2 out of 5

Womp.  Dr. McNinja webcomic writer Christopher Hastings seems like a good pick for the surreal / stupid action /comedy of Deadpool.  After all, Dr. McNinja gets away with the fourth-wall breaking audience-winking stuff that DP’s dual internal narrators do, and the dinosaurs and mustaches that populate the good Doc’s pages would be totes at home in the Deadpool world.  And, I think, given free reign to plot his own Deadpool tale, Chris would’ve done just fine.  But shoe-horned in to the already wayward ‘Fear Itself’ storyline – about some powerful hammer, ya’ll – it doesn’t work so much, the script stretching to make room for jokes, and the surprisngly-detailed-for-a-webcomic paneling sensibilities of Hastings’ creator-owned work has to be appropriately bumped up to a more epic size for a Marvel comic.  Artist Bong Dazo is a great find for this, packing a lot of calamity sensibly on to the page, but it reminds me of the over-abundance that started happening in Dan Slott’s She-Hulk, where the art was doing a great job of following the writer’s lead, but the writer is leading things astray by packing too much into the space.

To be fair, Deadpool lends itself to this.  I think it’s a hard book to script appropriately, ever since it was opened up to the halls of parody and nonsense, and especially when it’s attemptedly tied in to any sense of ongoing plot or, god, forbid, a crossover series.

The spin here is fitting enough – DP figures he can make some money off this hammer business by getting a Z-List villain to pick up one of the tools and wreck a pre-chosen target, then selling his security services to stop the menace, things going bumblingly wrong in the process – but the pacing is off at three issues, not giving enough space for the over-complicated setup and machinations, and needing to break from his page-to-page webcomic format causes Hastings to plot it sort of recklessly, elements either too cramped or too spread out to pay off effectively.

I’m not saying I could’ve done better.  Deadpool has always been conceptually hilarious in this wacko version but rarely actually hilarious beyond a few chuckles, and besides that, you’re given a very limited 3-issue span to work into an overly massive dumb Marvel crossover.  What would you do?  Hastings applies his humor but and figures out a good “in” to the story (if it was all his idea, who knows), but various elements make it feel uncomfortably rushed and forced.