{"id":3603,"date":"2016-11-23T23:34:43","date_gmt":"2016-11-23T23:34:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=3603"},"modified":"2016-11-23T23:34:43","modified_gmt":"2016-11-23T23:34:43","slug":"deadpool-v-gambit-the-v-is-for-vs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=3603","title":{"rendered":"Deadpool v Gambit: The “V” Is For “Vs.”"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve certainly been putting this one off. \u00a0Deadpool v Gambit<\/em> finished ages ago. \u00a0The trade paperback is out by now. \u00a0But\u00a0time to get back into the\u00a0rhythm. \u00a0There’s something a bit odd about reading American comics right now. \u00a0Comics have a long lead-in time. \u00a0They’re slow to react to big events. \u00a0And there has been a\u00a0very big event indeed, one which\u00a0won’t begin to feed through into actual comics until some time next spring. \u00a0In the meantime,\u00a0everything feels a bit like reading\u00a0Archie<\/em>. \u00a0It’s\u00a0a charming world of yesteryear, when things weren’t on\u00a0fire yet.<\/p>\n

No doubt I’ll be saying a lot more about this in the coming\u00a0months,\u00a0both here and on the podcast, as the achingly slow turning circle of comics finally orients itself to\u00a02017. \u00a0But\u00a0Deadpool v Gambit<\/em> is not\u00a0really a good\u00a0place\u00a0to get into this:\u00a0not only did it come out entirely before the election, but it’s a\u00a0bouncy, shaggy-dog story caper book\u00a0with no political dimensions at all.<\/p>\n

So, this is a five-issue mini written by Ben Acker and Ben Blacker. \u00a0It actually sold quite respectably,\u00a0fairly close to the\u00a0regular X-Men books – though that’s\u00a0probably more because of the Deadpool audience picking it up, since Gambit\u00a0hasn’t been a major character in years. \u00a0As lead characters, they’re an interesting pairing. \u00a0Acker and Blacker like their repartee\u00a0– there are a ton of one-liners in this thing – so you can see\u00a0why they’re drawn to using a motormouth by Deadpool. \u00a0The\u00a0thing about Deadpool, though, is that if you handle him wrong, he runs away with the story and blasts everyone else off the page. \u00a0Gambit has enough charisma\u00a0of his own – and of a very different sort – that he can\u00a0anchor the story as the\u00a0de facto<\/em> straight man, even while his inveterate thievery and flirting add to the general chaos in their own way. \u00a0It’s a surprisingly effective pairing.<\/p>\n

It’s a dense read, as well. \u00a0The overall plot isn’t actually\u00a0that<\/em> complicated, when you look back on it, but\u00a0thanks to a combination of\u00a0tricksy plot mechanics and\u00a0rapid-fire\u00a0gags, there’s a lot going on in every page. \u00a0It’s the sort of thing that\u00a0could easily\u00a0have wound up feeling confused, but it’s a con story and\u00a0overcomplication is one of the tropes. \u00a0I think they generally handle it nicely, keeping the through line just about\u00a0clear 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. \u00a0Artist Danilo Beyruth – who I think is pretty new – also deserves\u00a0a lot of credit for some strong character work and clear visual storytelling\u00a0in a book which is regularly calling for 7 or 8 panel pages. \u00a0Those can get claustrophobic,\u00a0and he avoids that.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

At first, the\u00a0idea\u00a0seems to be to take a\u00a0cute heist\/con idea, run with it for an issue, and then scale it up to the next level in the following issue. \u00a0So 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. \u00a0(“Don’t mind us. \u00a0Super-hero fight. \u00a0Daredevil and I have political differences.” \u00a0“A lot of super-hero fights these days come down to political or philosophical differences.”) \u00a0The 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.<\/p>\n

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. \u00a0Cue an issue of them trying to trick a fat guy into giving them his fingerprints. \u00a0This 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.\u00a0 \u00a0From here we get to Deadpool and Gambit having their powers disrupted…<\/p>\n

…at which point issue #4 turns out to be a Scrambler story. \u00a0Deadpool and Gambit barely appear in it (and hey, to be fair, the cover tells you so). \u00a0And this is a curious issue. \u00a0Scrambler. \u00a0Who was after a Scrambler story?<\/p>\n

To be clear, yes, we are indeed talking about the\u00a0kid\u00a0from the Marauders, who until now has done pretty much nothing other than screw up people’s powers and look smug about it. \u00a0Oh, and for some reason he was saddled with the real name Kim Il Sung. \u00a0In this book, he’s pretty much unrecognisable as the one-dimensional sociopath of old; instead, he’s a hesitant tag-along who\u00a0isn’t quite sure how he drifted into being a Marauder, and is kind of playing along due to peer pressure. \u00a0I’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\u00a0design choice since it\u00a0was so wildly inappropriate as to imply something about his otherwise largely absent personality. \u00a0Here, of course, it’s a red flag that he’s wandered into a situation for which he’s hopelessly unqualified.<\/p>\n

This version of Scrambler finds himself\u00a0in hospital after a mission gone wrong, and leaps at the first available chance to\u00a0testify against the Marauders and go into witness protection. \u00a0He starts a normal life, he learns to use his powers to manipulate systems in\u00a0more controlled ways than just disrupting them, and he fends off the Marauders’ attempts to drag him back into the game. \u00a0And somewhere along the line he gets caught up in one of Gambit and Deadpool’s cons for Chalmers.<\/p>\n

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. \u00a0Scrambler finally\u00a0steeling himself to rise to the occasion\u00a0in 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. \u00a0And, without going too far into spoilers for those of you who\u00a0might be planning to read the thing,\u00a0the book does resort to some rather glaring handwaving\u00a0when it comes to what Chalmers is actually up to and how Gambit and Deadpool got involved with him. \u00a0None of which would matter so much if the book had been able to tie Scrambler’s story into\u00a0the main characters a bit more satisfyingly.<\/p>\n

Still, there’s a lot to enjoy here, and a constant barrage of ideas and details. \u00a0If it doesn’t quite come together as a miniseries, it does have plenty of moments along the way.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve certainly been putting this one off. \u00a0Deadpool v Gambit finished ages ago. \u00a0The trade paperback is out by now. \u00a0But\u00a0time to get back into the\u00a0rhythm. \u00a0There’s something a bit odd about reading American comics right now. \u00a0Comics have a long lead-in time. \u00a0They’re slow to react to big events. \u00a0And there has been a\u00a0very […]<\/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-3603","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\/3603","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=3603"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3603\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3604,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3603\/revisions\/3604"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3603"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3603"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3603"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}