Deadpool #4: Holy Chimichangas, Batma-er Wade! Those are Flying Eyeballs!

In terms of pacing and narrative flare, this was the best issue of Deadpool’s current run, so far. A lot happened (about twenty years worth of mayhem ensued, in-panel) but it was delivered to the audience via a series of texts and phone messages, interlaced with pages that served as condensed capsules of narrative which all came together in the end before falling apart (spectacularly) on the very last page. It felt like a cohesive story, played in fast forward; not an info dump. All of the elements were there (Deadie’s arrival, his fiery rebirth, his first encounter with the natives, captured by an evil wizard, his rescue by the love-interest, his marriage, and his inevitable, irreverent betrayal of his spouse) but they might as well have been backed by a saxophone playing Yakkety Sax.

In short, it was a very Deadpool story, as told by Skottie Young. It was Deadpool meets I Hate Fairyland.

The art was the biggest let-down, here. It was sketchy where Weird World would have been better drawn as a cartoon. We want to see the weirdness clearly. There were a great many panels in this issue that were nearly indecipherable to me. Here’s an example.

This is meant to be a picture of a flying wolf plucking Wade from a river of fire and delivering him to its nest.

Wade is difficult to make out. The dog is painful to look at.

Ordinarily, I think that Scott Hepburn’s work is appropriate for the book. He’s good at creating gross-out details and implying a lot of action. But Weird World would have been better as something of a cartoon.

It wasn’t uniformly ineffective. Hepburn’s style worked appropriately in some of the scenes (the montage double-spread posted below is a prime example of that fact) but he’s better when he works on a wider canvass. The speed and pace (which were great strengths of the script) did a disservice to his work.

This does not detract from the overall (disgusting, hilarious) quality of the issue.