Well X-force through it’s run is all over the goddamn map. I’m reading it now so I can’t speak to everything but it’s a trip.
DP and Cable were only replaced for a year then shoved into a book with each other. So sad Leifeld gets a cut when he barely did any of the work that made them popular.
I was on board with Deadpool from New Mutants 98, when he was just a teleporting ninja guy. That Joe Madureira on going series pushed him all the way into wacky territory, but that was probably also the last time that was done well aside from that team up series from the 2010s.
Cable was huge from the get go though!
Nah, Deadpool has had tons of great comics, certainly some low points as well but overall a great character, but Madurira on DP was just the Circle Chase. A fun 4 issue mini to be sure, but IDK if it did anything that crazy with the character.
Yeah the first two DP limited series he was still just the “Merc with a mouth” lots of wise cracking and such but that was really it. When he got his ongoing series is where it started getting wacky but the first arc/writer was still limited in that and did some nice things with him as a character. Successive writers and arcs kind of ebbed and flowed, like the one where he had a space jailbreak with a really pointed out Totally Not Lobo, or the one which was kind of like a sitcom starring working class supervillians, but then you get ones like a renewed Weapon X team that he gets involved with which was pretty serious.
The Cable and Deadpool run seemed to be Fabian Nicieza seizing his chance to go back and kind of sift through all that had happened and put Deadpool back on a track where he could be silly while still being taken seriously as a character, even if it ultimately didn’t stick.
Oh yeah! Ed McGuinness was the artist on that Joe Kelly run, not Madureira. I’ve had those two mixed up for years.
They were both drawing weird SFA Akuma noses on everyone.
the end of his 90s ongoing (the gail simone run iirc?), the taskmaster and agent x minis, and cable & deadpool were the deadpool golden age.
also i didn’t know about the legal stuff leading to agent x’s creation. that explains why they were so coy about whether or not he was actually deadpool!
it’s interesting how deadpool and harley quinn both had ongoing series, and both those ongoing series had a shit super-serious arc with a dark tone. deadpool had a story where some (non-super) old flame was in trouble with gangsters or something, while harley quinn had an even worse story where harley permanently blinds a little girl to unlock a safe.
and now both characters are cash cows for their owners after being wildly changed.
Yeah, came here to call out Gail Simone’s Four Winds arc and the subsequent Agent X spinoff as being the high point of Deadpool, at least for me.
Simone’s Run across DP and Agent X along with Kelly’s run are the heights of the character before he got locked into anything.
As mentioned Cable and Deadpool is also excellent.
I think there are other minis and moments with ol’ DP that are real standouts but it would take a new focus for him to top those.
I am hoping he gets a new ongoing soon though. I’d rather that then some of the X books being pushed right now. Just throw him into Krakoa. He’d fit in with that whole villainous lot.
I’ll have to check out those later issues. I think I only read through the first couple Christopher Priest issues, and by the time I saw it had switched to Agent X i totally stopped even paying attention. I’m not sure if Gail Simone was even on my radar before The Movement.
That’s not her… best work.
If you wanna check out Simone’s best stuff I’d say yes the DP/Agent X stuff (and follow ups there like Dominio are good)
Secret Six/Villans United at DC
Her Birds of Prey (that’s a whopper)
Her Wonder Woman run
and I know some people swear by her Red Sonja.
oooh I like its angularity and how it looks to be made of concrete.
Sam Zabel And The Magic Pen: checked this out for the slightly cruel reason that the cover made me think it’d be the most on the nose possible daniel clowes pastiche - which turned out to be unfair, it’s not really similar and the art is good, clear but weighty feeling, the story… is about a middle aged cartoonist who gets over his writers block by teleporting into the worlds of various mildly pornographic comic books, like an M rated version of The Pagemaster… there’s a lot of talk throughout about what morality we may owe to our horrible dreams or desires but it feels kind of perfunctory, firstly because the desires as depicted already feel like they’ve been softpedalled (lots of nude cartoon people but none of the charged obsessive feeling of a Go Nagai or whoever) and secondly because the two spunky female sidekicks clear up any anxieties as soon as they emerge by explaining the importance of Enjoying but also Subverting The Text at the same time, by e.g. teaching the planet of sexy green wish fulfilment aliens about consent in a single panel. and the thing is that this careful sense of ringfencing off any potentially dubious parts makes them feel more heightened and queasy when they do emerge. eg: the teenage sidekick in a school uniform and rocket boots who was hanging out on the sidelines is eventually revealed to be a “manga” character who escaped from a tentacle porn comic drawn by a different, evil cartoonist, and the evil guy then captures a different girl and is going to push her into the tentacles but the manga one is like no… take me instead… sadly saying “this is what i was made for” with tears in her eyes… but then the other girl then Subverts that by shooting the tentacle pit with a rocket launcher instead and they all go back to declaiming inspiring things about art and imagination or whatever. i don’t know. contra the message of the rest of the book it’s like all the potential sleaziness kept carefully out of sight in the earlier pages actually became worse by being re-cast into this crazily melodramatic, moralized form. i would probably be less put off by whatever this person happens to be into than i am by all the plot machinery they used to construct the “good” version of that.
Black Hammer: i checked this out cuz it had an enthusiastic blurb from mike mignola on it and i think it might be the worst comic series i’ve ever read? certainly the one which felt least interested in being a comic as opposed to like, source material for some eventual hbo adaptation. there are superheroes but they’re all living on a farm together and pretending to be a family in a strangely idyllic 1950s town which is actually some kind of pocket dimension which they can’t leave, and there are various self contained stories like “the Martian Manhunter analogue is also The Only Gay In The Pocket Dimension” but also a Longer Arc in which a detective in the regular world tries to find out what happened to these people. there’s a little girl who swears all the time and smokes cigarettes and is actually a Reverse Captain Marvel where she’s actually an adult stuck in a child’s body and still has an adult sex drive and she hits on the alien but he explains it would be weird. it’s like someone went yeah, an emotional beat, that’s like the part in Scrubs episodes where they play a Keane song or something right, and tried to make things that hit that shape but which are too crazily unreal as problems to mean anything. also: as a coathanger for an entire Black Hammer Universe of offbrand superhero guys (including as i write this: Black Hammer '45, Black Hammer Reborn, Black Hammer Visions, and a crossover comic where they meet the justice league) it sucks, i don’t remember a single superguy that was inventive or funny, at best it got to the webcomic level of like having a guy named Dr T-Rex who’s a doctor and also a t-rex, or similar. except if that was a character in this comic they’d be sure to throw in a scene where Dr T-Rex explains how hard it is to deal with looking like a t-rex, emotionally, and then it shows another character looking sympathetic. really makes you think.
Hal Foster era Prince Valiant was really good, did you get as far as Prince Valiant disguising himself as a demon that was the direct inspo for Jack Kirby’s Demon?
Which editions did you pick up? The old off-white bordered softcovers or the newer hardcovers?
I was just talking to my dad about Prince Valiant and he got inspired to read through his Foster era set of the former. I had kept a list in my wallet for years of the volumes he was missing, but he finally ebayed em a couple years back. I think the new editions finally drove the prices down on the originals. Those new ones are supposed to have better color treatments I hear.
it was one of the newer skinny hardcovers, honestly the colours are good enough that i was convinced they’d be expensive hyper-boutiquey editions but apparently the Youth Of Today showed enough inexplicable collective disinterest to knock the price down a bit. i’d only read like a page or two before from the big smithsonian newspaper comic anthology and bounced of them, and then ended up getting the book on the strength of opening it at random to see a beautifully colored panel of a volcano erupting, so i wouldn’t be surprised if it’s a noticeable difference!
I was shocked at how cheap those hardcovers are. I guess those color Marvel Essentials collections are just mega overpriced and messed up my frame of reference.
If I wasn’t just a conversation away from borrowing those old versions, I’d be tempted to start picking up the hardcovers myself.
I’ve only really read a handful of strips based on which ever of those 80s books had the best covers.
The one with the monastery protected by the fake dragon and one of the Viking related story lines are standouts in my memory.
