Growing pains lead to a lot of confusion.
Deadpool "parody" crossover tie-ins have become the norm with Marvel events, but I've never been one to purchase them. I decided to give Fear Itself: Deadpool a shot, but wasn't exactly impressed.
The Good
Well, the Juggernaut, as one of the serpent's monsters, is in this issue.
The Bad
Maybe it's because I've rarely found Deadpool funny, but this issue just seemed to fall flat with me. There were a couple nice "caption" gags that we've come to expect, but for some reason nothing really got done in this issue. At its core, Deadpool is trying to scam money from people in order to protect their houses from Fear Itself related disasters, then decides to con a "F-Class" villain with a fake hammer in order to jack his protection rates up, or.. something. This reasoning is literally triggered by an explosion and a hammer colliding with his skull, so it took me, as a reader, a little while to wrap my head around it.
It's actually kind of unclear what's going on for most of this issue. Deadpool tries to convince an old Spider-Man villain that he has one of the Asgardian hammers to follow some plumbers to a New Mexico city in order to get some money and... yeah. The plumbers may or may not be magical agents, and there may or may not be a feral person made out of fur after them.
It's only on the last panel does Wade tell us that his scheme is to make it seem like the Walrus is a harbinger of doom, then get the citizens to pay him to run the shlub out of town. This really could have been established earlier, with more clarity.
Incoherent story aside, I'm surprised that Christopher Hastings didn't really get a good grasp on Deadpool; I mean, he wrote Doctor McNinja, for Pete's sake! I'm not sure if this is just a rough transition that'll get better with later issues, but it just seemed that Wade was missing what makes him entertaining in this issue: while he's clearly insane, there's a method to his madness that the reader's usually in on for the whole ride. This time, it just seemed like one random event after another with little holding it together.
The Verdict
As I've stated above, there's a lot of confusing little tidbits in this book that don't quite add up. Are the plumbers more than they appear? Is the hammer really magic? What effect will it have on the Walrus? Who was that weird fur person? Why did he fire a bazooka at the plumbers' van? Will Wade really learn the true meaning of capitalism?
All this and more in issue two, I suppose, but at the moment I'm finding it hard to care.
