Review: Deadpool #1 Gives The Merc With The Mouth A New Mission
by Tony Thornley
Deadpool has been a lot of things over the course of his mercenary career, but nothing as strange as the newest volume’s status quo change. It’s not an understatement to say it’s the biggest mission he’s had to date!
Kelly Thompson, Chris Bachalo, Wayne Faucher, Tim Townsend, Al Vey, Jaime Mendoza, Livesay, Victor Olazaba, David Curiel, and Joe Sabino put the Merc with a Mouth through his toughest challenge yet.
When Wade Wilson is hired to solve a little monster invasion on Staten Island, he discovers he’s bitten off more than he can chew. Not only does he have competition from Elsa Bloodstone, he discovers that killing the king of the monsters has an unexpected side effect. What would you say to Deadpool: King of the Monsters?
Thompson clearly had a lot of fun with her script in this story. It’s full of her trademark wit and humor, as well as multiple supporting characters that have become her trademark at Marvel, such as Elsa Bloodstone and Jeff the Land Shark. It’s not a trail blazing story, or particularly deep, but it’s fun, full of action and charm.
Bachalo has long been one of my favorite artists, and with his inking team he puts a lot into this issue. In the slower scenes, his style works really well; he gets to cut loose with monster designs and show off his inventiveness. In the action scenes though, he falls a bit short, with those sequences becoming overly chaotic to the point of being confusing, sometimes because of his choices in layout and point of view, other times because of the colors.
Curiel is a great color artist, but here his colors get muddy. In the action scenes he relies too much on gradient colors, which confuse the scene. In the flashback scenes, he relies too much on greyscale, making Bachalo’s hyper-detail transform into a mish-mash of details. Just like Bachalo’s line work, his color art really shines in the scenes where the team slows down and allows the story to breathe.
This story isn’t perfect. However, it’s fun and light, and sometimes we need series like that.
Deadpool #1 is available now from Marvel Comics.