After last month’s pitch perfect parody of 1970s comics featuring Deadpool teaming up with the reluctant Heroes For Hire back in the Sweet Christmas days to take down a pimptastic enemy calling himself The White Man (entirely without irony, as he was as chalk white as the Purple Man is purple), Gerry Duggan and Brian Posehn have brought forth this concoction into the modern day in Deadpool #14.
If Deadpool #13 hadn’t come out the same week as Comic-Con, I would have reviewed it with effusive praise for being an amazingly accurate reproduction of the comics of that era, right down to some sloppy color smudging on the opening page. But it did, and I was too busy, so I’m checking in for the follow-up. Amusingly, neither Luke Cage, Iron Fist nor Deadpool even remember their “lost” ’70s encounter with The White Man that left him frozen solid for decades. He speaks in old-time supervillain-speak (“Did you hear that peole don’t say words like ‘impudent’ anymore?”) and wants nothing but revenge against the H4H and DP for his defeat lo those decades ago, and he will randomly freeze as many people as it takes to get it to happen.
So Cage rounds them up, along with Iron Fist’s dojo kids, and, while angrily insisting that Deadpool was never their partner despite Wade and The White Man assuming he was (a running gag from the previous issue – The White Man even refers to DP as their leader), they go after the guy – not before Cage gets some amusing digs in on The Today Show dregs, though. The White Man has taken hostages at the Empire State Building, malarkey and shenanigans ensue, comedy abounds and lo, Deadpool is once again an entertaining read and I wind up laughing like a yokel at a nut-punch.
It feels good to laugh at Deadpool again. The Daniel Way run was a long drought in that respect, but Posehn and Duggan have at least brought the comedy back. I’m still not as devoted to Wade as I was back in the Joe Kelly era, where you cared as much about where he was going as a character as you did about his next quip, but that might be a factor of overexposure and longevity as much as anything else. As long as this series remains a rollicking good time, I’m on board – especially with an artist as talented and versatile as Scott Koblish, who can move from the masterfully perfect retro style to the modern look so impressively.
It’s also worth noting that the appearance of this Butler character, who has apparently been randomly harvesting Deadpool’s organs for who knows how long, might be a sign of some of that compelling drama coming back as well. Regardless, they were able to make me laugh at a guy getting sacked, which you’d think is the lowest form of humor. But no! It works on so many levels!
