I’m nothing if not comprehensive.  Why is there a Cable & Deadpool annual this year?  No idea.  Well, not exactly no idea – maybe it’s something they wanted to do before Extermination – but this is very much disposable stuff.

It’s David Walker writing, and a whole bunch of artists doing anything from a scene to an individual page.  Basically it’s an artist jam issue, then, and your mileage will vary depending on your interest and tolerance for such things.  Mine… not so high.

The plot is suitably straightforward.  Dr Gamble of the Time Variance Authority sends Deadpool on a time travel mission to rescue his mother from killer robots.  Entirely failing to recognise the plot of The Terminator, Deadpool enthusiastically bounds off to give it his best shot, with Cable showing up to keep the timeline on the rails.  Cue much bounding through differently-illustrated time periods, in which it turns out that Gamble naturally has an ulterior motive and needs to be stopped.

It’s… mildly amusing, I guess?  It’s certainly not bad, as crazy time travel romps go; but there’s a mountain of wacky Deadpool stories by this point, and the bar is fairly high for any of them to stand out.  Otherwise, well, for people who like this kind of thing, this is the kind of thing that they like.  And all that.

The art is largely good, but relatively few pages really cut loose.  Paco Diaz does a solid framing frequence, and gives Gamble plenty of instant character.  Danilo Beyruth’s late-seventies Bronx scene is… fine, I guess?  I don’t get much sense of time or place from it; there are a lot of panels with just Cable and Deadpool in medium shot.  Nick Bradshaw’s three page fight with pirates and a giant squid is another matter; that’s fantastic, because it’s Nick Bradshaw drawing something very visual indeed.

In contrast, Luke Ross’s hideout scene is a rather bland segment with some unusual shading techniques about the only thing that stands out.  Marco Rudy gets to do a colourful page in a time vortex, and makes the most of that.  Edgar Salazar does a pretty but straightforward sci-fi gladiator page.  Flaviano does an insane page of outright cartooning which is totally different from the rest of the issue and stands out welcomingly.  And Francesco Manna and Leonard Kirk round of the montage with two rather similar chaotic shooting scenes.

There’s a cute meta bit during all this, where Deadpool abandons the plot entirely and starts monologuing about the medium, but it really doesn’t have much to do with anything around it.  Beyond that, if I’m going to take this simply as a story, there are a couple of issues.

For one, the plot is that Gamble is actually trying to chase down a fellow TVA agent who rejected his advances.  This is an odd choice.  If you’re unfamiliar with Justin Gamble – and you almost certainly are, because he’s only made a couple of cameos since his debut in Power Man & Iron Fist #79 – he’s a Doctor Who pastiche.  At some point after this he steals a time machine, runs away from the TVA, and becomes a very thinly disguised version of the Doctor.

So… why use him if you’re not going to riff on the Doctor Who thing?  You don’t need him to justify using time travel; you’ve got Cable for that.  Sexual harassment in the workplace isn’t a particularly Doctor Who story concept, unless there’s something I’m missing.  It doesn’t really play that well with the freewheeling style of a jam issue either, honestly.  But mainly, he just feels like the wrong character for this story.

And as for Cable… well, he’s here, occasionally nudging the plot forward.  But it’s terribly easy to let Deadpool dominate a Cable & Deadpool story, because he’s a runaway motormouth, and Cable is the straight man.  The original Cable & Deadpool series largely avoided falling into that trap; this issue doesn’t.  Frankly, Cable contributes so little to this issue that they’d have been better off writing around him and just making it a Deadpool story.

It’s not terrible.  But it’s just another Deadpool story, and there’s no shortage of those.