Deadpool 10, A+X 8

Deadpool 10
Posehn and Duggan (w) and Hawthorne (a) and Staples (c)

Ben Franklin and Agent Preston are both disturbed and upset about the way Deadpool is handling the Vetis situation, which included killing Michael in the hopes he could go convince Mephisto that Vetis is trying to undercut him. Franklin leaves the group and drifts into, predictably, a strip club. We'll get back to that "predictably" bit in a second. Anyway, the next person Deadpool has to assassinate is a businessman named Daniel Gump who Vetis gave pre-cognitive powers to. When Deadpool arrives, he comes across Spider-Man, who is also investigating Gump, a suspiciously successful businessman who has suddenly acquired mercenary protection in the form of people like Batroc, Taskmaster, Stilt-Woman, and others. There's a bunch of banter, including Deadpool making fun of Doc Ock kind of out of nowhere, and eventually Deadpool catches up to Gump and kills him. Spider-Man webs Deadpool up with the other villains, denouncing him for killing Gump instead of letting the justice system have him. Meanwhile, Michael is trying to get to Mephisto but has run into some trouble with a gatekeeper demon.

Readers of this blog will know that I'm not particularly on board with this title the way it's currently running. That "predictably" tag I gave to Franklin going into the strip club could be applied to a lot of the jokes that pop up throughout this book and throughout this series. There are a handful of decent and original jokes peppered in throughout the ten issues we've seen so far but it feels like something like 80-90% of the jokes can be seen coming a mile away. That wouldn't be horrible in a book that doesn't sell itself on its jokes and that hadn't hired comedians to write it. However, where you have a book that makes just about every line a joke, it's a downside if those jokes constantly reach for the lowest hanging fruit. So no, this book hasn't really made me excited about anything they've done, despite including Tim-favorite Batroc the Leaper. It hurts when he shows up and I'm still not entertained.

A+X 8
Spider-Woman and Kitty Pryde: Duggan (w) and Larroca (a) and Ocampo (c)
Hawkeye and Deadpool: Hastings (w) and Brown (a) and Armstrong (c)

Hey, look at that. We start with a story written by Gerry Duggan, co-writer of the Deadpool series! I'm not going to say that what I said above about Deadpool 10 totally apply to this first story featuring Kitty Pryde and Spider-Woman and Lockheed trying to acquire a strange and unidentified space-metal for SWORD before anything bad happens to it. However, most of those things still do apply. There are a bunch of pop culture references and low-hanging fruit jokes and things like that. The other thing I couldn't help feeling, as is true with literally every issue of Deadpool I read, was that this book felt so long. Each Deadpool book, I get just about halfway through and can't believe the book is still going. Not because so much has happened, but because there's been such an overabundance of dialogue. Same problem here, which is particularly depressing because this story is half of an issue. So one quarter of the way through a book, I got annoyed with how long the book felt. Not the best feeling. Anyway, the three heroes fight Absorbing Man, who is trying to get his hands on the weird metal amidst a swarm of Hydra and AIM fighters. Kitty lets him take the metal then shuts his brain down after a whole ton of exposition about her history. Like I've said, A+X books aren't particularly plot-heavy or heavy in general and they don't have to be because of the conceit of the book. I would still rate this story under a lot of the stories that have spawned from this immensely long series.

There are still a bunch of pop culture references in the second story, featuring Hawkeye teaming with Deadpool to rescue a taco chef from pirates who intend to force him to make meals on their journey, but they make light of the fact that they're using pop culture references. Deadpool searches his repertoire for a new pop culture reference for Hawkeye only to learn that all of them have been used over and over again. Deadpool also decides to join Hawkeye in using arrows and shows off his own trick arrow, which uses a novelty Hulk hand at the end that punches people and roars when it hits them. The trick though, he explains, is that they all explode. The whole thing feels pretty genuine though, with two heroes who can more or less respect the way the other works and knows that their mission is a relatively fun one. Of course, I was a little biased going in as someone who likes both these heroes (and particularly roots for Deadpool to be halfway decent outside of his own books now, as it's the only place I can tolerate him now) and who likes Christopher Hastings (to my credit, I was a fan of Brian Posehn before Deadpool too). Anyway, this story was fun, nothing more, but that's what A+X is so can't fault it for doing its job well.