So they made a Deadpool movie. \u00a0And it worked. \u00a0I mean, I haven’t seen it yet, but\u00a0it’s done well enough. \u00a0Now, Marvel’s\u00a0tie-in production for Fox movies\u00a0can be a little half-hearted, but\u00a0hell, any excuse to make a Deadpool comic, right? \u00a0So they had a bunch of reprints out, and, well, this.<\/p>\n
It’s not the most obvious pitch for movie synergy. \u00a0Split Second<\/em> is a\u00a0Cable & Deadpool<\/em> reunion,\u00a0and much as I liked that book,\u00a0it comes from the days when he and Cable were kind of just hanging in there, before Deadpool really took off as\u00a0a hit. \u00a0But it was a good dynamic –\u00a0Deadpool works well with a straight man. \u00a0And this series\u00a0also reunites the book’s creative team, Fabian Nicieza and Reilly Brown.<\/p>\n Let’s pause here to note that Marvel really could do a better job of promoting the Infinite Comics. \u00a0As in,\u00a0promoting the fact that they exist at all. \u00a0I mean, I’m\u00a0probably a more than usually attentive fan, right? \u00a0I go to Comixology every Wednesday and check through the entire new releases section,\u00a0to make sure I don’t miss anything. \u00a0But for reasons best known to themselves, Comixology don’t put\u00a0“digital-first” books in the regular new releases section. \u00a0You have to look for them separately. \u00a0So I didn’t even know this series was coming out until\u00a0issue #6 shipped. \u00a0And I only noticed then because I somebody mentioned it on Twitter. \u00a0I would have completely missed the book otherwise.<\/p>\n That’s not good. \u00a0Have Marvel maybe considered running actual cross-promotion pages at the back of their comics, in place of “here is a picture of next issue’s cover”? \u00a0Because seriously, guys, one would achieve something, and the other is a waste of pixels. \u00a0Who the hell is the target audience for a book that isn’t in the regular solicitations, can’t be found in the regular Comixology\u00a0new release section, and isn’t promoted in Marvel’s own comics? \u00a0Psychics?<\/p>\n Still. \u00a0If you’re going to do a Deadpool Infinite Comic, then going with a\u00a0Cable & Deadpool<\/em> reunion is actually a smart\u00a0decision. \u00a0In the years since, Reilly Brown has taken a lot of interest in the\u00a0storytelling possibilities of this format, as shown\u00a0by his own series\u00a0Power Play<\/em>. \u00a0And\u00a0this book –\u00a0especially the first half – makes some really good use of the format, with mock\u00a0movie credit sequences and so forth. \u00a0There’s a rhythm to this format which is quite different from the printed page, and Brown has a\u00a0strong sense\u00a0of the possibilities.<\/p>\n And given Deadpool’s meta tendencies, there’s some obvious fun to be had in revisiting the\u00a0days before he was famous. \u00a0Which is precisely what the book does in the\u00a0early going, as Deadpool gleefully celebrates the inversion of their former relationship. \u00a0Cable’s popularity remains basically where it was at the time; Deadpool\u00a0somehow became a breakout\u00a0star with a hit movie. \u00a0Who’s the sidekick now? \u00a0What’s happened with Deadpool in the last few years is very unusual, come to think of it. \u00a0It’s not so uncommon for a languishing character to have a successful book, but\u00a0the enthusiasm rarely translates to the next creative team. \u00a0Deadpool, for some reason, is different. \u00a0The character has\u00a0built his own audience, distinct from any particular creative team, in a way that almost never happens these days. \u00a0No wonder Marvel like him so much.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n So the story, then. \u00a0Nicieza has always had a tendency to overcomplicate a good idea, and when I tell you that this is a time travel story, well…<\/p>\n The\u00a0starting set-up is\u00a0easy enough. \u00a0Cable has\u00a0a precognitive vision that Deadpool is going to assassinate a scientist who’s invented a\u00a0primitive time machine,\u00a0and goes to stop him. \u00a0Since Deadpool\u00a0never had any intention of killing the guy in the first place, they wind up hanging around at the site of the murder trying to figure out what Cable saw. \u00a0(And Deadpool, being Deadpool, patiently explains to nitpicky readers that, yes, they\u00a0could<\/em> have just\u00a0stayed away and guaranteed that the scientist would live, but then there wouldn’t be a story, would there?) \u00a0A time travelling villain called Split Second shows up attempting to assassinate the scientist, Cable and Deadpool try to stop him, and then there’s a rather lovely sequence where\u00a0everyone\u00a0keeps using time travel to repeat the scene until they get it to work the way they want – with some poor sod managing to get killed in increasingly random ways each time. \u00a0This is the sort of thing that the Infinite format can do very well.<\/p>\n Aaaaaaand then it kind of goes off the rails, because\u00a0like a lot of time travel stories, it’s walking a thin line between “enjoyably paradoxical” and “this doesn’t make sense”, and it\u00a0doesn’t really get it right. \u00a0The intended upshot of all this is to hit the reset button on Cable’s status quo and free him up for use in\u00a0Uncanny Avengers<\/em> –\u00a0that’s not speculation,\u00a0Deadpool tells us outright in issue #6. \u00a0You can see the idea here – dizzying self-parodic paradox which plays to Deadpool’s sense of absurdity, all building to something familiar getting restored at the end – but what actually happens in issues #4-5 really more incoherent than anything else. \u00a0There’s a second time-travelling Deadpool, there’s an appearance by the Time Variance Authority, there’s a weird idea that Deadpool is meant to kill Cables from alternate timelines (why?) and that his refusal to do so ends up healing the timeline anyway (why?). \u00a0If a story like this is going to work, there\u00a0has to be\u00a0at least some sort of frayed cause and effect in place, however Heath Robinson,\u00a0and this\u00a0just feels too random.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Still, Nicieza created Deadpool’s voice and knows how to script him entertainingly, and the pairing\u00a0with him and Cable is always good fun (even if Cable himself is actually marginalised for a big chunk of this). \u00a0It’s got some very fun bits, but it loses\u00a0its way somewhere in\u00a0the middle.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" So they made a Deadpool movie. \u00a0And it worked. \u00a0I mean, I haven’t seen it yet, but\u00a0it’s done well enough. \u00a0Now, Marvel’s\u00a0tie-in production for Fox movies\u00a0can be a little half-hearted, but\u00a0hell, any excuse to make a Deadpool comic, right? \u00a0So they had a bunch of reprints out, and, well, this. It’s not the most obvious […]<\/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,"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3370","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\/3370","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=3370"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3370\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3371,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3370\/revisions\/3371"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3370"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3370"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3370"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}