Deadpool (2012) #15-19

Deadpool #15-19

Originally released in 2013

Written by Brian Posehn and Gerry Duggan

Art by Declan Shalvey

After seeing the movie Deadpool & Wolverine yesterday (a ton of fun - hard to believe it's the only MCU movie releasing this year, and the first MCU project to be released since Echo came out six months ago), I was in the mood for more comics featuring the two of them.  I had seen that there was a storyline in one of Deadpool's books that involved those two and Captain America called "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly," though I didn't know much about it beyond that.

A shadowy organization has been kidnapping Deadpool for years, taking chunks of his body to research while messing with his memory in the process.  The leader, Butler, wants to use this research to cure cancer, motivated by a woman who he keeps frozen.  The woman turns out to be his sister, which results in a lot of his interactions with her unconscious body being rather creepy.

Figuring that someone must be targeting other survivors of super soldier programs, Deadpool goes to Wolverine and Captain America for help, but they don't take him seriously.  However, the threat is real, and Deadpool is captured and taken to the country that's benefiting from Butler's experiments.

It's quickly made clear that the country in question is North Korea, which is using Deadpool's harvested body parts to make bargain-bin mutants.  These pseudo-mutants vaguely resemble classic X-Men from the Claremont era, but they have Deadpool's physical deformities and a healing factor that is inconsistent at best.  Fearing that his program will be uncovered, Butler has Wolverine and Captain America captured as well; somehow, Wolverine can tell which country he's in through smell alone.

Throughout this, Deadpool is being haunted (and occasionally possessed) by a SHIELD agent named Preston.  He's hoping to get her a body, whether it's a Life Model Decoy, a clone, or something else, but in the meantime, she serves as a conscience along with someone he can talk to.

The mock mutants (aside from Kim, who's the pseudo-Nightcrawler, and Park, the North Korean version of Wolverine) don't get a ton of development, though their inclusion gives the book a lot of heartfelt and tragic moments. It's clear that these people have been tortured by their own government for a half-baked super-soldier program that seems to have an extremely low success rate. (Their attempt at getting people who were pumped full of Nightcrawler DNA to teleport involved tying them to a post, pointing guns at their heads, and shooting them in the back of the head unless they teleported out of the way of the bullet)

Of the three main characters, Deadpool gets the lion's share of the focus (it is his book, after all), while Captain America doesn't get a lot to do. Wolverine's somewhere in the middle of Captain America and Deadpool, both in terms of focus and morality. There were a few developments going on in X-Men at this time that I wasn't aware of - Nightcrawler is apparently dead, while Wolverine lost his healing factor.

The comic wasn't as fun as I was expecting it to be when I only knew that it was a story involving those three heroes - as it turns out, most of the story is set in a North Korean prison camp and heavily involves human experimentation, which puts a damper on the mood. This is reflected in Deadpool's characterization - at the start of it, he's a motor-mouth, though by the end, he's dead serious or not talking at all, which is usually a bad sign for whoever he's up against.  It still has some comedic moments, like Wolverine teaching the North Korean mutants about the Fastball Special, but overall, it's pretty dark.

 

Unlike the movie that this story was named after, the comic doesn't involve much conflict between the title characters, which was nice to see.  There's some disagreements, but overall, there's a lot of respect between the three of them - even if Deadpool can get on the nerves of others, Captain America and Wolverine consider him a hero even when others look down on him.  It strikes a nice balance, and I'm glad I read this story for those interactions alone.