I’ve certainly been putting this one off.  Deadpool v Gambit finished ages ago.  The trade paperback is out by now.  But time to get back into the rhythm.  There’s something a bit odd about reading American comics right now.  Comics have a long lead-in time.  They’re slow to react to big events.  And there has been a very big event indeed, one which won’t begin to feed through into actual comics until some time next spring.  In the meantime, everything feels a bit like reading Archie.  It’s a charming world of yesteryear, when things weren’t on fire yet.

No doubt I’ll be saying a lot more about this in the coming months, both here and on the podcast, as the achingly slow turning circle of comics finally orients itself to 2017.  But Deadpool v Gambit is not really a good place to get into this: not only did it come out entirely before the election, but it’s a bouncy, shaggy-dog story caper book with no political dimensions at all.

So, this is a five-issue mini written by Ben Acker and Ben Blacker.  It actually sold quite respectably, fairly close to the regular X-Men books – though that’s probably more because of the Deadpool audience picking it up, since Gambit hasn’t been a major character in years.  As lead characters, they’re an interesting pairing.  Acker and Blacker like their repartee – there are a ton of one-liners in this thing – so you can see why they’re drawn to using a motormouth by Deadpool.  The thing about Deadpool, though, is that if you handle him wrong, he runs away with the story and blasts everyone else off the page.  Gambit has enough charisma of his own – and of a very different sort – that he can anchor the story as the de facto straight man, even while his inveterate thievery and flirting add to the general chaos in their own way.  It’s a surprisingly effective pairing.

It’s a dense read, as well.  The overall plot isn’t actually that complicated, when you look back on it, but thanks to a combination of tricksy plot mechanics and rapid-fire gags, there’s a lot going on in every page.  It’s the sort of thing that could easily have wound up feeling confused, but it’s a con story and overcomplication is one of the tropes.  I think they generally handle it nicely, keeping the through line just about clear enough, and using the momentum to keep Gambit and (especially) Deadpool on the rails when the characters want to wander off and do something else.  Artist Danilo Beyruth – who I think is pretty new – also deserves a lot of credit for some strong character work and clear visual storytelling in a book which is regularly calling for 7 or 8 panel pages.  Those can get claustrophobic, and he avoids that.

At first, the idea seems to be to take a cute heist/con idea, run with it for an issue, and then scale it up to the next level in the following issue.  So issue #1 really just sets up the idea of Gambit and Deadpool running cons together with their untrustworthy ally Chalmers, but it takes the form of an extended sequence in which they pose as Spider-Man and Daredevil having a generic superhero fight across town while they quietly get their heist stuff done.  (“Don’t mind us.  Super-hero fight.  Daredevil and I have political differences.”  “A lot of super-hero fights these days come down to political or philosophical differences.”)  The cute bit is to leave it to the reader to work that out, so that on a first read you start off wondering what in the hell any of this has got to do with the stars.

Issue #2 gets to the actual plot, as Chalmers enlists Deadpool and Gambit to go to New Orleans and steal a macguffin from a man.  Cue an issue of them trying to trick a fat guy into giving them his fingerprints.  This is fairly obvious if you know the character already, but the man in question turns out to be Fat Cobra, one of the immortal weapons from Iron Fist.   From here we get to Deadpool and Gambit having their powers disrupted…

…at which point issue #4 turns out to be a Scrambler story.  Deadpool and Gambit barely appear in it (and hey, to be fair, the cover tells you so).  And this is a curious issue.  Scrambler.  Who was after a Scrambler story?

To be clear, yes, we are indeed talking about the kid from the Marauders, who until now has done pretty much nothing other than screw up people’s powers and look smug about it.  Oh, and for some reason he was saddled with the real name Kim Il Sung.  In this book, he’s pretty much unrecognisable as the one-dimensional sociopath of old; instead, he’s a hesitant tag-along who isn’t quite sure how he drifted into being a Marauder, and is kind of playing along due to peer pressure.  I’m guessing that’s drawing on the fact that Scrambler was the one member of the Marauders who didn’t wear a costume; he wore a suit instead, a smart design choice since it was so wildly inappropriate as to imply something about his otherwise largely absent personality.  Here, of course, it’s a red flag that he’s wandered into a situation for which he’s hopelessly unqualified.

This version of Scrambler finds himself in hospital after a mission gone wrong, and leaps at the first available chance to testify against the Marauders and go into witness protection.  He starts a normal life, he learns to use his powers to manipulate systems in more controlled ways than just disrupting them, and he fends off the Marauders’ attempts to drag him back into the game.  And somewhere along the line he gets caught up in one of Gambit and Deadpool’s cons for Chalmers.

And this, admittedly, is where the plot starts to go off the rails a bit, because the connection between Scrambler’s story and pretty much anything else is a bit slim.  Scrambler finally steeling himself to rise to the occasion in the final issue is of course part of the pay-off, but it’s a pay-off for a plot that only really got going in issue #4.  And, without going too far into spoilers for those of you who might be planning to read the thing, the book does resort to some rather glaring handwaving when it comes to what Chalmers is actually up to and how Gambit and Deadpool got involved with him.  None of which would matter so much if the book had been able to tie Scrambler’s story into the main characters a bit more satisfyingly.

Still, there’s a lot to enjoy here, and a constant barrage of ideas and details.  If it doesn’t quite come together as a miniseries, it does have plenty of moments along the way.