2 out of 5

Dumb.  “But that’s the point!”  …Is it?

It’s true: I don’t have fond memories of Joe Kelly’s original Deadpool run.  I laughed out loud at – and lauded – the man’s run on JLA, and then began scrounging up back issues… which didn’t do much for me.  Nor did a lot of the series he would release post JLA.  In fact, some of them were pretty bad.  JK (womp) generally has a vein of humor running through his books, and it seemed so on point in JLA, I always dreamed his Deadpool, unleashed from linearity, would be awesome.  Prior to it being collected, back issues were tough to track down, though, so I’d pick up books here and there, read them, then tell myself it’d be more satisfying when I had the whole run.  To be more precise: I wasn’t that entertained, and was justifying why I wasn’t.

So you flip-flop your opinion of a writer, and admit that he or she has had more Mehs than hits.  Thus: I don’t know what I was expecting here.  I loved Kelly’s bring fling with Spider-Man, and when he would pop in on Marvel / DC annuals, they had that same JLA zing to them.  But S-Man / Deadpool just misses all the marks.  The timing – which I do think is Joe’s forte – feels off, and it’s certainly the writing, as Ed McGuinness’ art has never looked sharper, and you can feel the energy on the page, zooming around the panels in search of a landing for jokes that aren’t there.  It might be the forced conceit of the premise (mysterious man hires Deadpool to kill Peter Parker; Deadpool decides – for various plotty reasons – to team-up with Spider-Man for the hit), but comics are pretty much 100% forced conceit, and the entirety of Deadpool’s comic life could maybe be summed up foibles regarding his missions, so whatever.  I think, moreso, it’s two things: First, the plague of the “funny” character, which puts a creative in a corner where they’re maybe not thinking story first, but approaching it from a yuks perspective.  Fine for a comedy book, or a parody book, but less so when there’s supposedly a plot.  Second, the nature of Spider-Man in comics at this point.  Which is: a billionaire celebrity inventor pulling a Tony Stark an “employing” Spider-Man as his bodyguard.  I think Joe wrote a good humble-snarky S-Man, which would have been a good foil for crazy Deady.  But even though Parker in-suit is still sarcasm central, something about his character doesn’t sit right.  He’s not very… compelling?  Interesting?

Thus we’re left with one character who you don’t really like, and one character who’s mugging for the reader too excessively, and then sprinkle it with unfortunate potty humor that can’t even time its jokes effectively.  If not for Ed’s ace pages, I think I would’ve wisened up sooner and ditched this at book one.