This is what happens when Techland goes to the comic book store: we end up talking about what we picked up. This week, Douglas Wolk, Graeme McMillan, Evan Narcisse and Mike Williams discuss Deadpool MAX #1 and the new DC Comics Presents project.
DOUGLAS: Unlike a couple of you, I was expecting Deadpool Max to be at least interesting. I like a lot of David Lapham’s stuff (especially Young Liars, although it took a while to grow on me), I think Kyle Baker’s just alarmingly gifted, and I figured that if they were signing on to do a work-for-hire series together at this point it’d be something so cool they had to do it. And the MAX imprint has yielded some great stuff in the past, especially Alias and Garth Ennis’s Punisher: it turns out that sometimes there’s superhero material you need to have an explicit-content license to do right.
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But this is just wretched–a generic Deadpool story like any other, except with extra gore, cussing, poop, gay-baiting and domestic-violence jokes. Baker draws it in the freaky-distorted style that he used on Special Forces, in which everybody’s gestures and expressions are pumped up to outlandishly silly-looking levels–it’s technically fantastic work, and in the service of a genuinely funny story, I think it’d be really effective. But Special Forces had a legitimate satirical sting; this doesn’t have a single successfully funny moment, and it has a lot of failed attempts at funny moments, starting with the “crumpets” bit on the first page. I’ll repeat what I said last time we talked about Deadpool: he’s funny when he’s the only character who’s not taking his surroundings seriously at all.
Punisher worked as a MAX character because Ennis mostly toned down the superhero stuff, and gave him a single, clear, unstoppable motivation; after that, he could pull off everything from comedy to psychological horror, because the stories’ engine was always what happened when Hurricane Frank came to fulfill his mission, and the MAX tag let him make those stories as vivid as he liked. Lapham’s Deadpool is a delusional, unkillable psycho with scraps of motivation that don’t even begin to make sense, in a setting where everyone else is at least as much a loose cannon. There’s no drama and no comedy and nothing to bring me back for the next issue.
MIKE: Wretched will have to do, Douglas. I want to use coarser, more low-brow adjectives. After reading this I assumed we could just go back a month or two to the last time we talked about a Deadpool comic in The Club and just copy and paste it. It’s zany without being funny. It’s over the top without being remotely interesting. Now with the MAX rating there’s more sex (but somehow it feels like less violence), more blue humor, and more all around adult content but as you mentioned no payoff.
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Yes, Deadpool is a mercenary and an assassin, but that doesn’t mean he needs a MAX title. In fact, he doesn’t need a title at all. If the last three years or so have shown us anything, it’s that Wade Wilson is a support character. Fine, he can keep his team-up book. I’m scared to even look at the sales figures for his titles, I just don’t want to even know.
All of this is made worse by the fact that Rick Remender just wrote a fantastic opening sequence starring Deadpool in this week’s Uncanny X-Force. It was well paced, witty if not laugh out loud funny, and above all he kept the spirit of the character intact without turning him The Mask. Ugh, Deadpool MAX has actually put me in a bad mood. I don’t even want to scan images for this post.
GRAEME: I am so glad that it’s not just me that thought that Deadpool MAX was such a failure. I’m actually kind of surprised that I didn’t find it funny in the least, because for all my problems with Lapham’s writing – generally, I think he goes for style over substance in almost everything he doesn’t create himself – I normally find him amusing, but here… Nooooo. It tries too hard, but doesn’t actually have any comedic punch at all, and instead comes over as nasty and misanthropic. It felt, at times, as if Lapham was trying to write a parody of the Deadpool cliche (“It’s Looney Tunes but with a mental superhero!”) with added “Aren’t gay people funny.” Storywise, it’s really, really bad, and a little troubling, as well.
(Tying in with Mike’s comment: Wade Wilson is a supporting character in this book. He’s a McGuffin at best here, barely on panel and just an excuse for Agent Bob to do whatever he has to do for Lapham to feel comedic – Hey, he’s been raped! That’s HILARIO… Oh, wait.)
Artwise, I’ll admit, I’m glad to see Baker back in a style closer to I Die At Midnight and You Are Here than some of his recent, very-clearly-done-using-CGI-programs, work, but I think you’re right, Douglas: It’s not really working here. I’m not entirely sure why, because I think it isn’t entirely reliant on the writing to succeed, yet it fails anyway. Maybe it’s too garish to work with the story, and the dissonance is throwing me off?
EVAN: I knew it was gonna suck, and even yet I feel disappointed. I was hoping Deadpool MAX would be like a dirtier, nastier version of Bizarro Comics or Strange Tales: Two really good creators on superhero material, giving it a off-center twist.
But the biggest letdown with this is that it’s not adventurous enough. It comes down on the most conservative interpretation of the character and what he does. Adolescent humor, “k3wl” bad-assery, and look-how-crazy-I-am non-sequitur. Yawn. I’m really tired of this character. I move that we never discuss Deadpool again.
DOUGLAS: A moratorium, at any rate.
EVAN: The thing about Baker’s art is that I remember his early Spider-Man work in the 1980s, and it was far more realistic than anything he’s turned out in years. I like how he’s able to go back and forth between a more cartoony style and the grittier stuff we see a little bit of in this book. I did like the action sequences and wish there were more of them.
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And, like Graeme, every time I see Lapham on work-for-hire stuff that fails to ignite, I think “this is why I’m not getting new Stray Bullets?!” Young Liars was a crazy, effed-up book that got so much right about using rock-n-roll energy and youthful alienation in a modern comic book–not the least of which was re-inventing itself at least twice during its run. I was hoping for more of that wild unpredictable vibe in Deadpool MAX, and it didn’t show up at all.
DOUGLAS: While we’re at it: what do y’all think of that new “DC Comics Presents” line that started this week–the 100-page reprints of DC material that’s got some relationship to creators or storylines that are hot at the moment, but isn’t quite big enough to make a trade paperback out of? (This week’s are one with some old Green Lantern material, and one devoted to the four extant issues of Jack Cross, which was written by Warren Ellis but never got off the ground no matter how frantically it flapped its wings.) I like the idea in theory, and I especially like that it’s going to encompass some material that’s been sitting in the archives for a while (like Ellis’s Hellblazer story “Shoot”). But I’d like to see some slightly more adventurous programming–what about a collection of DC’s old humor comics, or a ’60s-era romance serial, or stories drawn by Nestor Redondo, or something along those lines?
MIKE: Here’s a fun game, replace the name Jen with Veronica and the name Terry with Betty, and the Green Lantern one is a perfectly acceptable Archie comic. The majority of this book felt like an Afterschool Special. I could almost hear the live studio audience cooing “Awwwwww” on some pages. The scene where Kyle tells Terry that it is, in fact, OK to be gay should have been punctuated with the tag line “And knowing is half the battle.”
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Then the book swings over to this alien planet featuring a very nicely packaged civil war that I couldn’t begin to give a crap about which included the poignant and terrifying bombing of school children. Two pages ago we were all delighting over vegetable lasagna! Now we’re supposed to care about an old, bloody war that Kyle isn’t even tangentially related to? Actually, no, because he doesn’t care either and says so out loud. Besides, he has to get back to Earth and attend the smoothest coming out / birthday party of all time.
GRAEME: Yeah, I’m with both of you again. I like the format – and the price point, because $8 for 100 pages squarebound works pretty well for me, thanks very much – but neither the Green Lantern nor Jack Cross selections seem like great introductions to the line. The GL book, in particular, just feels like four random issues thrown together for no apparent reason at all (Wasn’t the solicit something like “Jade’s back in Brightest Day! Find out more about her here!”? There is nothing of interest about Jade in this book!). I like the format and hope it continues, and succeeds enough to allow the collection editors – who seem to be the ones behind this, judging from the information at the front? – to get more interesting material back into print, especially more of the promised creator-led collections. DC COMICS PRESENTS GRANT MORRISON’S SECRET ORIGINS STORIES, anyone?
DOUGLAS: I would buy that in a heartbeat, and I actually bought all those Secret Origins issues the first time around. (For the record: Animal Man in #39, the Justice League’s HQ in #46 and a “Flash of Two Worlds” rewrite in #50.)
EVAN: I didn’t get the Green Lantern one because, honestly, the cover didn’t jump out at me. I literally could not identify it.
Maybe it’s because I came to Transmetropolitan late, but I still have lots of love for the standard-issue Warren Ellis archetypes. It’s usually the Mad Bastard or the Hard Man, and Jack Cross is more of the latter. I was picking this up in singles when it was first coming out but then stopped. I wonder if something this overtly political could come out now, which makes me think this 100-page format could be a great place to experiment. What I don’t want it to be is a sausage factory for stillborn back-catalog stuff.