It's a good team-up, considering it doesn't have Deadpool or Thor...

I don't usually harsh on new books, and I can't even say it was a completely unenjoyable book, either; but today we're picking apart Deadpool Team-Up #887, written by Rob Williams, art by Matteo Scalera.

First, the good: love the Humberto Ramos cover. I liked Deadpool's self-loathing pilot Tan: there is probably something to the idea that a lot of the people that Deadpool has to work with are just as crazy as he is. I think Den Vakre is a new villain...ess, thing; but it definitely feels like something Thor could've fought years ago, imprisoned, then forgot about. And overall, while some jokes (like a couple Raiders of the Lost Ark bits) fall flat, there are more than a couple laughs here.

But the bad? Well, while Deadpool has almost twenty years (!) of publishing history on him, it's not like a lot of those issues are hard to come by, and we live in an age where you can look this crap up. Namely, that Thor and Deadpool have met before. And the last time, they didn't much care for each other:


This time, Thor is a little more amused with Deadpool, since his joking antics remind him of his currently dead brother Loki. (Which bizarrely ties into Thor's current book, where he seems to remember Loki far more fondly than he should.) But Deadpool previously disliked Thor as being bigger, stronger, prettier, nobler, and overall better than him in every way; he seems to have substantially revised his opinion of Thor:


Still...even though this issue contradicts old continuity, I ended up liking it a lot more than I intended. The problem with Deadpool, is that I think it's tough to have him grow as a character, without ruining everything about him that makes the character works. But the alternative is to leave him status quo: Pool tries to be good, screws up a lot. Pool tries to be bad, but isn't heartless enough for that to work. (He gets hired for jobs like he's Bullseye, a stone killer; but he really wants to be a one-man A-Team...)

And any contradiction with old comics, or even current comics, can be written off with one sentence: Deadpool is crazy, and his healing factor doesn't help and may actually partially cause that. It's not out-of-character for him to act one way today, and another tomorrow; because the alternative is him repeatedly doing the same things that don't work and not being crazy.

Older page from Deadpool #37, "Chapter X: Benediction" Written by Christopher Priest, pencils by Jim Calafiore, inks by Mark McKenna. And congrats to Williams and Scalera; I was set to ream this issue, but it won over my bitter little heart after all. This time.

And I did like my version of the hammer joke better...