Over the last few years, Marvel have dialled back enormously on miniseries.  The solicitations used to be packed with more or less random minis that, given the creators, characters and level of publicity involved, never realistically had much chance to do more than pad out the collections of devoted completists.  This has largely stopped, which makes it a little jarring to come across a miniseries quite as cheerfully throwaway as Deadpool vs X-Force.

A four-issue miniseries by Duane Swieczynski and Pepe Larraz, this takes place shortly before Deadpool’s debut in New Mutants #98 (and thus before the heroes strictly became X-Force, but what the heck – the book happily acknowledges the point and hand waves it away).

Swierczynski’s major contribution to the X-books was the 2008-2010 Cable run – the one with Bishop chasing Cable and Hope through time.  This mini bears no resemblance to that series whatsoever.  It’s tempting to say that it’s basically a Deadpool story, but that’s not quite fair; X-Force, and specifically Cable, are emphatically the viewpoint characters here.  But they’re ultimately the straight men for Deadpool, as they’re bound to be.

The story has the proto-X-Force travelling back in time to stop Deadpool from screwing up history.  Initially it seems he’s just causing trouble because he’s Deadpool, but it turns out that he’s actually been hired by a mad industrialist guy to try and make the USA even more dominant than it already is.  X-Force, obviously, have to stop him.

The point – to the extent that there’s a point – is to do an untold first meeting between Cable and Deadpool, making this more of a precursor to their later team-up double act.  That first meeting then promptly gets deleted again, since the story is a self-cancelling time loop.

The reader avid to give this story a point could admittedly hang on to a line of dialogue where Deadpool claims that Cable has accidentally linked their fates together, thus explaining their lengthy odd-couple act.  But in reality, the dubious significance of the whole affair is part of the joke at the expense of these “hidden first meeting” stories.  It is a Deadpool story, after all, and meta comedy is a big part of his schtick these days.

All of which means that there’s not a huge amount in this story for the rest of X-Force to do, and indeed they end up getting picked off to deal with side plots so that the story can focus on Cable.  You have to wonder whether it might have been neater just to not bother with them at all.

Nor does the story bear any real resemblance to early X-Force and Deadpool appearances, despite a couple of nods in that direction – such as Deadpool having his original lettering style, and insisting on using family-friendly language because stories set in early 90s continuity are still Code approved.  It ends up seeming a bit non-committal about its retro aspects.

But it is a pretty fun read for all that.  Larraz is a good clean superhero artist who shifts tones easily from playing X-Force straight, to Deadpool’s lunatic comedy set-pieces.  The opening sequence of issue #3, with Cable playing along as Deadpool attempts to remote control him, is very well done.

He’s strong when it comes to establishing the tone of the historic scenes, too.  And that’s important, since the basic gag of this take on Deadpool is that he shows up in other people’s stories and disrupts them.  In order to make that work, you’ve got to establish your baseline, and Larraz does that very effectively throughout.

This is also presumably why the story throws in a few nods at “serious” dramatic tension – Boom-Boom getting shot, or Cannonball agonising about whether he can bring himself to fight American soldiers in the War of Independence.  It’s not that Swierczynski seriously expects anyone to get invested in these points, which are gestured at, and which don’t really go anywhere.  They’re there to establish X-Force as the straight men and give Deadpool something to play against.

It’s always tricky for me to judge how well a story playing with this sort of basic American history actually works, since the assumed audience here is Americans, who have a rather clearer idea of the reference points than I do.  It’s not that I’m not aware of the broad strokes of American history, but I didn’t learn about it in an American school; I pick most of it up second-hand through American pop culture, which probably means that it’s evoking somewhat different things for me than it does for writer or (intended primary) audience.

Coming from that standpoint, the story in itself isn’t particularly funny, and it’s ultimately too abitrary to really work as a farce.  It’s really a case of escalating lunacy until something more or less random happens to end the story.

But there are a lot of genuinely clever gags in here, such as the idea that in a world where time travel has been invented, young Adolf Hitler needs an armed guard to protect him against the endless stream of amateur assassins; recap pages positioned at the end of each issue, dutifully recapping the story you’ve just read; and a villain who isn’t able to actually explain his master plan, because due to the alteration of history, he no longer knows what he was thinking.

A genial romp through history with some clever jokes, and enough momentum to skirt over its logic problems, this turns out to be surprisingly enjoyable.  True, it has no good reason to feature the whole of X-Force instead of just Cable, and true, the ending is a bit of a cop-out even within the logic of a comedy story.  But it offers enough entertainment value elsewhere to get away it.