{"id":2645,"date":"2014-09-07T23:01:06","date_gmt":"2014-09-07T22:01:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=2645"},"modified":"2014-09-07T23:01:06","modified_gmt":"2014-09-07T22:01:06","slug":"deadpool-vs-x-force-time-to-die","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=2645","title":{"rendered":"Deadpool vs X-Force – “Time To Die”"},"content":{"rendered":"

Over the last few\u00a0years, Marvel have dialled back enormously on miniseries. \u00a0The solicitations used to be packed with more or less random\u00a0minis that, given the creators, characters and level of publicity\u00a0involved,\u00a0never realistically had\u00a0much chance\u00a0to do more than pad out the collections of devoted completists. \u00a0This has\u00a0largely stopped, which makes it\u00a0a little jarring to come across a miniseries quite as cheerfully throwaway as\u00a0Deadpool vs X-Force<\/em>.<\/p>\n

A four-issue miniseries by Duane Swieczynski and Pepe Larraz, this takes place shortly before Deadpool’s debut in\u00a0New Mutants<\/em> #98 (and thus before the heroes strictly\u00a0became X-Force, but what the heck – the book\u00a0happily acknowledges the point and hand waves it away).<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Swierczynski’s major contribution to the X-books\u00a0was the 2008-2010\u00a0Cable<\/em> run – the one with Bishop chasing Cable and Hope through time. \u00a0This mini\u00a0bears no resemblance to that series\u00a0whatsoever. \u00a0It’s tempting to say that it’s basically a Deadpool story,\u00a0but that’s not quite fair; X-Force, and specifically Cable, are emphatically the viewpoint characters here. \u00a0But they’re ultimately the straight men for Deadpool, as they’re bound to be.<\/p>\n

The\u00a0story has the proto-X-Force travelling back in time to stop Deadpool from screwing\u00a0up history. \u00a0Initially it seems he’s just causing trouble because he’s Deadpool, but it turns out that he’s actually been hired by a mad\u00a0industrialist guy to try and\u00a0make the\u00a0USA even more dominant than it already is. \u00a0X-Force, obviously, have to stop him.<\/p>\n

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. \u00a0That first meeting then\u00a0promptly gets\u00a0deleted again, since the story is a self-cancelling time loop.<\/p>\n

The reader avid to give\u00a0this story a point could admittedly hang on to a line of dialogue where\u00a0Deadpool claims that\u00a0Cable has accidentally\u00a0linked their fates together, thus explaining their lengthy odd-couple act. \u00a0But\u00a0in reality, the\u00a0dubious significance of the whole affair is part of the joke at the expense of these\u00a0“hidden first meeting” stories. \u00a0It is a Deadpool story, after all, and meta comedy is a big part of his schtick these days.<\/p>\n

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\u00a0off to deal with side plots so that the story can focus on Cable. \u00a0You have to wonder whether it might have been neater just to not bother with them at all.<\/p>\n

Nor does the story bear any real resemblance to early\u00a0X-Force and Deadpool appearances, despite a couple of nods in that direction – such as Deadpool having his original lettering style, and insisting\u00a0on\u00a0using family-friendly language because stories set in early 90s continuity are still Code approved. \u00a0It ends up seeming a bit non-committal about its retro aspects.<\/p>\n

But it is a pretty fun read for all that. \u00a0Larraz is a good clean superhero artist who\u00a0shifts tones easily\u00a0from playing X-Force straight, to\u00a0Deadpool’s lunatic comedy set-pieces. \u00a0The opening sequence of issue #3, with\u00a0Cable playing along as Deadpool attempts to remote control him, is\u00a0very well done.<\/p>\n

He’s\u00a0strong when it comes to establishing\u00a0the tone of the historic scenes, too. \u00a0And that’s important, since the\u00a0basic gag of this take on Deadpool is that he shows up in other people’s stories and disrupts them. \u00a0In order to make that work, you’ve got to establish your baseline, and Larraz does that very effectively throughout.<\/p>\n

This is also presumably why the story throws in a few nods at “serious” dramatic tension – Boom-Boom getting shot, or\u00a0Cannonball agonising about whether he can bring himself to fight American soldiers in the War of Independence. \u00a0It’s not that Swierczynski seriously expects anyone to get invested in these points, which are gestured at, and which don’t really go anywhere. \u00a0They’re there to\u00a0establish X-Force as the straight men and give Deadpool something to play against.<\/p>\n

It’s always tricky\u00a0for me to judge how well a story playing with this sort of basic\u00a0American history actually works,\u00a0since the assumed audience here is Americans,\u00a0who have a rather clearer idea of the reference points than I do. \u00a0It’s not that I’m not aware of the broad strokes of American history,\u00a0but I didn’t learn about it in an\u00a0American school; I pick most of it up second-hand through American pop culture, which probably\u00a0means that\u00a0it’s evoking\u00a0somewhat different things for me than it does for\u00a0writer or (intended primary) audience.<\/p>\n

Coming from that standpoint, the story\u00a0in itself isn’t particularly funny, and it’s ultimately too abitrary\u00a0to really work as a farce. \u00a0It’s really a case of escalating lunacy until something more or less random happens to end the story.<\/p>\n

But there are\u00a0a lot of\u00a0genuinely\u00a0clever 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\u00a0end<\/em> 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\u00a0no longer knows what he was thinking.<\/p>\n

A genial romp through history with\u00a0some clever jokes, and enough momentum to skirt\u00a0over its logic problems, this turns out to be surprisingly enjoyable. \u00a0True, it\u00a0has\u00a0no good reason to feature the whole of X-Force instead of just Cable, and true, the ending\u00a0is a bit of a cop-out even within the logic of a comedy story. \u00a0But it\u00a0offers enough entertainment value elsewhere to get away\u00a0it.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Over the last few\u00a0years, Marvel have dialled back enormously on miniseries. \u00a0The solicitations used to be packed with more or less random\u00a0minis that, given the creators, characters and level of publicity\u00a0involved,\u00a0never realistically had\u00a0much chance\u00a0to do more than pad out the collections of devoted completists. \u00a0This has\u00a0largely stopped, which makes it\u00a0a little jarring to come across […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2645","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-x-axis"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2645","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2645"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2645\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2721,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2645\/revisions\/2721"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2645"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2645"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2645"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}