Thursdays With Wade: Revisiting Joe Kelly's Deadpool Part 20

Today’s reading: Deadpool #26-29, March-June 1999

Story by Joe Kelly

Art by Pete Woods (#26, 28 & 29) and Walter McDaniel (#27)

You just saved the world, and your book’s been spared from cancellation. Now what?

This is the question Joe Kelly is left to wrestle with as he continues writing a series that was supposed to end with issue #25.

Fortunately, there’s one big mystery left over from the previous 25 issues: Why does T-Ray hate Deadpool so much?

The answer to that question is one big retcon that has since been unretconned, reretconned and contraretconned, in what can only be described as the Continuity Curse of the Kelly Run.

But first, a cast reshuffle, a Howard the Duck villain, and a pointless fight with Wolverine!

Deadpool has pulled up stakes from San Francisco and moved into the Bolivian fortress he raided in issue #1. And he’s got a new roommate. Blind Al is, inexplicably, out, and Montgomery, the former Landau Luckman & Lake precog, is in. You may recall from the end of issue #25 that Monty kissed his true love and co-worker, Zoe Culloden, who upon promotion to overboss had him decommissioned and thrown out of the company because she couldn’t handle having a skinless, wheelchair-bound boyfriend.

Wade also has a new pilot: Ilaney Bruckner, whom you may remember from the Ajax story. Turns out she didn’t die after all!

(Writer’s aside: This seems like something I should’ve known and pointed out in writing about Ilaney earlier, right? Yes. If I’m being completely honest, the eight issues that make up Kelly’s Deadpool denouement kind of faded from my memory, save for the big T-Ray reveal at the end and the fight with Wolverine.)

Sadly, much like before, Ilaney is the butt of a number of fat jokes that I still maintain were wholly unnecessary.

Despite having saved the world, Wade is still a miserable sack of stuffing. Part of him believes all he did was curse the human race to remain unhappy as a result of getting to keep its free will. He’s no longer on the LL&L payroll, and so he’s gone back to mercenary work, though this time for a Moroccan gentleman named Alestaire Grunch who tortures cats and used to be the business (and life?) partner of Patch, the diminutive old curmudgeon who runs Hellhouse.

Wade’s also going a bit nuts … OK, nutser. He’s begun hallucinating a beautiful, raven-haired woman who hangs out with bunnies and pours liquor into milk jugs. And so he’s started seeing a shrink. Or rather, he’s started seeing Howard the Duck villain Doctor Bong. His prescription, or Deadpool’s interpretation of it, at least: Go fight Wolverine.

Logan just so happens to be in San Francisco’s Chinatown district, visiting a generic old friend. And he’s brought fellow X-Man Kitty Pryde along with him. Kelly does a great job of mocking Wolverine’s narration boxes from the time period, that mix of violent 1970s antihero appropriating Eastern zen wisdom:

“Smell is the sense that most closely links us to memory. A breath of half stale air in a district like Chinatown unlocks a glut of images. Old friends, lovers, dead goat on a beach, my tricycle, Ginger, the spice and the castaway, chopsticks jutting out of a guy’s eyeballs like cockroach antennae. Sometimes, I wish that when I smelled an egg roll, it just smelled like an egg roll.”

Deadpool disguises himself as an old-lady street merchant but drops the ruse once Wolverine’s sniffer susses him out. He then proceeds to provoke Logan, who doesn’t appear to be in a fighting mood until Wade hits Kitty with an uppercut straight outta Street Fighter. As Wade and Wolvie exchange blows, Wade comes to the realization that he knows the woman in his hallucinations.

“She’s just the broad who stole my heart a long time ago, then got dead,” he tells Doctor Bong. Issue #27 closes with the actual woman of Deadpool’s hallucinations running from some unseen terror in Atlanta. She drops a locket, inside which is a picture of her with a man, and the inscription reads, “Love always, Wade.”

Issue #28 opens with some creepy looking narration boxes we haven’t seen in a while, familiar green flames and a fella in a cloak plotting to make Wade Wilson’s life miserable from afar. We’ll get back to him.

In the meantime, Alestaire’s got a new assignment for Deadpool, in Atlanta of all places, a job that came on magic paper that turns into green flames (SEE?!). The target, the raven-haired woman from Wade’s hallucinations. But he’s not the only merc on the job.

Enter Bullseye. How long has it been since these two crazy kids hung out?

“Issue sixteen. Greece,” Wade replies, a mere hint of the fourth-wall breaking that will become far more pervasive under the next writer, Christopher Priest.

Deadpool sees this familiar woman as the key to his sanity and tries to talk his old friend out of making the hit. Bullseye responds by stabbing Deadpool in the side and bounds off to do his anything-can-be-a-deadly-projectile schtick. They have a pretty sweet fight that ends with Bullseye taking a boomerang-shaped spoiler to the chest. Despite the mask – and the face covered in scars beneath it – the woman, Mercedes, believes Deadpool to be Wade Wilson, her long lost husband. And Deadpool believes Mercedes should be dead.

But wait, when was Wade ever married? Was this before or after Weapon X? How come this wasn’t mentioned in the Flashback Month issue? And what does T-Ray have to do with any of this?

Patience, my friends. We’re getting there.

Issue #29 opens with Deadpool forcing Latverian scientists to run DNA tests to prove Mercedes isn’t a clone, by threatening their prized collection of Star Trek memorabilia.

Monty, meanwhile, wants to know who this woman is who’s sleeping in Wade’s bed and why he’s never heard of her, despite spending years researching his life in preparation for him to become the Mithras.

Deadpool doesn’t get very far in explaining when a horde of zombies comes crashing into his Bolivian pad, led by none other than Black Talon.

For those who did not read this past fall’s Deadpool vs. Thanos miniseries. Black Talon is a voodoo priest who wears a rooster costume and practices necromancy. He comes seeking Mercedes because as a resurrected dead woman she is a near-perfect construct and he wants to learn her secrets.

This fight scene is played nearly entirely for laughs, including Deadpool’s own. Assisting in the hilarity is Monty, who, given his physical appearance, attempts to blend in with the zombies, grunting things like “Brains is good food” and “Eep op ork ahh ahh.”

Eventually, though, the old ultraviolence kicks in, and Mercedes screams for Wade to stop mercilessly wailing on Black Talon, who by now has lost control of his zombie horde, which has turned to dust. Wade responds in sadly characteristic Wade fashion:

“Maybe you didn’t notice, but this chicken McNugget impaled me with a ten-inch steak knife! Healing factor or not, I’d say I’m entitled to a little payback! So get off my hump before I forget my life has gone ape snot since you breezed back into it and wish I’d never saved you in the first place!”

Mercedes runs off, and Deadpool lets slip to Monty this key bit of backstory to close out the issue:

“Years ago, in the snow, “Crazy” (the Patsy Cline song, later featured in the Deadpool video game) playing in the house behind us, my wife was murdered, and all I could do was watch.”

The story of Mercedes’ death, and how Deadpool and T-Ray play into it, will be revealed across the final four issues of the Kelly run, which we’ll cover in next week’s final Thursdays with Wade before the Deadpool movie premiere. See ya then!

In addition to writing for The Matt Signal, Dan Grote is now the official comics blogger for The Press of Atlantic City. New posts appear Wednesday mornings at PressofAC.com/Life. His new novel, Magic Pier, is available however you get your books online. He and Matt have been friends since the days when Onslaught was just a glimmer in Charles Xavier's eye. Follow @danielpgrote on Twitter.

I’ve Got the Runs: Rick Remender’s Uncanny X-Force, issues 1-35, 2010-12

It's a weird week to be writing about Rick Remender, I suppose, after all that business from a couple days ago. But I actually wrote this last month. I was prepared to write a different column, based on something I'd read Sunday that I was pretty excited about, but that announcement was never made, replaced instead by damage control over a firestorm created by a few people misreading 21 issues of Captain America.

Anyway, this is what you get. Enjoy!

Killing is bad. Some people are killers. Those people won’t stop killing unless they are killed. But killing killers makes the killers into killers. And then what’s the difference between the killers and the killer killers? And if you don’t kill the killers, are you responsible for all their future kills?

Cross-eyed yet? Welcome to the rabbit hole that is Rick Remender’s Uncanny X-Force, quite possibly the best book ever to bear the name X-Force. The series is 37 issues (Marvel threw two of those .1 issues into the mix) of the above moral dilemma, featuring five of the darker, edgier, more X-treme X-Men, and nothing but the biggest villains.

Magneto, Apocalypse, Sabertooth, the Shadow King, Mystique, the Blob, Daken, the Reavers, Lady Deathstrike, the fake children of Omega Red, the gang’s all here. Literally: Many of the aforementioned villains formed an alliance to take down Wolverine & Co.

The team also goes on reality-hopping adventures in the Age of Apocalypse and Otherworld, the omniversal home of the Captain Britain Corps., and travels to the future to see what their actions hath wrought, complete with elderly super guest stars.

Our story starts with the age-old dilemma: Would you kill Hitler as a baby? Only in this case, baby Hitler is a 10-year-old Apocalypse. How the team decides to handle young Evan sets into motion the events of the entire series, which alternate between bloodbaths and mental anguish.

“I’m making sure to tell you stories with beginnings, middles and ends, and when those stories are put together, they form a much bigger story – like a Voltron of nerdocity,” Remender told Comic Book Resources in a 2012 interview.

One of Remender’s greatest feats is fleshing out Weapon XIII, Fantomex, the smooth-talking spy/sentinel created during Grant Morrison’s run on New X-Men. Fantomex’s actions at the end of the first arc set in motion much of the plot of the rest of the series. Watch the master of misdirection woo Psylocke, stand trial by order of Betsy’s brothers and face off against the Skinless Man, aka Weapon III, a newly introduced graduate of the Weapon Plus program, another Morrison-bred concept. Fantomex is hands-down the most physically tortured member of the team, but in undergoing said tortures – and remember, this book is for mature readers, so it’s some pretty grisly stuff – he finds redemption.

But if Fantomex spends the series being physically tortured, Psylocke, the team’s resident telepath, spends it being mentally tortured. Betsy hasn’t been this interesting since Chris Claremont turned a purple-haired British woman into the Mandarin’s personal ninja in the late ’80s. In her attempts to be the team’s conscience, Psylocke is repeatedly forced to make difficult choices and then forced to watch in horror as the consequences of those choices play out, both in the present and in the future. Her despair is so great that at one point she makes a deal that requires her to yield her ability to feel sorrow, and though she makes it, it really doesn’t stick, as her former captive, the Shadow King, exacts revenge on her as a member of a newly formed Brotherhood of Evil Mutants.

Remender’s Deadpool may be my favorite version of the character in any of his ongoing titles of the past few years, primarily because he’s sharing the spotlight with four other people and therefore not exhaustingly front and center as he is in his solo title and spinoff series. You could argue the fact that he’s not the center of attention makes the character work harder for it. I’m pretty sure I laughed harder at his heart-to-heart with Evan at the end of the series than I have in much of Gerry Duggan and Brian Posehn’s current Deadpool solo book. And I’m a Deadpool fan from way back.

And lest we forget, there’s Wolverine, the whole reason this incarnation of X-Force exists. At this point in his career, Wolverine has become all things to all people. On X-Force, he’s the head killer in charge. In Wolverine & the X-Men, he’s the head of a school, raising the next generation of mutants to fight the good fight. On the Avengers, he’s a brawler in an army of supermen ready to be fastball-specialed at Thanos on a moment’s notice. And while Wolverine is the best at what he does, he still struggles with his conscience and the animal inside, just like he did 40 years ago when Claremont first gave the character depth. And nowhere is his conscience more active than when it comes to his son, Daken, who assembles an Army of royal X-pains – including Sabertooth – to work out his daddy-abandonment issues.

Archangel is also in this book, but I’m not quite sure how to talk about what happens to him without spoiling one of the series’ best arcs, except to say about midway through the series, Nightcrawler joins the team. Not the 616 Nightcrawler, of course, he’s dead at this point. Instead, we get the Age of Apocalypse Nightcrawler, who is much like our Nightcrawler, except he has a red face tattoo, he doesn’t like being called Elf, he’ll betray the team if it means getting revenge on the ones who wronged him, he gets along well with his mother, Mystique, and he really likes teleporting people’s heads off their bodies. Otherwise, totally the same old Kurt Wagner.

And then there’s Deathlok, who serves as the team’s Jiminy Cricket, crossing the time stream to show X-Force how its kills affect the future.

One of the best things about Remender’s run is that it’s self-contained. You don’t have to read a whole bunch of other X-titles or drown in an incomprehensible crossover to enjoy the book. It even completely sidesteps Fear Itself and Avengers Vs. X-Men.

Speaking of the latter crossover, Remender’s next book, Uncanny Avengers, picks up after the events of AvX with a combined team of Avengers and X-Men who spend much of their time cleaning up the messes X-Force made in their last book, in addition to facing big Avengers villains such as the Red Skull and Kang. So if you like Uncanny X-Force, keep reading.

Remender’s Uncanny X-Force is collected in seven trade paperbacks: The Apocalypse Solution, Deathlok Nation, The Dark Angel Saga Books 1 and 2, Otherworld, and Final Execution Books 1 and 2. The series is also available in a hardcover omnibus.

I’ve Got the Runs: Larry’s Hama’s Wolverine

Larry Hama took a lot from Logan: the reliability of his memories, his adamantium, that “snikt” sound he makes when his claws pop, his greatest enemy’s mental faculties (just kidding!), and for a time his nose. That’s a lot of deconstruction for a character who still managed to show up in what felt like almost every Marvel book in the 1990s. (Although certainly, by making Wolverine an Avenger in the 2000s, the company was determined to double down on that glut)

Hama, also known for his work on G.I. Joe, Bucky O’Hare and a number of Venom miniseries, wrote Wolverine’s solo title from 1990 to 1997, with a few hiatuses in between, writing issues 31 to 53, 55 to 57, 60 to 109 and 111 to 118.

But let’s drill down a bit, because if I’m being honest, my Wolverine’s a little rusty. Strike that; rust implies metal, and when I started reading the book in 1993, he had just had the metal sucked out of him during a pretty sweet fight with Magneto aboard his orbital space station (because every few years, a mutant leader is required to have a floating space station or island utopia).

The great adamantium-suck gave Wolverine some time to go wandering, to leave the X-Men, to fight old enemies so they could say, “Holy crap, where’d your adamantium go? And why do you still have claws?”

Lady Deathstryke, who was all set to kill Logan, Heather Hudson and Puck when she shows up at Hudson's house in Ottawa, takes pity on him and walks away. The pseudo-vampire Bloodscream stalks him across Canada, to Muir Isle and back, teaming up with the androids Albert and Elsie Dee in a subplot that disappears after issue 86. Cyber stomps off half of Wolvie's claws on one hand (which slowly heal, issue by issue) and pumps him full of hallucinogens and poison. The Hand walk away from him, after Yukio logics them into thinking they had the wrong guy with the same haircut and speech patterns. Maverick goads him into attacking him, but only because the Legacy virus has made him suicidal.

There's a recurring theme of Wolverine dropping in on old friends and being trapped by a killer. He's taken to Muir Island and is hunted down by Cyber, then two arcs later visits Alpha Flight’s Mac and Heather Hudson in the arctic and is trapped at a research station by creatures called the Hunters in Darkness.

Finally, he returns to the X-Mansion in issue 90 to find nobody’s home but us Sabertooths (the team was off trying to stop Legion from going back in time to kill Magneto, resulting in the death of Xavier instead and the creation of the Age of Apocalypse timeline). Logan and Creed have one of their more epic tussles, which ends with Wolverine jamming a claw right through Sabertooth’s brain just as their timeline unravels.

90 is one of Hama's best issues. He does a great job of contrasting Wolverine and Sabertooth's fight in the mansion with the on-TV police beating and arrest of a serial killer who has numbed himself to pain to allow him to resist arrest, much like Creed keeps zapping himself on the force field of his containment unit to get used to the pain and make good his escape.

When the X-books return four months later, Sabertooth is being cared for by the X-team as a simpleton and Wolverine becomes an outside dog, living on the grounds of the estate as opposed to inside with the more trusted members of the team, like the Cajun who can’t help but give off a rape-y vibe and the blue-skinned guy who’d done time as the embodiment of death.

It’s at this point that Hama begins building toward what we think will be the return of Logan’s adamantium, as it’s revealed that Cable’s son Tyler Dayspring, now going by Genesis and wearing Apocalypse’s old armor, has busted Wolvie’s old enemy Cyber out of prison to steal his adamantium and bond it to Logan. In issue 100, the bonding process fails, leading Wolverine into such a feral state that he LOSES HIS NOSE! Let me repeat: The X-Man known for his superior sense of smell LOST HIS NOSE. Comics, everyone! Don’t worry, it got better, but mostly only because artists either forgot or tired of drawing him in a bandana with a face that looked like it had been stepped on by the Juggernaut.

Marc Silvestri drew the issues in the early part of Hama’s run. Adam Kubert took over starting with 75. I was a big fan of the Kubert Bros. back then, between Adam on Wolverine and Andy on X-Men. Also, issue 80 features early work by Ian Churchill, who went on to draw a four-issue Deadpool mini and was the regular penciller on Cable for a time.

Kubert uses a lot of vertical layouts, requiring the reader to flip the book every few pages.

Issue 90 also experiments with gatefold pages. Again, an interesting idea, but when the fold breaks right on a word bubble it can be hard to read. Combine that with vertical layouts, and reading can be an exercise in patience. I can only imagine how they dealt with this in collected editions.

New friend: Issue 79 marks the first appearance of Zoe Culloden, expediter for the interdimensional firm of Landau, Luckman and Lake, who would go on to play a big role in Joe Kelly's Deadpool run as well.

Crossover interruptus: While "Fatal Attractions" sets up the adamantium-free Wolverine story quite nicely, 1994’s "Phalanx Covenant" kinda jams its way into a story in progress about Wolverine in Canada and Bloodscream tricking Albert and Elsie Dee into helping him find Logan. And of course 1995’s "Age of Apocalypse" interrupts a perfectly good Sabertooth fight. Onslaught comes calling in 1996 just as Logan loses his nose, and Hama's run ends with 1997’s "Operation: Zero Tolerance."

Easter egg: a video from a scientist in issue 80 talks about a sample of Wolverine's tissue labeled “Logan X #23.” COINCIDENCE?

Funny ad alert: A comic shop in Virginia announced it was holding a memorial service for Professor X, after the events of "Legion Quest." Wonder if they did the same thing in 2012?

Hama’s run is available in Essential Wolverine Vols. 2 through 6. Vol. 6 also includes a four-issue story by Warren Ellis titled “Not Dead Yet” that sticks with me because, well, Ellis is my jam.