Deadpool #14 – Review

Gerry Duggan, Brian Posehn (Writers), Scott Koblish (Artist), Val Staples (Colorist)

The Story: The White Man comes back from to this era to enact revenge against Power Man, Iron Fist and Deadpool. Chaos ensues.

The Review: It’s always fun to see a writer try to come up with strange ideas, seeing them try to follow it up as their stories goes on. Innovation is hard to come by as well as clean fun sometimes as a lot (though not all) of writers goes for the easy road when it comes to conflict or setting up threats.

However, while it’s nice to see new things, those can fail just as much as older and more familiar ones if not handled right. Unfortunately for this comic, the White Man and pretty much everything that entails that characters soon becomes rather boring, verging on the annoying at times.

What makes the issue disappointing isn’t mainly the villain, but rather the fact that it tries too hard at some points and not enough in others. The way Duggan and Posehn tries to show the difference between the 70’s and today through the characters, the comic itself and how the comic is written is admirable, yet it never do enough with the concept. It’s funny to see the difference with how people see media nowadays and how communication methods changed through the years, yet the characters themselves merely mention it with close to no humour or focus on that simple fact.

Deadpool #13 – Review

Gerry Duggan, Brian Posehn (Writers), Scott Koblish (Artist), Val Staples (Colorist)

The Story: Deadpool ”works” with Heroes for Hire in order to fight the White Man.

The Review: As we prepare for the next arc, we have the chance to read another ”inventory issue”, featuring a satirical look on a whole generation and age of comic. Like the issue making fun of the 80’s, this one give us a vision that is both filled with humor, yet also with an interesting point-of-view of how the era was in terms of comics and popular culture. With this issue focusing on the 70’s, there is a lot for the duo of writers to cover, however do they manage to strike gold like they did in issue 7?

In some minor ways, they don’t really give us a tale as complete and satisfying as the last ”inventory issue”, yet they do manage to cover a lot of ground on how comics in the seventies were written, complete with a plethora of in-jokes and fourth wall comments.

On the comedic front of things, a lot of what is presented here works rather well, as both Duggan and Posehn use a lot of the blacksploitation that was the butt of the joke and the common theme used in Luke Cage, Hero for Hire. Here though, they amp it up to eleven as a lot of the jokes involve racism, the comic code authority, the disco era along with what was popular in the 70’s. With jokes like Deadpimp, the way Iron Fist used his power, the enemy being literally called ”The White Man” and many more, it’s really a diverse selection of comedy gold we have here. However, there are some small weaknesses here and there on that front as some of the jokes are used perhaps too much, like how Luke Cage keeps denying Deadpool the satisfaction of being in his business, the joke about the name of the villain and the fact that some writers usually took way too much time describing how Iron Fist used his powers. It’s all fine, yet it lowers the effectiveness of these jokes in the process.