laura (Dafne Keen). It was all rather touching. 

But although the movie Logan was released seven years ago, it was actually set in the future (the year 2029, according to Wikipedia, and yes, I did have to look it up), a dystopian future that I don't think anyone really took to be the real, official ending of Fox' universe of X-Men films, what with its very down world-building (no new mutant children have been born for a generation, the ninety-something Charles Xavier has dementia, and he accidentally killed all of his X-Men when he had a psychic-powered seizure, etc). 

Sure, it took place in the future, but it certainly wasn't meant to be the future. Certainly no more than the apocalyptic, Sentinel-ruled future in 2014's X-Men: Days of Future Past was meant to be the real future. (Or, to use a comic book example, Logan's setting was no more definitive than that of Mark Millar and Steve McNiven's 2010-launched "Old Man Logan" arc of Wolverine....which proved popular enough to become a well that Marvel kept going back to, and thus establishing it as a possible future that became its own, alternate timeline).

But never mind what degree of "official" the Logan filmmakers might have thought of their work, or how the audience received and understood it. Official or not, it still takes place in the future, as in five years from now, which is when Deadpool & Wolverine is set. Deadpool even visits Logan's grave from the end of Logan and exhumes his at this point mostly skeletal remains. 

Wanting to give the filmmakers the benefit of the doubt, I did consider that maybe when an anchor being dies, the timeline/universe starts degrading backwards, with the "future" disappearing before the present (this is even somewhat suggested with the visual aid Paradox shows Deadpool, of the timeline disappearing from right to left), but that still wouldn't work, because if that was the case, the play would be for Deadpool to travel to the future and save Logan's life during the events of Logan's climax,  not shop around alternate timelines/universes for a substitute Wolverine to take his Wolverine's place (which, of course, he does, leading to the rather fun montage of alternate Wolvies, mostly played by Jackman). That would simply result with the Deadpool's world having two Wolverines in the year 2024, the official one of which would still be destined to die in five years and erode the universe.

Complicating things further is the fact that a grown-up version of Laura (played by the now grown-up Dafne Keen) appears in the Void. There she tells Logan that her version of him gave her a chance to grow up. In the "real world" after the events of Logan? Or in the Void? It's not clear, but her being a grown-up at all suggests that time did indeed move forward after Logan's death in Logan, a good seven years or so. 

I think that the four—four!—credited writers of this film, a number that includes comics writer Zeb Wells, should have realized this rather early in the process, and rather than just assuming it's a silly comedy, and therefore they don't need to explain such things, should have addressed it. (If anything, this movie starring Deadpool should make complicated explanations even easier to include, given that Reynolds' Deadpool peppers his non-stop dialogue with fourth wall-breadking, filmmaking terms like "maguffin" and "exposition.")

Really, Wells at least should be used to an audience questioning, even interrogating, the interior logic of a superhero story, and sought to address it. 

2.) What was up with the Avengers application scene? I'm still not entirely sure I understand the scene early in the film when Wade Wilson, wearing a suit and tie, sits down for a job interview with Happy Hogan (Jon Favreau) to discuss his application to join the Avengers. 

It's actually a pretty pivotal scene for Wade's character arc throughout the film (such that it is), with a line of dialogue in the film's climax referring back to it. And it's got some decent jokes. As random as Favreau's appearance was—one gets the sense that he was the easiest get among the Avengers and Avengers-adjacent cast members—Favreau is a pretty good comic actor, and it is fun to watch he and Reynolds play off of one another.

That said, exactly when and how did the interview even happen, considering the fact that the movie makes it so clear that the Fox/X-Men movies are set in a completely different timeline/universe from the one that the Disney/Marvel Studios Marvel Cinematic Universe, which Paradox refers to as "The Sacred Timeline"...?

It seems to be set sometime in the past, before Deadpool settles on his somewhat sad, mid-life crisis-y status quo at the start of the film's narrative, a fact that is reinforced by a line of dialogue that implies that Iron Man/Tony Stark is still alive...and it's therefore sometime before the events of 2019's Avengers: Endgame. 

Deadpool does of course get his hands on a device that allows him to jump from timeline to timeline (leading to the Wolverine-shopping sequence), but that's not until well after his interview to join the Avengers.

Or are we meant to believe that there are different version so the Avengers within the different timelines, and that Wade had thus interviewed with his timeline's Avengers, rather than the MCU Avengers...? (The version of Wolverine that stars in this film seems to know who the Avengers are, saying "Fuck the Avengers" when they are brought up, suggesting that there are Avengers in his timeline.)

Anyway, as amusing as the sequence is, it's one of several elements of the film that don't seem to be properly explained (or just plain don't make sense), and it seems like it's mainly in the film at all simply because now that Disney own Fox and the filmmakers had access to whatever toys from both universes they could afford/were willing to spend money on, it's a scene that could happen, rather than needed to happen. 

3.) I'm just going to say it: I did not care for Wolverine's costume. I am going to assume this isn't a very popular opinion, given online reaction to the costume since it first became common knowledge so many months ago, but the yellow and blue costume Jackman dons in this film didn't do anything for me.

While I certainly understand the appeal of finally giving him a comics-inspired costume after he's starred or appeared in...so many of these films that I've now lost count, the result commits the same sins that too many superhero movie costumes do, complete with built-in muscles (or suggestions of muscles, in the ab area there, which Jackman clearly does not need, as is demonstrated in the climax) and a clunky, armor-like look. 

Despite the color scheme, it's not actually that comics-accurate. 

It's especially noticeable whenever Wolverine is standing next to Deadpool (which is, um, much of the movie), given how comics-accurate Deadpool's costume is. They could have given Wolvie something like that, tighter fitting and more spandex-y, but instead they went in a more Batmanly direction. 

You know which costume did look great, though? The one that Jackman wore when he was playing one of his Multiversal alternates, in the Hulk-fighting scene. The classic brown and yellow suit (sans cowl). That was tight-fitting and more comics accurate, and it's kinda too bad they didn't make Jackman's blue and gold costume in that style and/or out of that material.

That said, it was great seeing the cowl on film, and I kinda liked what a big deal the film made out of revealing it. By the time Jackman finally pulled it on, I had assumed he wasn't actually going to wear the cowl at all during the film. 

4.) I was honestly a little underwhelmed by the cameos and uncredited guest-stars. This was probably more my fault than it was the movie's fault, but because of all the rumors flying around online during production—Reynolds' wife's friend Taylor Swift to appear as Dazzler! Daniel Radcliffe to appear as a Wolverine variant! Halle Berry spotted with her hair dyed white!—I went in expecting, if not a surprise Swift appearance, then at least a host of cameos from pre-MCU actors reprising their Marvel hero roles, including some who never actually got to play roles they were attached to. 

Basically I was expecting everyone from the original filmic X-Men to Nicolas Cage's Ghost Rider to Milana Vayntrub's Squirrel Girl, either making brief appearances while Deadpool and Wolverine hopped through the Multiverse, or rallying together as an army ala the "Avengers Assemble" scene in Avengers; Endgame. 

My hopes for such a complete collection of cameos were only further raised when Paradox mentioned he was sending our heroes to "the garbage heap" and the first of the surprise guest-stars—unless you count Henry Cavill as a Wolverine variant, a "joke" I didn't really get—made his appearance: Chris Evans as Johnny Storm, from the 2005 Fantastic Four and 2007 Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer (Say what you will about those movies, but they were pretty perfectly cast, especially in the case of Evans as Storm). If they could get Captain America Chris Evans to wear a "4" on his chest and shout "Flame on!" again, surely they could get Nicolas Cage, Eric Bana or Thomas Jane to appear for a scene, right?

Instead, what we got was a team of four freedom fighters resisting Cassandra Nova's forces in the Void: Jennifer Garner's Elektra (2003's Daredevil, 2005's Elektra), Channing Tatum's Gambit (from the long-rumored, never-made solo Gambit movie that languished in development hell), the aforementioned Dafne Keen (2017's Logan), who didn't really seem to "fit" with the others, and, most surprising to me, Wesley Snipes' Blade (1998's Blade, 2002's Blade II and 2004's Blade: Trinity...co-starring a young, up and coming Ryan Reynolds!).

As exciting as the sequence introducing them all was, it felt more like, say, the appearance of the Illuminati in 2022's Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness than the casting of 2021's Spider-Man: No Way Home; that is, it felt more like Who They Could Get rather than Who They Would Have Wanted to Get. 

Also, as great as it was to see the modern Marvel movie acknowledging Snipes' Blade as the vanguard of Marvel comic book superheroes anchoring successful movie franchises—beating the X-Men, Spider-Man, The Hulk, The Fantastic Four and the "Marvel Cinematic Universe" out the gate by years—his role in Deadpool & Wolverine didn't seem...well, big enough. I mean, he's the Adam of Marvel movie superheroes, the Ur-hero. Shouldn't he have had a bigger role than just, you know, hanging out with Elektra and a guy whose movie never even actually got made...?

Granted, I don't know what they would have or should have done with him to differentiate him from the others. 

Personally, I thought they should have cast Snipes as T'Chaka in 2016's Captain America: Civil War and 2018's Black Panther, but that would have just been meta-commentary stunt-casting. 

It's just that Snipe's Blade is the first, and should maybe be afforded a greater honor than hanging with Elektra and the never-to-be Gambit, you know...?

5.) I thought way too long about Wolverine's bones. Again, this is more a me thing than a film thing, but I had a hard time with the opening scene of the film, in which Deadpool is confronted by soldiers from the TVA at Logan's gravesite from the end of Logan, and then proceeds to slaughter them all to the tune of NSYNC's Bye Bye Bye, using the invincible, admantium bones of Wolvie's corpse as weapons. 

The whole thing about Wolverine's bones is that they are unbreakable, right? So how was Deadpool snapping them apart like Legos to use as projectiles and clubs against his foes?

It eventually dawned on me—like, a day later—that the human skeleton isn't composed of bones connected directly to one another, but that there is some connective tissue at each joint that holds them together. (That's why when someone discusses a particularly grievous state of affairs for their knees, say, they will say something like, "It is basically bone on bone at this point"). 

So I guess that while Wolvie's bones are individually unbreakable, his skeleton can still be pulled apart, especially if he has lost his healing factor and the organic bits holding the bones together into their skeletal structure have been rotting for a few years...? (Or, um, -7 years, in the film's nonsensical timeline). 

I think what threw me at first, aside from my own ignorance of course, is the fact that I've seen Wolverine hit with fire, plasma cannons and explosions in his comics so often, terrible wounds that melt away all his flesh and muscle, and yet he still survives as an intact admantium skeleton (See above for one of the best examples). 

In the comics, at least, whatever's holding his bones together seems as indestructible as the bones themselves. 

6.) Is it weird that Cassandra Nova is, like, 20? Don't get me wrong, I thought Emma Corrin was great as Cassandra Nova. She was strikingly hot, rocked the bald head (Was it a bald cap, rather than a super-clean shave, though?), and was genuinely terrifying; they made a great, squirmy special effect out of the way her co-creator Frank Quitely had previously drawn her using her hands during demonstrations of psychic powers. 

Still, it gave me pause at how damn young she was. According to IMDb, Corrin was born in December of 1995, making her...29, right? She introduces herself as the twin of Charles Xavier, but the Charles Xaviers we know from previous films are both quite a bit older (Patrick Stewart is 84, and James McAvoy is 45). 

Yeah yeah yeah, she could have been a variant from an alternate timeline where a Charles Xavier isn't yet 30, but the casting reminded me quite a bit of Sony having 34-year-old Dakota Johnson playing senior citizen Madame Web in that particular film starring a minor Spider-Man character the studio somehow convinced themselves there might possibly be an audience for (And here let's pause and wonder that Fox never ended up greenlighting a Gambit movie, whereas Sony has produced flops starring Morbius and Madame Web...as well as a flop-to-be featuring Kraven). 

Studios seem fine with using Marvel comics' old lady characters in their movies...as long as they lose the "old" part. 

7.) Is it just me, or were there an awful lot of gay jokes in this film for the year 2024? I mean, it does indeed have some positive gay representation in the form of a relationship between Negasonic Teenage Warhead and Yukio (Shioli Kutsuna)...although you might not even realize they're a couple at all if you skipped Deadpool 2, given their very brief appearances in this film. And Deadpool himself presents as bisexual, spending a generously long sequence in which he's confronted by an all-male TVA group of soldiers at a party and intimating that he assumes they are strippers and that he is quite alright with them gang-banging him with sticks (Although, as is so often the case, it's impossible to tell to what degree Reynolds' Deadpool is just joking).

Still, there are repeated jokes in the film that amount to nothing more than pointing out that a minor character may in fact be gay and...that's it. See this guy? He's gay. That's the joke!

8.) Grant Morrison seems to have had a bigger influence on this Deadpool than many other Marvel movies.  It's not just the reappearance of his character Negasonic Teenage Warhead (first appearing in 2001's New X-Men #115) or the use of his villain Cassandra Nova (Morrison and Quitely's 2001 New X-Men #114), although those clearly show the writer's fingerprints, despite how long ago their reinvention of Marvel's X-Men and their concept of mutants is now. 

Rather, the concept of the Void, a "garbage heap" where Paradox and/or the TVA can send characters that have outlived their usefulness (and/or who were recast, and/or had their franchises end, no longer earning new sequels), reminded me quite a bit of Morrison's Limbo, which Buddy Baker visited in 1990's Animal Man #25, discovering it to be a lonely, hell-ish plane where comic book characters are sent to languish when they are not actively being written about or starring in any comic (Initially he encountered the likes of Ace the Bathound, The Inferior Five and the Gay Ghost there).

Of course, it's not such a unique concept that Morrison and the writers of Deadpool & Wolverine couldn't necessarily have developed it in parallel, with Wells and the other screenwriters never having read Morrison's Animal Man run or their Limbo revival as part of 2008's Final Crisis event series, but given their use of Nova, it made me curious if they were indeed influenced by Morrison here. 

9.) The line "kick rocks all the way to bald hell" is my favorite in the film. I don't have anything else to say about it, I just like the idea of a "bald hell" for bald people, and the use of the old time-y, inoffensive insult of "kick rocks" in an otherwise fairly filthy, profane rant. Bravo Mr. Evans, a quite gifted comic actor who hasn't been allowed to shine much comedically in the strait-laced, upright role of Captain America.

Some recent Marvel trades I read, um, recently:

Daredevil: Back In Black Vol.3--Dark Art

After a really rather rough second volume (discussed in this post), the current, Charles Soule-written volume of Daredevil is back to the level of quality of the first volume. This likely has a lot to do with the fact that pencil artist Ron Garney is back, drawing all five of the issues collected herein. It may also have a lot to do with the fact that, like the first volume and unlike the second volume, Soule apparently wrote these issues as a single arc. It's not quite complete enough to read like a distinct graphic novel, as it does pick up on at least one event from volume two (Elektra having broken Blindspot's arm), and there's a pretty dramatic cliffhanger ending regarding the fate of Daredevil's new sidekick, but otherwise this is a pretty self-contained comics story.

Our heroes are doing their thing, lawyering and/or law assistancing by day, fighting crime by night, and they are forced to face a sinister new villain. The papers have dubbed him "Vincent Van Gore," which is pretty good, but he personally prefers "Muse," which isn't quite as good. He's a serial killer/artist, and his first major piece being a gigantic Guernica-esque mural painted with the blood of dozens of different victims. He's also got some weird and, frankly, ill-defined powers that make him a match for Daredevil in a scrap, particularly since Daredevil can't "see" him.

And that's pretty much that: Hero vs. villain, with the latter being a brand-new villain. There's something you don't see much anymore!

Complicating matters is that Muse's second piece involves killing of several Inhumans*, and so Daredevil and Matt Murdock try to work with Medusa and New Attilan. There's another new character introduced here--a former New York City Police Department detective who got Inhuman-ized, given a neat but subtle power and who now works as a liaison between the country and the city's police--who spends the most time with DD and/or MM, but the climax of the Inhumans' involvement seems to be to have Medusa be kind of a jerk and let Karnak and Daredevil fight. As I was reading one scene, in which neighborhood toughs attempt to murder an Inhuman, it occurred to me that this story arc may seem quite dated in a few years' time, as the scene is written almost exactly as if Soule had simply replaced the word "mutant" with "Inhuman."

I'm not crazy about Muse's mask, which appears to include a tight-fitting knit cap like the kind of a cartoon burglar might wear, and his tiny little backpack, but otherwise his design is visually striking, and of the sort that fits into the book's unusual coloring scheme (which color artist Matt Milla manages).

I can't say I'm terribly excited about what I imagine may dominate the fourth volume, based on the last, climactic pages of this arc, in which Blindspot is forced to take on Muse solo in order to save many lives, but it's quite possible that Soule will end up zagging instead of zigging.

Again, after a choppy second volume, Daredevil is again pretty tightly written super-comics, with great art and a somewhat unique visual hook to its telling that separates it from the scores of other superhero comics on the shelves at the moment (the vast majority of which are also published by Marvel).

Deadpool: Too Soon?

If Deadpool's current state of popularity is such that his presence can not only goose interest and sales in books he appears in, than this four-issue miniseries operated on almost reverse logic. This is a Deadpool comic filled with a large cast of guest-stars, most of them relatively minor characters, but ones with strong fan bases.

Writer Joshua Corin (whom I have never heard of**) sends The Forbush Man, The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl, The Astonishing Ant-Man, Rocket and Groot, Howard The Duck, The Punisher and Peter Porker, The Amazing Spider-Ham and, um, The Punisher to a mansion, each following a similar mysterious letter. There they are greeted by Deadpool and his apparent wife, a demon named Shiklah (I had heard he was married, although this is the first time in my extremely sporadic reading of Deadpool comics that I learned to who).

Deadpool has invited them all there to pose for his Christmas card photo with him, and has dug up enough blackmail material on each of them to force them to comply. Why this particular assortment of characters? Because, he explains, they are the funniest characters in the Marvel Universe. If The Punisher seems particularly out-of-place among this group, I suspect that is the joke regarding his presence.

This set-up leads to a locked-door sort of mystery, as when the lights briefly go out and come back on, Forbush Man is found decapitated! Is this the end of the Forbush Man, the most expendable of the guests, in that he's not currently starring or co-starring in a comic book? Looks like! At his funeral, attended by all (dig Tippy-Toe's little black ribbon), Deadpool vows to find the killer, criss-crossing the country to investigate the other suspects in the room that night (he naturally dismisses himself and his wife).

Joined against his will by Squirrel Girl, he travels to California, to Miami and then back to New York City, pursued by "Squirrelpool," a hideous clone monster created accidentally when he and Squirrel Girl share an old teleporter (I was pretty disappointed in this design by artist Todd Nauck; it suits the purposes of the story fine, although I'm not sure why it's a hulking monster-sized creature instead of being Deadpool-sized, or even just Deadpool-plus-Squirrel Girl-sized, but man, it would be so easy to amalgamate those two characters into a cool design).

When the beheadings start to pile-up, and include clearly-not-going-to-get-killed-off-for-long characters like Rocket and Groot (and, a little more shockingly, Squirrel Girl's besties Nancy Whitehead*** and Tippy-Toe), the stakes are lowered and, when the murderer is revealed and defeated with some help of Marvel's latest movie star Dr. Strange, it should come as no surprise that everyone is restored to life in some particularly random deus ex machina. (To be fair to Brad Meltzer, whose Identity Crisis is pretty much the worst murder "mystery" in comic book history, I should note that the killer is not a suspect introduced at any point in the comic, and so as a mystery, this doesn't work...not that the mystery set-up was ever meant to be anything more than a premise, of course).

Nauck is an artist I sometimes have some trouble evaluating entirely impartially, given the amount of affection I have for his work on account of his years on Young Justice. His ability--and tons of experience--balancing light-hearted supehero comedy with concinving superhero action serves him well in this particular series, though, and it's certainly interesting to see so many diverse characters translated though his particular visual style, even if they don't all seem to work (Squirrel Girl, for example, is a character that some artist seem to nail a particular take on, while others flounder a bit, sometimes for reasons I have a hard time pinning down. Nauck's version just looks like a typical super-girl character with a few Squirrel Girly features, rather than looking like Squirrel Girl.)

I was a little surprised to find a back-up, the story "Deadpooloween" taken from the Gwenpool Holiday Special: Merry Mix-Up #1, and I was more surprised still to find that it was both written and drawn by Chynna Clugston Flores. I guess it was included because it prominently features Squirrel Girl, as does the Too Soon?. It's been a good long time since I've read a Chynna comic, although I can hardly overstate how much I loved her Blue Monday in Action Girl and then from Oni (Image is currently reprinting it, and you should buy it and read it). While I'm sure she's done something for Marvel since, the last Marvel comic she drew that I read was that issue of Ultimate Marvel Team-Up from the earliest years of the Ultimate line, when Brian Michael Bendis had Peter Parker and pals run into the X-Men at the mall.

In her story, Deadpool belatedly realizes it Halloween, and suits up to cruise the town near Empire State University. There he finds that Squirrel Girl is hosting a Deadpool costume contest, which he angrily enters, irritated that the success of his movie has spawned so many college bros dressing up like him this Halloween.

Remember what I said about certain artists seeming to do a better, truer Squirrel Girl than others? Chynna nails hers. Her style is so different than that of Erica Henderson, but Chynna is just an all-around expert when it comes to drawing geeky young people, I guess. I would love to see more Chynna Clugston Flores Squirrel Girl somewhere in the future.

Doctor Strange Vol. 3: Blood in the Aether

With Doctor Strange's magical powers and resources utterly exhausted by his two-volume battle against the magic-destroying interdimensional entity The Empirikul, he is at one of his lowest, weakest points in Doctor Strange #11, by writer Jason Aaron and guest-artists Kevin Nowlan (who draws the scenes set during Strange's origin) and Leonardo Romero (who draws the scenes set in the present). That means there's blood in the water and the sharks are starting to circle.

And by "the water" I guess we mean "the aether," and by "the sharks" I guess we mean an assortment of villains, including Doctor Strange's arch-enemies and a few newer or more random threats.

So after the prelude chapter that the 11th issue serves as, the rest of the collection is a sort of week-in-the-life story, in which Doctor Strange runs a gauntlet of foes new and old, all the time being forced to rely on his wits, his allies and what new sorcery he can invent on the fly to save himself...and everyone else.

So in rapid succession Strange faces Mister Misery (the name the thing from his basement assigned itself), Baron Mordo, Nightmare, Satana and Master Pandemonium**** (and Pandemonium's hands), the post-Original Sin version of The Orb and, of course, the dread Dormammu. Their motives range from the dire to the petty to the idiosyncratic, and if you're at all familiar with any of these characters you can probably assign each of them to those categories without any help from me, but it all adds up to a pretty dramatic, almost arcade-like fight, with a few lighter moments to stop and exhale.

Regular pencil artist Chris Bachalo manages the bulk of the five issues that make up the actual "Blood in the Aether" story arc (with a pair of pencilers getting "with" credits on the last two issues, and eight different inkers credited on these issues...speaking of credit, it's to Bachalo and company's credit that the story actually looks pretty great, and all those different artists work together well enough that their collaboration is, if not seamless, than relatively seam-light).

It's really difficult to overstate how well-suited Bachalo is to the material, and not just to the Steve Ditko-conceived world of Doctor Strange in general, but to writer Jason Aaron's world-weary, joke-heavy conception of the character and his story specifically. As I've said before, Bachalo handles weird well, and he manages to make old characters like Dormammu, Mordo and Nightmare his own, while the characters that are his own, like Mister Misery, are hard to imagine under anyone else's pens.

Probably the best example of his work is the issue devoted to Satana, however. She plans to open up her own hell, one in which the damned can spend time with "cool" dead people, like dead rockstars and superheroes, like Doctor Strange. She pitches him over a bizarre meal in a bizarre diner (Pandemonium is both her short order cook and her muscle), filled with elaborately, cartoonishly designed creatures. To save himself, Strange must use his astral projection form in a pretty unusual way, which I'm not sure if he's ever done before, in order to achieve a particular goal I'm quite positive he never has.

I'm not sure if Bachalo has completely redesigned Satana here, or if his and colorist Antonio Fabela's version is just strikingly rendered, but this is maybe the coolest I can remember her looking. I think Bachalo draws Pandemonium's hand demons a little too gitancially, but, like Swarm, there's really no way to screw up the drawing of this crazy-ass Marvel villain.

Bachalo's Orb is another pretty great character. I don't believe I've seen him since Original Sin, nor do I quite understand how either he or Nick Fury Sr. "work" in the Marvel Universe anymore, but Aaron's conception of The Orb works well here for the purposes of a Doctor Strange comic, and Bachalo seems to have a lot of fun selling this new life of the character's menace as well as inherent humor.

This volume is really strong enough to stand on its own, independent of the two preceding it, as the only things one really needs to know from the previous ten issues get summarized in the three sentences following the Doctor Strange logo on the title page.

Power Man and Iron Fist Vol. 2: Civil War II

Here's another in the too-long line of pretty good books that got derailed and/or destroyed by Civil War II. In the case of the David Walker-written Heroes For Hire revival, I say "and/or destroyed" because the book is no longer around. That may have simply been Marvel trying to more closely tie their comics to the various Netflix series, as after this book's cancellation Walker went on to write a Luke Cage solo title sharing the name of his TV show, and a new Iron Fist series launched. Or it could have been because of this dumb-ass story arc, that takes over issues #6-9 of the then-new book, almost the entirety of this second collected volume of the series (there's also a fun, holiday annual included in this collection).

For trade-waiters like me, the other unfortunate aspect of Civil War II? Because that book was so delayed, and expanded after solicitation, it meant I couldn't read any of the tie-in trades like this until I read the main series, but so many of the tie-ins were published prior to the Civil War II collection, that basically meant holding off on reading any (or at least many) Marvel collections for a few months longer than I might have otherwise. (As it turns out though, one really only needs to have read the first few issues of Civil War II to understand what's going on here; War Machine's dead, She-Hulk is in a coma and Carol Danvers is a big, stupid immoral idiot and...that's it, really).

Now, this arc is bad, but it's still fun, and maybe as good as a tie-in to such a dumb event series could be if it really did try to honestly engage with the event instead of simply side-stepping it as fast as possible. Walker writes these characters extremely well, and has a lot of fun with Luke's refusal to swear and in recovering the often very goofy characters from Cage's deep past, and other failed or half-forgotten street-level characters from Marvel's past, and reintroducing them, often portraying their past portrayals as youthful indiscretions, or perhaps trying to be something they weren't...or, in at least one case, trying to hang on to something they never were in the first place.

The artwork by Flavianao and Sanford Green is great, and I could look at those two guys' drawings of the two guys in the title all damn day; I particularly like, as I believe I mentioned when discussing the first volume, how huge this Luke Cage is drawn, in relation to Danny, Jessica, Danielle and the whole world around him. He's a literally bigger-than-life character.

Walker's way of dealing with the Civil War II plot is interesting, and I find myself wondering whether the plot for this arc, which isn't quite concluded in this volume, is one he would have written anyway, and he was just forced to fold Carol Danvers in, or if his non-Civil War II plot was an intentional echo of Civil War II, inspired by its plot.

So the first issue opens with Luke Cage, Danny Rand, Jessica Jones and a clueless Danielle watching news footage of the battle with Thanos that took place in Free Comic Book Day 2016, which the Civil War II collection puts between Civil War II #0 and Civil War II #1 (That event series, by the way, makes an excellent case for trade-waiting, as it's really hard to tell where and when it actually starts; there are basically three different starting points, one of which isn't terribly relevant. Better to let a collections editor curate it, I think). This is the battle that ends with War Machine James Rhodes dead and She-Hulk in a coma, and the two heroes are pretty shaken for obvious reasons, with flashbacks giving less-obvious, more personal details: Cage and Rhodey's last conversation was an intense argument, and Danny thinks about the time he kissed She-Hulk. Four more pages are devoted to Civil War II: They attempt to visit Shulkie at the Tri-Skelion but are turned away, and they are warmly greeted by Carol, who then asks if they can give her a minute of their time so she can explain what's going on.

Jump to the two of them walking to their car, reiterating that Civil War II is dumb and they hope they can avoid being in it (they can't!).

"What was all that 'predictive justice' stuff Carol was talking about?" Danny yells. "Sounded like a bunch of fiddle-faddle to me," Luke says, and they agree to sit this one out, as they are also sick of hero vs. hero fights. On a two-page spread, between two tiers of them talking about it, there's a nice big spread of the Luke Cage-lead Avengers (from the second volume of the Bendis-written New Avengers, I want to say) fighting the Carol Danvers and Iron Man-lead Avengers (from the pages of the Bendis-written Mighty Avengers). Cage, who sided with Captain America in the pages of the first Civil War, was basically in a kinda cold war with the government-sanctioned Avengers between the end of Civil War and the post-Secret Invasion "Heroic Age," I think.

Walker then returns to matters related to his book, as a bunch of reformed criminals and their family members attempt to hire the Heroes For Hire to find a bunch of ex-cons who have since gone straight but disappeared shortly after encountering a group of mysterious vigilantes. And then those vigilantes attack! Followed by the police!

This ends with Danny Rand in jail for assaulting some officers, where he tries to figure out the disappearances. Many of those who have disappeared are also in jail there, and they ended up there without officially being charged or getting trials. Outside prison, Luke calls in favors from many friends to try to figure out the one clue they have, a mysterious device that mixes facial recognition software with the ability to manipulate and falsify criminal records. This is what the vigilantes were doing to bust their victims.

So you can see how this thematically kinda sorta ties in to Civil War II, as innocent--or at least innocent-until-proven-guilty--people are being attacked, arrested and punished for crimes they didn't actually commit. Civil War II comes back to the fore when Ulysses--the prophesying Inhuman that Carol Danvers is using to predict possible future crimes to prevent before they happen--has a vision of Luke Cage leading a break-in at Ryker's to free the incarcerated Danny.

In fact, a confused and frustrated Cage calls Songbird and Centurius to join him as he looks at Ryker's, in the hopes that they can talk him out of doing something stupid and figure out this whole mess, and then "Sweet Christmas, Easter and Hanukkah," in swoop Danvers, Mockingbird, Puck, Spectrum, Storm, Deathlok and a whole bunch of SHIELD troops. They are there to stop Ulysses' vision from coming to pass by arresting Luke first and, just as in All-New Wolverine Vol. 2: Civil War II, Carol's intervention is exactly what causes the vision to come to pass (slow learner, I guess).

Luke's not having it, of course, he tells off Carol in such a way to piss her off, and everyone fights, with the fight eventually spreading inside the prison after Carol punches Luke through its walls and a couple of errant energy blasts and explosions continue to escalate the situation.

There's a lot of fighting between all parties. I particularly liked the fight-then-team-up sequences involving Mockingbird, who Walker writes close enough to Chelsea Cain that she sounds like the same character, and Songbird, because they have similar names. And I'm always calling Songbird Mockingbird by accident.

It ends with Cage making a couple of speeches in Carol's direction, and then Danny making another one, and she's eventually shamed into dropping it and they help round up the prisoners and clean up the jail. (I'm not sure this all lines up perfectly well with Civil War II, by the way. In that book's third issue, Luke and Danny appear to be working with Carol and SHIELD, at least according to one big panel of a series of three images that run across a two-page spread while New York City Assistant District Attorney examines Carol Danvers, but in issue #4, Luke is allied with Iron Man on the "cool" team that shows up at the Triskelion to fight Carol's lame team.)

But just as in the pages of Civil War II, the tie-ins seem mostly designed to demonstrate that Carol is dumb and keeps making the same mistakes over and over and over again.

As for the A-plot, which becomes the B-plot, Luke's team is just about to crack where the doohickey being used to find and incarcerate people came from, when a very powerful person in a hoodie teleports to his safehouse and steals it from the hands of his allies.

As I mentioned earlier, the rest of the collection is devoted to an annual, or, to be specific, Sweet Christmas Annual #1. Walker writes this as well, but Scott Hepburn provides the art. It's Christmas Eve, and Luke, Danny and Danielle visit a toy store to find the Pokemon-like hot toy of the season. Also there is Spider-Woman Jessica Drew and her baby. And Daimon Hellstrom, Son of Satan, in an open-coat Santa suit. And The Krampus. And the real Santa Claus. It is every bit as awesome as it sounds, and Hepburn draws a hell of a Krampus, as well as a pretty sweet warrior version of Santa that isn't as over-the-top as the one in the Grant Morrison-written Santa vs. Krampus comic, Klaus.

I'm really glad it was collected here, even though the storyline preceding it didn't really reach its conclusion, because it at least means the book ends on a high note, rather than being another example of the Civil War II storlyine stumbling into an already perfectly strong title, upsetting all the furniture and then stumbling back out.

The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl Vol. 5: Like I'm The Only Squirrel In The World

This volume takes for its cover that of Unbeatable Squirrel Girl #13, i.e. the one where Squirrel Girl is hauling back to throw Tippy-Toe, who is herself hauling back to throw Ant-Man, who is all curled up like a ball in her tiny squirrel fist. Is this modified Fuzzball Special just something for the cover, or does it actually occur within the pages of the comic itself?

It does!

The Squirrel Girl/Ant-Man team-up takes place during a story arc that dominates this trade, occupying the first three of the five issues collected herein. Doreen, Nancy and Tippy-Toe join Doreen's mom at a cabin in Canada for a rather boring vacation, which is interrupted by a bid to conquer the world by a character who can split himself into many different versions of himself. His name is Enigmo, and he is apparently a pre-existing Marvel villain (The Internet said he debuted in 1994 issue of Avengers). Brain Drain, the disembodied brain in a jar atop a powerful robot body that has been hanging around with Doreen and friends for a while, teleports to Canada to help her, and he does so with the only hero he could find who was small enough to fit in the teleporter at the same time as him: The Astonishing Ant-Man, Scott Lang.

As per usual, Squirrel Girl is able to save the day, with the help of her many friends and the help of science knowledge, which writer Ryan North applies to the comic book world of the Marvel Universe as charmingly as ever. For example, there is a flashback to physics class, where in Doreen and Nancy remember their teacher's lecture on "Galileo's Square-Cube law," which explains why giant mice are impossible.

"And yes, you can get around this restriction with certain cosmic rays or other exotic particles. I am aware of Pym's work, thank you," the professor continues. "It's hard not to be when he published journal articles like 'Ha Ha, I'm Giant-Man Now: Screw You, All Other Physicists.'"

That sounds like a fantastic journal article! Should I be reading scientific journals, for laughs?

This very full arc, which actually feels a lot longer than three issues, contains not only a team-up with a very grumpy Ant-Man--who was kidnapped into participating--but lots of jokes based on Brain Drain's nihilistic view of the universe and the humor inherent in Canada, and how it is different than America.

I mention that the arc felt longer than it actually was, not as a criticism, but as a compliment. Not only does artist Erica Henderson draw lots of panels per page when called on to do so, but North clearly spends a great deal of his writing-time think of how to pack as many jokes into each page as possible. Not just the bonus jokes that come in the alt-text like sentences below most of the pages, but, for example, this panel, in which Doreen surveys her choices for magazines to read in the cabin:

North easily could have stopped at the titles of the magazines themselves, but he went above and beyond, to include several jokes on each cover, detailing the contents of those magazines.

Unbeatable Squirrel Girl has got to have set some kind of record for the most jokes per square centimeter of page-space.

The remaining two issues of the collections are done-in-ones. The first of these is a comic told entirely from the perspective of Nancy's cat Mew, which I believe the solicitation for blamed on Matt Fraction and David Aja doing that Pizza Dog issue of Hawkeye a few years back (In fact, there's a dog that appears in this that I'm fairly confident is supposed to be Pizza Dog, although he's not named, and I didn't see either of the Hawkeyes among the many super-heroes running around). In the background, The Taskmaster is using his awesome skills to take on a whole mess of superheroes--Iron Man! A The Hulk!***** Captain America! Spider-Man! Ms. Marvel! Ms. America! Hellcat!--in addition to Squirrel Girl, but she ultimately proves unbeatable, thanks to the fact that she has something Taskmaster can't master. This issue contains several pages by Zac Gorman, in which he draws comic strips that replicate Mew's dreams. Apparently cats dream in comic strips? Who knew?

The final issue is devoted to celebrating the 25th anniversary of Squirrel Girl's introduction by creators Will Murray and Steve Ditko in 1991's Marvel Super-Heroes Winter Special #8. It's a kinda sorta origin of the character, although not in the "how she got her powers and became a super-hero" kind of way as much as a "where, specifically, she came from" kind of story (That is, it opens with her parents meeting, and the title page is her mom holding her just after giving birth). From there it jumps around in five year increments, and we meet the late Monkey Joe, watch 15-year-old Squirrel Girl help The Hulk take down The Abomination and, finally, enjoy a birthday party with her pals and some Avengers, a party which The Red Skull foolishly attempts to crash.

While the issue is mostly another North and Henderson joint, Murray writes the 15-year-old Doreen sequence, and a piece of Ditko art is repurposed to get something from the great artist into the issue.



*Oh hey, in all those recent discussions of the source of Marvel's current sales woes--you know, whether it was diversity of characters or event exhaustion or them renumbering their books twice a year or whatever--did anyone theorize that maybe it was just that everyone hates the Inhumans, yet Marvel seemed to go ahead and keep publishing Inhumans books constantly, while shoehorning them into pretty much everything they publish? Could that have been a factor? Did Marvel comics readers so hate the Inhumans that they stopped buying Marvel comics to avoid reading about the Inhumans?

**At least not until googling him. He's a prose writer and playwright, and this was his first comics work, which would explain why I had never heard of him. It should be noted that he writes like a comic book writer here, and doesn't display any of the typical flaws one sees when writers fluent in another medium tackle comics-scripting for the first time.

***I was a little surprised that Corin didn't include a joke of any kind referring to Nancy Whitehead as Nancy Whiteheadless. He is a stronger man than I am, I guess.

****I just went to check the table-of-contents of Jon Morris' The Legion of Regrettable Super Villains, the companion book to his earlier League of Regrettable Super Heroes and, to my surprise, Master Pandemonium was not included. Nor was The Orb. Swarm was however, and there's actually a pretty good showing from Marvel villains overall: Stilt-Man, MODOK, Angar the Screamer, Black Talon, The Headmen and others.

*****Not a typo! I'm just not sure which The Hulk it is, Amadeus Cho or Bruce Banner, the latter of whom I'm fairly certain wasn't temporarily dead-ish at the time that issue of Squirrel Girl was pubished.

Review: Avenging Spider-Man: The Good, The Green and The Ugly

This trade collects five issues of what is essentially Marvel's current version of the old Marvel Team-Up, which paired Spider-Man with a different co-star each issue, now given a title that makes sense only in that it's meant to suggest an association with Marvel's most popular branding device at the moment, "Avengers."

After all, Spider-Man does nothing in the way of avenging in these issues, which are quite light-hearted adventures that play up the character's fun and funny side, and, of the three Marvel heroes he teams up with in the three stories within, one of them doesn't even have any association with The Avengers.

The first of the stories collected is an all-Immonen one-issue She-Hulk team-up, a Spidey/Shulkie comic from the creative team behind 2010 Top Shelf graphic novel Moving Pictures, which was about a pair of people making tough choices during World War II, while the Nazis were pillaging the art of the continent.

Oddly enough, this one is also set in and around a museum!

I find that one of the best ways to judge whether a Spider-Man comic is any good or not is whether it manages to make me laugh at all, and this made me laugh:

(The art really sells that joke; not sure if it's the speedlines or the figure work that do the heavy lifting, or simply the combination of the two, but that's a joke that would very easily not be very funny if drawn differently).

In this story, She-Hulk's team-up with Spidey lasts a lot longer than she would have liked, as the wall-crawler tags along to a museum function she has to attend for work. There some cultists attempt to steal some ancient Egytpian maguffin, and the cat goddess Bast arises.

It's full of the same sharp wit Kathryn Immonen's scripts usually are, and the super-short length (just 20 pages) keeps her sometimes overly wild plotting (see Hellcat, Herald, X-Men: Pixie Strikes Back for examples) in a nicely constructed, easily digestible package. It's great fun to see Stuart Immonen—a great, and greatly undervalued artist—drawing something light and fun like this, rather than the sorts of epic angst-fests we've seen him doing for Marvel lately (Fear Itself, Bendis-written Avengers comics).

That's followed by a slightly flabbier two-parter teaming Spidey with another super-strong superheroine, Marvel's current Captain Marvel Carol Danvers. This one's written by Kelly Sue DeConnick, penciled by Terry Dodson and inked by Rachel Dodson, making for another extraordinarily high-caliber art team for what is essentially something of a trifle of a comic.

In this one, Danvers offers Peter Parker a free flight to Boston to visit his aunt, in Danvers' own personal airplane, but the pair get pulled into superhero action against a spunky, jet-packing 99-percenter and an overzealous independent security contractor in a mechanized suit of super-armor. It's incredibly predictable—I've seen this almost exact same twist used in half the page-count by Grant Morrison in the late '90s—but DeConnick writes fun banter, and the art is super-slick.

I hadn't noticed previously, when I'd seen the cover image online before, but Danvers is actually wagging her index finger at whoever is shooting at her and Spidey on the cover. From a distance—the distance at which the image is visible as a little jpeg on a computer monitor, for example—it looked more like she was holding up her first two fingers.

The image makes a lot more sense now, although it's still kinda weird; it's such a frozen image, confined to a particular split-second—we can see where the bullets hit and are arcing away from her invulnerable skin—that allowing for motion in it like that seems pretty off.

The final story is another two-parter, featuring Deadpool, who must be "the Ugly" being referred to in the title). It's written by Kevin Schinick (whose name I'm not familiar with) and drawn by Aaron Kuder. It's a pretty Deadpool story, which means it's kind of in your face and annoying, but it has some pretty decent moments.

The first half features Deadpool in Spider-Man's subconsciousness, trying to guide him through his dreams in order to rescue him from a villain purportedly attacking him through his dreams. And then there's a reveal in the second issue, in which the incredibly unlikely (anywhere other than a story featuring Deadpool, anyway) villain: The Hypno-Hustler.

I really liked Kuder's style, which reminded me quite a bit of Frank Quitely's and Chris Burnham's in many panels (mostly in character design and in the way he draws his lines), and he has a pretty swell version of the Green Goblin (who appears in hallucinatory form only). Take away that guy's pupils, and he looks pretty damn horrifying, doesn't he?

So in The Good, The Green and The Ugly we get stories that are pretty great, pretty good and pretty decent, all of which adds up to not bad at all.

Click to better scrutinize my poor penmanship and limited understanding of Photoshop's eye drop and paint tools

(Cross-posted here and at Blog@Newsarama)

One more Deadpool story arc...

While I was putting together that really long post about Deadpool a couple weeks ago, the one in which I was trying read my way towards an explanation as to why the character was so incredibly popular all of a sudden, I looked to see what Deadpool trades were available at the library.

None, it turned out.

Oh, they had three trades featuring Deadpool in some capacity, but no collections of the series, which seemed rather odd. A quick search on Amazon reveals plenty of trades to choose from, with more coming up in the next few months. Maybe Columbus just doesn’t have many Deadpool fans around? At least not any that bug their local libraries to order trades for them?

Of the three they had, there was Ultimate Spider-Man Vol. 16: Deadpool, in which Brian Michael Bendis and Mark Bagley introduced the Ultimate Deadpool in a not-very-interesting story pitting him against Spider-Man and the X-Men, Wolverine/Deadpool: Weapon X, Frank Tieri and Sean Chen’s comics featuring the pair, and, finally, Wolverine Origins: Deadpool.

That’s the one I remember Tucker Stone speaking fairly highly of at the time it was being released in serial comic book format, so I took it out to give it a looksee.

It’s actually two story arcs. The first, “The Deep End,” is by Daniel Way and Steve Dillon, and it is fantastic. It’s followed by a two-issue story arc entitled “Son of an X” by Way and artist Stephen Segovia and tells the origin of Daken, Wolverine’s son with bad hair and worse tattoos.

The second story is no damn good, and its presence kind of ruins the whole book. But that first story? The first issue/chapter begins with Wolverine finding a bomb stuffed into a roast duck in the Chinese restaurant he’s eating at, and ends with someone dropping a piano on the ol’ Canucklehead’s head.

Deadpool’s attempts to kill Wolverine seesaw between typical for such comics high-tech, sci fi weaponry and things he saw in a Warner Brothers cartoon. Way’s not the first writer to play Deadpool as some sort of Loony Tunes character—Buddy Scalera put him in the position of Wile E. Coyote in Deadpool #56—but Way certainly does a good job of it.

Both Deadpool and Wolverine have healing factors that make them impervious to any mortal harm, so, not unlike cartoon characters, they heal after each explosion they’re caught in, and come back for more punishment.

Way also frequently lets us inside Deadpool’s head, and it’s clear he sees the conflict as something out of a cartoon, with Wolverine appearing in his mind’s eyes as a skinny guy in a baggy costume with sporks for claws and, later, as a rabbit in a Wolverine costume.

Then there’s the simple fact that the story is, like a Roadrunner or Tom and Jerry cartoon, almost completely devoted to traps and combat. What little story there is doesn’t intrude into the narrative until about halfway through the fourth issue of a five-issue story arc.

The rest of the story? It’s just Deadpool subjecting Wolverine to one deadly trap after another, forcing him to run a gauntlet of meticulously orchestrated violence until he finally “kills” him and takes the already-healing body to a place that will keep him dead (I’m a little lost on the science of killing Wolverine at this point, but Deadpool’s plan is to keep him chained underwater indefinitely—if you left Wolverine underwater like that for ten years, would he come back to life once he could breathe again?)

That probably doesn’t sound all that appealing, and I would have been horribly frustrated with the story if I was reading it in 22-page installments over the course of five months, but it’s enormous fun in one big, chunk like this—a perfectly accessible, super-straightforward action comic that plays to both of its leads’ strengths with just enough eleventh hour plot revelation to justify all the slapstick violence that precedes it as a necessary part of the story.

That story? Well, it’s more of whatever the hell’s going on in Wolverine: Origins, a title that at least in theory sounds interesting, but seems to deal with Wolverine chasing around his three-clawed, mohawk-ed son and an always off-panel wolf man. Characters that hadn’t appeared in the first eighty-some pages of the story simply walk onto the scene at the climax of “Deep End,” and I’m not sure how one even makes sense of them without having read previous collected volumes (I read enough Marvel promotional material that I have a general sense of what’s going on in the title and who’s who, but if I didn’t I imagine I’d be pretty frustrated with the way it plays out).

The reason the story works as well as it does comes down to the simple fact that Steve Dillon draws it. Dillon draws absolutely perfect comics, and you could take almost all the words out of this thing and still be able to follow the action perfectly well. In fact, most of the good parts come from the drawings, from the perfect clarity with which Dillon renders a character’s expression or stages a transition between two panels.

How good is Steve Dillon? Let’s put it this way. He makes Daken look cool. That is no easy task, since Daken looks like this:

Once “The Deep End” ends, this is the next thing that confronts a reader:
It’s a terrible Greg Land image, in which Wolverine doesn’t look like the Wolverine in the preceding 100 pages, Daken doesn’t look anything like the Daken of the preceding 100 pages and he seems to be missing his third claw.

That’s the awful cover of the first issue of a two-part story drawn by Stephen Segovia, whose art looks so much like Leinil Yu’s I had to check and make certain it wasn’t.

“Son of an X” follows Wolverine as he carries his now-in-a-coma son Daken to a secret military compound only he knows exists, and there he finds some monsters created by mad medical science who want revenge on him. The story flashes back to both Wolverine being a total cock during WWII, when he guarded the compound and made sure none of the interred Japanese human guinea pigs escaped, and to Daken’s secret origin. Apparently, he was born with his haircut, as he had it even as a baby.

As I mentioned, it’s not very good, and it is particularly jarring following “The Deep End.” The shift in art style is so drastic that the characters don’t even look like the same people, making it harder still to care about what these two monstrously unlikable guys with claws were up to in their flashbacks. I was sort of rooting for the monsters, but our hero Wolverine kills them all, out of mercy.

If you’re curious about what so many people seem to see in this Deadpool character, this Wolverine: Origins trade isn’t a bad way to go. At $20, it’s probably a pretty expensive curiosity satiate-er—Deadpool #900 is a more economical choice—but it’s definitely worth a borrow from your local library.

Diving into Deadpool

According to popular twentieth century comic book artist/industry bad word Rob Liefeld in a recent Newsarama comment thread, his co-creations Cable and Deadpool are now “the center of the X-Universe and Deadpool is the most popular character in comics, soon to be fronting 4 monthly titles.”

That’s not remotely true, of course.

Even if you define “comics” as “American superhero comics,” Deadpool was outsold in August by titles featuring Captain America, The Hulk, Spider-Man, Daredevil, Wolverine’s son, Batman, Dick Grayson-as-Batman, Green Lantern Hal Jordan, The Flash Barry Allen, Batwoman and Batgirl III (That’s not counting team and ensemble titles, of which plenty of others out-sell Deadpool, but comparing Deadpool to The Fantastic Four or Justice League doesn’t seem fair).

And as for how many titles Deadpool fronts, Marvel’s only announced three (and how long will that last?). But even if it is four, Deadpool’s still not fronting as many as Batman, Superman (when he gets back in town), Wolverine and probably Spider-Man, depending on the month.

I thought it was kind of astonishing for Liefeld to be bragging about Deadpool’s current popularity, precisely because it seems so very surprising.

His relatively long-running (for modern comics) solo title was cancelled in 2000 at #69, to make way for short-lived Agent X, which featured a Deadpool-like character who ended up not being Deadpool. Whether it was cancelled originally due to low sales, or as part of an ill-advised rebranding that killed it, Deadpool was title-less for a few years, at which point he returned in Cable & Deadpool, which lasted fifty issues before getting axed.

When he got his own title again in 2008, it apparently proved successful enough to justify more and more Deadpool comics. From outside Marvel’s offices, it’s not clear why they feel comfortable putting out multiple Deadpool comic all of a sudden. The main title is selling respectably—50,000-ish units in August—but is hardly a hit book.

Maybe it’s a relatively rare instance of the character itself being popular enough to moves 50,000 books, so Marvel can hire writers and artists who don’t cost as much as those at the Mark Millar/Brian Michael Bendis level, and thus its cheaper for them to produce Deadpool, making it a more profitable book?

I have no idea.

But it seems quite remarkable that in so little time Deadpool went from sharing a title to having two ongoings—Deadpool and Deadpool: Merc With a Mouth—with a third one, Deadpool Team-Up, set to start publication next month.

What accounts for the sudden surge in relative popularity? I can’t guess.

Maybe it has something to do with his appearance in X-Men Origins: Wolverine (which I haven’t seen yet, but which I understand features a Deadpool that’s pretty different than the comics version), or the announcement of an upcoming Deadpool movie starring Ryan Reynolds.

Maybe Marvel is just being extremely shrewd and short-term profit-oriented (surprise!). That is, perhaps someone at Marvel HQ noticed that the Deadpool solo was doing surprisingly well and/or making a lot of profits due to how cheap it was to produce compared to hit comics, and they decided to strike while the iron was hot and sell as many Deadpool comics as possible while Deadpool comics seem to be selling.

At any rate, hearing about all these new Deadpool title announcements has had me wondering about the character and his popularity. I thankfully missed his introduction in the nineties (I never liked Liefeld’s art, even as a teenager reading a couple of Image books), and have never been very interested in Marvel’s mutant comics.

As I’ve mentioned before, I could sort of see what people could see in the character. Aspects of his look and personality seemed borrowed from Spider-Man, but he also had guns and killed people like The Punisher, and, of course, he had ties to the X-Men, and a whole lot of people really liked the X-Men for a really long time. I just couldn’t see it for myself, because I never really looked.

A few months back, I finally got the opportunity to do so, when I was gifted a moving friend’s comics collection, which included a sizable run of Deadpool comics, with only a few holes here and there. It was among the first of that wheelbarrow full of old comics I read (runs of Cable, Gambit and some various X-Men comics are still in a pile, daring me to read them), in order to satiate my curiosity about the character.

So over the course of a couple of weeks, I worked my way through a bunch of Deadpool comics, and typed up my thoughts on them while doing so.


Deadpool #44

This is the earliest Deadpool issue I have, and although it’s from the summer of 2000, it’s worth noting just how much Marvel comics have changed during these past nine years.

The cover has the old, pre-little red box with white “Marvel” Marvel Comics logo, it has the little box in the upper left corner for a picture of the lead character (which I believe originated in response to the way comics used to be racked, in spinner racks. So even if most of the cover were obscured by the rack or the comic right below it on the rack, a browser would be able to spot the character in the corner), it only cost $2.25 and it was approved by the Comics Code Authority.

This story is entitled “Cat Trap (Or: Wakanda Merc Are You?),” and is the first part of a two-part crossover with Black Panther. It’s written by Christopher Priest, who was also writing Marvel’s Black Panther ongoing at the time, and drawn by J. Calafiore.

I like Priest quite a bit, and his superhero books are ones I’m always glad to find in back-issue bins (I managed to track down his whole Justice League Task Force run and have just about completed his run on DC’s The Ray, but have a long way to go with his Black Panther yet).

He’s one of those writers whose name I’m surprised I don’t see more often any more. He’s great with character, he’s very funny (often without being silly) and he seems to be constantly trying new and different ways to tell the same old stories.

As this story starts, Deadpool is apparently sharing an underground base with a couple of roommates—villains Titania and Constrictor—and as the story opens, it’s been infiltrated by The Reverent Michael Ibn al-hajj Achebe, whom as far as I can tell is basically just an off-brand Joker.

He hires Deadpool to kidnap the new Black Panther’s leopard, Preyy (with two y’s…not sure how that’s pronounced). The new Black Panther is, apparently, Erick Killmonger (Best. Name. Ever.), who is filling in for T’Challa while he…sits in a chair in some weird, undeground Wakandan Star Wars-looking labyrinth of wires and sci-fi stuff, I guess.

Anyway, it’s a whole lot of back-story, but I got through it without giving up and throwing the comic against the wall, as when I try reading X-Men comics form this period, so Priest is clearly doing something right.

The story itself is pretty simple. Because the new Black Panther, whom narrator Everet K. Ross calls “KillPanther” is hanging out with the Avengers during this period, Deadpool must fight the Avengers.

(In another sign of how old this comic is, The Avengers consist of Triathalon, Iron Man, Hank Pym, The Wasp, and She-Hulk.

So after a few pages of back-story filling-in, there’s a lot of rat-a-tat-tat banter between various players, and then a fight scene. Priest stays outside Deadpool’s head for the most part, so his craziness makes him seem more remote and amusing than when he’s played more sympathetically, as a point-of-view character.


Black Panther #23

“Cat Trap” continues in BP, which is drawn by Sal Velluto and Bob Almond (So now the characters all look bigger, rounder and more realistic than they did under Calafiore’s flatter, more jagged and compact figure work).

Deadpool and his roommates have been captured by The Avengers, who go to Wakanda looking for their captured teammate Triathalon (Deadpool teleported him along with Preyy).

Velluto’s Deadpool is really weird looking; the featureless face makes the head look extra tiny atop the titanic body Velluto gives his superheroes.

There’s a lot of fighting in this.


Deadpool #45

This is apparently the climax of Priest’s run on the title, in which the specific circumstances he set up are all taken away. Titania’s revealed to be, um, another character (I probably don’t need to worry about spoilers on nine-year-old comics, huh?), Deadpool and his roomies lose their pad, and a curse ‘pool’s been suffering from—in which he is given the face of Hollywood actor “Thom Cruz” is taken away.

Priest gets some gags out of that, but man, I hate when superhero comics half-use real celebrities and public figures like that. Either give him the face of Tom Cruise or don’t. You can say “Tom Cruise” in a comic book without getting sued, particularly in circumstances like these where it’s clear you’re not trying to pretend your Tom Cruise is the real Tom Cruise (Tom the Dancing Bug gets away with it pretty regularly). And if you’re afraid Cruise might be too litigious, try a different celebrity (Maybe Freddie Prinze Jr. woulda signed off? He was cool being in The Ultimates).

But by going with “Thom Cruz” it just calls attention to the fact that you’re—the writer, the editor, the company, the company’s lawyers, whoever—wants to make a particular joke, but is afraid to. And nothing is less funny than caution.


Deadpool#46-#48

This is the launch of a new creative team…or at least a new writer, Jimmy Palmiotti. It’s a three-part storyline entitled “Cruel Summer,” and it’s basically a noir-ish sort of crime story in which a femme fatale seduces Deadpool before turning on him.

It’s executed well enough, although the femme’s betrayal lacks much impact because it’s so hard fto imagine a beautiful woman seriously falling for Wade Wilson who, under his mask, has a Freddy Krueger-like face of red, peeling skin over various pits and boils.

What makes this story arc really special, however, is the art. It’s provided by Paul Chadwick, with Ron Randall on inks.

Man, look at this stuff:

Just gorgeous.


Deadpool #49

Palmiotti gets a writing partner in Buddy Scalera, and Chadwick is gone, replaced by Michael Lopez (Jon Holdredge replaces Randall on inks). This one’s entitled “Cat Magnet,” by which they mean “Pussy Magnet,” but apparently didn’t think they could get away with it (Still Comics Code approved, by the way).

Basically, the story consists of Deadpool, his scarred face disguised, meeting one remarkably scantily clad and sexually aggressive woman after another, often in unlikely places—including an ER nurse and a package delivery person. Deadpool would have to be stupid not to suspect that something is up, but if he does, Palmiotti and Scalera don’t share his suspicions with the reader.

As it turns out, each of these women are the same person, his shape-shifting ex-girlfriend Copycat. (Ah! So the title has a double meaning!)

The cover is by Kevin Nowlan. This run sure has a lot of great talent on covers. It also credits Chadwick and Randall on art, and fails to mention Scalera. Makes me wonder what was going on behind the scenes as these were coming out. The original creative team sure didn’t last in its original form very long at all.


Deadpool #50-#51

Check out these two covers, one by Arthur Adams, the other by Darick Robertson (The latter of whom even Bob Kane-inizes his signature. Neat).


Palmiotti and poor, never credited on the cover Scalera are joined by Darick Robertson on pencils (Holdredge is still inking).

That Robertson sure knows his stuff, and it’s nice to see his art on this old, grittier paper with more comic book-y coloring. There are none of the weird computer coloring effects that are endemic to Marvel comics these days. The skies are drawings of skies, not photos dropped in. Ditto the cityscapes and the moons. It’s all just nice, bold drawings, with nice, bold bright coloring. Beautiful.

This is probably the strongest of Palmiotti’s run (that I’ve read), in which he applies a standard element of superhero comics to Deadpool just to see what happens. In this case, it’s giving Deadpool a sidekick, Kid Deadpool.


Deadpool #52-#53

A two-parter featuring Deadpool versus two scantily clad, serial-killing twin teenage sisters with Barbie doll bodies. It’s pretty silly-bordering-on-stupid stuff, and it was in this issue that I noticed something that would grow to be a pet peeve of mine throughout this experience, the pop culture references.

They’re easy to make and can be funny, but they sure don’t have much shelf life. I think I noticed it here simply because the narration boxes mention Jennifer Lopez’ Oscar gown on the first page, and the second page has a character refer to the killer sisters as “those two Brittany-looking twins.” In 2001, “Brittany-looking” had a different meaning (and certainly different connocations!) than it does in 2009, and I wonder what it will mean, if anything, if this is read in 2019, or 2069 (I don’t think it will be, but still)

Oh, another new art team for this “Talk of the Town” storyline. It’s Anthony Williams and Andy Lanning, and their work is pretty nice.


Deadpool #54-#55

And now it’s time for a guest star! It’s a two-part Punisher story, drawn by Georges Jeanty and Holdredge. Two great covers, by the two artists probably best associated with The Punisher at this period in his career:

Deadpool doesn’t really translate to Tim Bradstreet’s realistic world as easily as Frank Castle does, does he?

This story is a continuation of Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon’s initial Punisher story, Welcome Back, Frank (which Palmiotti inked). It turns out, Ma Gnucci had a single, surviving relative, who would inherit all her money after her untimely death, so long as the condition of her will is met—her death must be avenged.

So Ma’s nephew Peter Gnucci hires Deadpool to kill The Punisher for him.

The two killers fight and fight and fight and—surprise!—neither of them dies.


Deadpool #56

It’s the end of another creative team’s run, although, to be fair, the word “team” might not really apply, given all the comings and goings. For this issue, Palmiotti himself is gone, and Scalera gets the sole writing credit. Karl Kerschl’s on art now, inking himself.

With this single issue, Scalera does a deck-clearing story along the lines of the one Priest provided at the end of his run, with all of the supporting characters being sent away from Deadpool, and his home again getting destroyed.

The issue is divided into two plots.

One follows Deadpool trying a variety of Wile E. Coyote-style traps to catch and kill a super-speedster named “The Street Speeder,” whose costume is yellow and blue and who says little other than “Meep meep” (GET IT?!).

The other follows Copycat disguised as Deadpool to go on a date with and then beat the hell out of an X-person. Siryn, I think. I suppose I should be thankful I got this far without a single reminder that Deadpool is technically an X-Men character.

This, by the way, is the first one without the Comics Code Authority stamp of approval on the cover. There’s no Marvel replacement rating either though.


Deadpool #57-#59

The title received a pretty radical makeover with #57, and I wonder if it caused much—or even any—confusion among comic shop patrons the week it was released. It certainly confused me, when I sat down to try and put all the Deadpool comics in order to read.

Marvel ditched the logo with the character image in the corner (the image shape had, over the months, shifted from a rectangular one to a circular one). The new logo is in a completely different smaller, thinner font, and is actually much smaller than the name of the storyline. In fact, based on the logo, it seems like it is an entirely different book, one called Deadpool: Agent of Weapon X.

Adding to the confusion is the big #1 on the cover, with a smaller “57” under it. So this looks like the first issue of a new series, but it is actually the fifty-seventh issue of an old series in disguise (This doesn’t seem to be a matter of Marvel relaunching and retaining their old numbering, as they sometimes did, because “Agent of Weapon X” and this weird numbering only lasted three issues).

The covers for these three issues, by the way, are by original Weapon X series artist Barry Windsor Smith, and they are thus fairly awesome.

Here’s the cover of #58, in which Smith must draw a trio of terrible costume designs:
Deadpool’s temporary new look makes him look like a little KGBeast, doesn’t it?

The new writer is Frank Tieri, and the new, more steady art team is Georges Jeanty and Holdredge.

Tieri seems on pretty sure footing with all the Marvel super-people and shadow organization intrigue, and while his version of Deadpool is a zany, agent-of-chaos type of character, the rest of the narrative doesn’t conform around Deadpool’s personality. That is, the story would be pretty straightforward and serious if you plucked out Deadpool and plopped in, say, Wolverine, which is probably how it should be.

While I like the way Tieri constrains the comedy to Deadpool’s character instead of the structure of the book in general, I don’t think his Deadpool is particularly funny, and he seems to go for an abundance of pop culture gags. In Deadpool’s very first panel, for example, he mentions that “Barbie Girl” song (the existence of which I had completely forgotten), Liberace, VH1’s Behind The Music, Magilla Gorilla, The Weakest Link and Gilbert Gottfried.

The plot involves the old Weapon X re-starting as a free agency, offering alumni like Sabretooth and Deadpool amped-up powers and resources if they come to work for them. In Deadpool’s case, he gets his face back, but he can’t reconcile working with Sabretooth, who’s been killing and eating people left and right, and some of the other bad guys—especially the agency sets its sites on his ex.

Sabretooth totally murders her, by the way.


Deadpool #62

I’m missing two issues, including the final “Agent of Weapon X” one (presumably, he avenges Copycat without actually killing Sabretooth), and the first issue of the next arc, which is also designed to look like a stand alone miniseries.

This one’s called “Funeral For a Freak,” and once again has the little confusing numbering going on. (This is also, by the way, the first cover featuring the little image of a red, white and blue ribbon above the silhouette of the World Trade Center towers. I guess I never noticed when these first arrived on Marvel covers and when they went away, but they seemed to be there for a while).

Tieri, Jeanty and Holdredge engage in an odd mid-nineties, “Death of Superman” era parody, in which Deadpool is seemingly killed (he actually just has amnesia and is living on the streets) and is replaced by four different new Deadpools. No idea how it started or ended, as I only have the second and third parts of the arc.


Deadpool #67

In some ways, this is the best of the Deadpool issues I read, as it’s the first in which the writing is very sharp and the art’s really great.

It’s written by Gail Simone, who is perfectly at home writing superheroics and comedy simultaneously, and the art comes courtesy of Udon studios—I’m not sure who does what on art chores, as the credits don’t parcel out credit by the task, but from pencil to colors its all well done, boasting the look of anime cels-as-panels that Udon was doing so well at the time.

Having missed a few issues, it seems Deadpool’s status quo has changed quite a bit again, but it wasn’t too difficult to feel my way through the issue. Deadpool is hanging on to a shrunken Rhino, whom he’s using as a key chain, and is tasked with body-guarding Dazzler, in all her disco roller-skating glory.

While this is the all-around best creative team I’ve read on the book, even they didn’t last long. According to comics.org, they took over with #65, and the series was canceled with #69.