Deadpool #8 // Review
Wade’s daughter is trying to wake him up. He’s really slow to get moving for reasons that are unlikely to become totally clear for a while. There will be other problems that Wade will have to deal with when he wakes up. Like for instance--the fact that he’s not horribly disfigured or anything. That normally wouldn’t be a problem for anyone, but Wade’s got his own thing going on in Deadpool #8. Writer Alyssa Wong takes Wade Wilson through his own kind of hell...and it’s a pretty one thanks to the efforts of the art team of Luigi Zagaria and Matt Milla.
Once Wade’s daughter has gotten him up, he’s got another surprise waiting for him in the kitchen. Cable is at the stove. Wolverine is setting the table. Domino is sitting at the table. And Spider-Man is...on the ceiling. There’s more than enough room for everyone in the kitchen, but that doesn’t exactly explain why everyone is there. Wade asks the first question to come to mind, but it’s not like he’s going to get a very coherent answer. Wolverine tells him that it’s Saturday. It’s a Saturday tradition for them all to show up in his kitchen for breakfast. Something weird is clearly going on.
Wong makes a pleasantly surreal encounter out of what really WOULD be a perfectly normal sort of situation. It would be...if Wade Wilson was a normal guy and not a masked guy with superpowers and a history that goes back a couple of decades. Throwing a hero with a remarkable life into a perfectly mundane situation can be fun if it’s executed well. Extending the cast to include some of the more troubled characters in the Marvel Universe amplifies the weirdness of the situation considerably. Wong takes an old idea and amplifies it in a pleasingly weird direction before diving into more of a traditional hero-vs.-villain thing with a few pleasant twists.
The art team has a clear sense of humor about the world Wong is conjuring onto the page. There’s a clear sense of the absurd about it. They’re sharp enough to know that even though there’s a lot of weirdness going on in the script, there needs to be proper care in putting the mundane end of everything to the page with a sharp sense of wit. Wade wakes up with an extended page in which his daughter is waking him up...as seen from his perspective. A few more moments like that and Deadpool #8 would have been a lot more interesting.
Wong and company are putting Wade Wilson through the hell...of a perfectly normal life situation with friends. Things are wrong, and...inevitably, there IS the sort of life that typically inhabits a superhero comic book, but it’s nice to see Wong hang the possibility of that in front of Deadpool long enough for him to get a taste of the life he doesn’t have. It’s a nice little shot at hell for a guy who has a life that’s anything but normal.
