Thursdays With Wade: Revisiting Joe Kelly's Deadpool Part 9

Today’s reading: Deadpool #11

Story by Joe Kelly
Art by Pete Woods

 

To celebrate their first year, Team Deadpool wanted to do something special for its 12^th issue. (Sure, Flashback Month screwed up the numbering, but not the intentions). 

What they landed on was a Forrest Gump-like tale in which Deadpool and his roommate/prisoner, Blind Al, end up in 1967’s Amazing Spider-Man #47, a classic Stan Lee/John Romita Sr. tale involving Kraven the Hunter, Osborn hair, Aunt May fainting, Mary Jane dancing for no reason and the origin story of Deadpool’s best friend/tech guy, Weasel. 

For the parts of the issue that were lifted from ASM, the team took the negatives from the original issue, covered up the parts that needed to be switched out, then drew in Al in the place of Aunt May or Deadpool in the place of Spider-Man. Panels were reordered as needed, and extra subplots involving the Daily Bugle staff were removed. The original plot was about Kraven returning to town to get revenge on Norman Osborn for stiffing him out of $20,000 in his quest to defeat Spider-Man and crashing Gwen Stacy’s send-off shindig for Flash Thompson, who was leaving town for the Army. 

P.S.: This is during that stretch when Osborn doesn’t remember being the Green Goblin, after a fight with Spidey in Amazing #39-40. 

The book switches back and forth between the past – where Wade and Al are – and the present, where Weasel and the Great Lakes Avengers are working out how to bring them back. There’s also a framing sequence featuring the Watcher, because why not pretend this romp is an event of great cosmic importance? 

Pete Woods deftly handles blending in with Romita’s ’60s art, though one suspects that classic Marvel inkers Al Milgrom and Joe Sinnott helped significantly. DP regular Nathan Massengill inks Woods in the present. 

Filling out the cast is a number of classic Spidey characters, including Anna Watson, Harry Osborn, and a never-before-seen Empire State University science student named Jack Hammer, who is every bit as much of a clean-cut nerd as Peter Parker, but more of a prick about it. 

Ladies and gentlemen, meet young Weasel. 

“You gotta wonder what happens to a kid like this t’mess up his life,” Wade ponders. You happened, dude. You happened. More on that later. 

Wade and Al travel not only 30 years back in time but clear across the country, landing smack on top of Aunt May on the porch of her home in Forest Hills, Queens. Not knowing they’ve teleported through time as well as space, DP uses his belt clicker to travel to Chicago, where he believes he’ll find the Hellhouse and a ride home. What he finds, instead, is the Hellhouse’s predecessor, Sister Margaret’s Home for Wayward Girls. Said wayward girls proceed to kick Wade in the shins until he leaves, breaking his teleporter in the process. 

How the main characters in the past and present realize Wade and Al are trapped in time is a bit of not-unexpected ridiculousness. Al figures it out because Aunt May’s TV is playing way too many old shows. Flatman of the GLA figures it out because human portal Doorman coughs up a Ferragamo platform pump he believes was made circa 1967. This leads to a bunch of unfortunately of-their-time jokes about Flatman’s closeted homosexuality. 

Thankfully, the LGBTQ crowd isn’t the main target of Wade’s merciless mirth in this issue. That honor goes to the signature ribbed-for-whose-pleasure hair of the clan Osborn, which is the subject of wisecracks in 13 – count ’em (I did) – 13 separate panels. 

Deadpool and Norman Osborn will cross paths again many years in the future, in a crossover with Thunderbolts during the Daniel Way era. And yes, Wade makes more hair jokes. 

Anyway, to bring Wade and Al back, Weasel and Flatman deduce they’ll have to replicate the double-teleportation event that sent them to the past in the first place. Except Wade’s bodyslide belt is busted, so he has to find some other form of ’port technology. Fortunately, an ESU class picture on the wall of Aunt May’s home shows Peter standing next to one Jack Hammer. 

Hammer and Peter Parker may share an affinity for the sciences, but they’re far from friends. They’re both up for the same job at Osborn Chemicals, and Hammer harbors a crush on Gwen Stacy, a then-future Parker girlfriend. So it’s only natural that he scoffs at Wade, who disguised himself as Peter, when he asks him to help fix his belt. To get proto-Weasel to loosen up, Wade-Peter takes him to Gwen’s party, gets him nice and blind with drink … and then pretty much turns him into the Weasel we all know and love, aka ruins his life. 

Though, for a brief, shining moment, Wade does think about making sure the future turns out OK for his sidekick. At one point, Gwen lets Jack dance with her, and Wade, watching from the sidelines while thinking up additional Osborn-hair jokes, considers ensuring they end up together and that Weasel gets the job at Osborn Chemicals. It’d mess up the timestream, but what the hell, right? 

But then Kraven attacks, and all bets are off. Wade ditches the Peter Parker disguise and goes full Deadpool to fight the hunter. Wisecracks aside, the fun part of this is watching DP fight using Spider-Man’s moves, because he’s being drawn onto the page in place of the web-slinger. After all, isn’t Deadpool just Spidey with an extreme ’90s edge? (P.S. Have I mentioned how excited I am for Kelly and McGuinness’ upcoming Deadpool/Spidey team-up book? Because I am very excited). 

While Deadpool is out pretending to be Peter and fighting like his alter-ego, Al disguises herself as the presently unconscious Aunt May (all it takes is pulling back the hair) and suffers the misery of being cared for by Mary Jane’s aunt, Anna Watson. The real May is set up on her couch, where when she comes to, a scarecrow is set up to spook her so she passes out again.  

And what about the real Peter Parker? Wade summons the freelance photographer via payphone to Bayonne, saying there’s something out in the dumps that might ensure good pictures of Spider-Man. Mischief managed. 

Then, of course, there’s good old ditzy Mary Jane, who apparently never stops dancing to the tune in her airy head. “So young to be involved with the crack,” Alfred-as-May thinks while watching MJ shake her hips for no apparent reason (In the original book, MJ had put on some rock ‘n’ roll records to dance to while Anna and Aunt May tidy up their new shared living space). At this point in the Gwen-Peter-MJ love triangle, Gwen clearly has the advantage. For more on the classic Gwen vs. Mary Jane argument, check out this old chestnut. 

The fight with Kraven ends anticlimactically, as it did in the original issue, when Kraven realizes Osborn doesn’t remember anything about the Green Goblin and won’t be giving him his $20,000. He walks off, DP saves Normie from falling off a building and burgeoning alcoholic Weasel, fresh from not getting the Osborn job, agrees to fix Wade’s belt, ensuring he and Al can get home. 

And so begins what has become a proud tradition of shoe-horning Deadpool into the past of the Marvel Universe, a convention used to great effect during Gerry Duggan, Brian Posehn, Mike Hawthorne and Scott Koblish’s run on the character, during which DP teamed up with Power Man and Iron Fist against the White Man in the 1970s, helped Tony Stark face the Demon in a Bottle in the 1980s and wrangled the Infinity Gauntlet from Thanos in the early 1990s. He also teamed up with many a classic Marvel hero against Doctor Doom and the Beyonder in this summer’s Deadpool’s Secret Secret Wars miniseries, the true events of which the Wasp had erased from everyone’s memories. 

By this point, Deadpool had already cemented itself as my favorite book, but this issue, with its time travel, high joke-per-panel ratio and fun at the expense of silver-age conventions, cemented the series as one of my all-time favorites. I like Deadpool because of this series. I love him because of this issue.

Context alert: A big four-page ad in this issue teases Heroes Return, the grand re-entry of the Fantastic Four and the Avengers to the main Marvel Universe. None of them will be teaming up with Deadpool for the time being. It’s just fun to know what else was going on at the time.

Next time on Thursdays with Wade, we’ll dip back into the dark, swirling madness of T-Ray and Typhoid Mary with the two-part “Drowning Man” storyline from Deadpool #12 and 13, which will bring a number of ongoing plot threads to a head. See ya there.



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.
  

Thursdays With Wade: Revisiting Joe Kelly's Deadpool Part 8

Today’s reading: Deadpool #9 and 10

Story: Joe Kelly

Art: Ed McGuinness (issue #9 only), Shannon Denton and Nathan Massengill

 

After a heavy few issues involving Typhoid Mary, Team Deadpool gives us a breather to concentrate on one of the many things Wade does best: Poking fun at lame characters.

It’s not an entirely care-free romp, however. Wade is still unpacking Mary’s emotional damage, his head swimming in darkness as he struggles to find the light. In fact, issue #9 opens with Wade hiding away in an attic room Blind Al refers to as “the box.” We don’t get to see what’s in there, apart from some silhouetted chains, spikes, hooks and a mace. He claims to be meditating, but he also warns Al that if she says the M word again, “Expect bad things.” You can tell he means business because the word balloon has icicles at the bottom.

He then heads over to the Hellhouse, where he has his cronies, C.F. and Fenway, distract Patch while he beats up everyone allied with T-Ray. When Patch asks what happened, DP blames all the limp mercenaries on a banana peel, then asks him whether he has any work in a more heroic vein. Of course, it’s a mercenary business, so there is pretty much nothing, but Patch says the events of Onslaught also diminished the need for hero work, which seems odd, as Onslaught removed a number of heroes from the playing field, so you’d think there’d be more need, if anything.

Before we’re left to dwell on pesky things like logic, a purple-cloaked stranger interrupts their conversation claiming to have work rescuing a princess, a job so classically heroic it is the premise of most early video games.

Said stranger turns out to be a new villain named Deathtrap, who knocks out Deadpool and takes him to his vaguely European lair, straps him to a table, dresses him up like a baby, explains away his plans and proceeds to let a giant voice-activated teddy bear slowly fall on him, each word out of Wade’s mouth bringing him closer to death by suffocation.

Sigh … I miss Arcade.

True to form, Deadpool refuses to shut up, fighting back with a barrage of yo-momma jokes, bad observational comedy and references to Martha Quinn, Jack Palance, Fat Albert and the “Where’s the Beef?” lady, as the plunging plushie attains ramming speed.

By this point, however, Deadpool had already broken both his wrists and ankles, allowing him to free himself from Deathtrap’s deathtrap, but leaving him a weak-limbed mess on the floor. Deathtrap, thoroughly amused by all of this, knocks DP out again and delivers him back to the Hellhouse with a note taped to his chest that reads, “This is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”

He is never seen again.

“Where’s the message in the story? What’s the lesson?” Deadpool (and the reader) is left asking. An excellent question that is never answered.

 

Oh well. On to issue #10, in which we spend a lot of time making fun of the Great Lakes Avengers, but the story is really all about Blind Alfred’s relationship with Deadpool.

Al’s spent the past couple of issues both pissed at and concerned about her captor. Deadpool essentially gave his vision-impaired prisoner a service dog just to further torment her, a mock-kindness she repaid in issue #9 by tampering with all his weapons, as he discovered while he was held prisoner by Deathtrap. At the same time, knowing Wade had been spending time in “the box” had her concerned for his mental state. Normally, a quick trip to the Xavier Institute for some late-night Siryn stalking would help him find his center, but, as he discovers in issue #10, the mansion’s been cleared out by Bastion as a part of the Operation: Zero Tolerance crossover of summer 1997.

Wade gets revenge on Al for her weapons prank by subjecting her to a game called Road-Trip Roulette, promising exotic destinations such as Graceland, the Grand Canyon, Def Comedy Jam (’90s pop culture reference, take a drink) and, in the smallest sliver of the wheel, freedom.

P.S. If Alfred is blind, why build an elaborate game-show wheel she can’t see?

Anyway, the wheel lands on the aquarium (after Wade blows it off freedom), which is apparently where they went the last time they played this game.

Going out in public lets Wade have fun with his image inducer, disguising himself at points as a morbidly obese man, a Latino gangster (a repeat disguise from issue #1), a guy with a long, curly mustache and a ruggedly handsome blond man (another repeat from issue #1). If you look at the last two long enough, you’ll start to see a little bit of the way Wade appeared after he was healed by Zsaji in Deadpool’s Secret Secret Wars. But considering how he was drawn in his Flashback Month issue, that’s likely pure coincidence.

At the aquarium, Wade does something unexpected. After rehashing his recent conflicted feelings about good and evil, he offers Al her freedom, tells her to leave and never come back.

Except Al doesn’t go for it. She stays put in the bird sanctuary. Deuce runs all the way home, but she parks herself right on a bench. Now, the book doesn’t actively address Stockholm syndrome, the psychological condition in which hostages bond with their captors. But that doesn’t really apply to Al anyway. She tends to torment Wade almost as much as he does her. But she definitely wants him to turn his life around, and she’s been burned by past promises of freedom. Maybe she’s just old and tired, maybe after all this time, the thought of being out in the world is scarier than being confined to a rowhouse in San Francisco. “… Maybe ’cause my seeing-eye mongrel abandoned me. Maybe ’cause you’d never match your socks without me.”

Either way, Wade’s short attention span gets the better of him, and after counting to 500 (and skipping a bunch of numbers in the process), Wade shuts off his image inducer, whips out his weapons and whips the crowd up into a panic as he begins to hunt for the woman he just set free. Which attracts the attention of this issue’s special guests: The Lightning Rods, formerly the Great Lakes Avengers.

The GLA were created by John Byrne and first appeared in 1989’s West Coast Avengers #46. They include Flatman, a two-dimensional version of Mr. Fantastic; Mr. Immortal, who cannot be killed and talks like Sam Guthrie; Dinah Soar, a bipedal pterodactyl; Big Bertha, a supermodel who can grow into a female version of the Blob; and Doorman, whose body is an interdimensional portal. Their then-new name, the Lightning Rods, was a reference to the Thunderbolts, a series that had just started and featured members of the Masters of Evil parading as superheroes in the wake of Onslaught (because there is a demand for hero-work, Patch!).

Once he finds Al, Wade attempts to teleport her away from the approaching Lightning Rods. Except Doorman lands on them as they’re bodysliding. The effect of two teleportation events happening simultaneously in the same space gets them stuck in time, and in Doorman. When do they end up? Keep reading!

Random observation 1: When Wade drops the disguises and goes full Deadpool at the aquarium, he tells the panicked crowd he is on a mission “to ventilate all killer whales in captivity, to ensure that the world will never have to suffer through Free Willy Four.” Free Willy: Escape from Pirate’s Cove, the fourth movie in the franchise, was released in 2010 and stars Bindi Irwin and Beau Bridges. You failed Wade. You failed.

Random observation 2: In issue #9, DP tells Deathtrap: “Yo mama so fat, she sat on a dollar bill and four quarters came out!” In issue #10, he tells Big Bertha: “Hey, I heard you sat on the rainbow and Skittles came out!” Fat-shaming aside, it might be time for some new material.

Next Thursday, we tackle Deadpool #11, in which Wade and Al get trapped in 1967’s Amazing Spider-Man #47. I love this issue so much I turned the cover into a T-shirt. See you 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.