Cable & Deadpool faces a rather obvious problem just at the moment.  What do you do with the book when the X-books' wider storyline - and yes, it seems that they've got one again - calls for Cable to be dead?

Judging from the upcoming solicitations, it seems that the answer is to do a Deadpool solo title with a ton of guest stars.  First through the door is Wolverine, in the two-part "Head Games."  This picks up on a stray plot thread from a few months ago, when Deadpool broke into a Hydra base and cheerfully left his sidekick Weasel behind.  Thanks to his technical skills, Weasel has now inveigled his way into a position of authority.  This isn't as good an idea as it seems, because it means Wolverine is coming to kill him.  So Deadpool has to go back and rescue him.

It's an odd story, this.  Taken purely on its own terms, it works quite well.  Deadpool is a complete idiot, but there's something almost touching about his stubborn insistence, in the face of fairly overwhelming evidence, that his friend is not really working for Hydra.  The Hydra goons all come across as complete idiots, but then that's part of their charm; it's been years since anyone treated them as a serious threat.  Veteran artist Ron Lim strikes the right balance between straight superheroics and nonsense.  And however childish it may be, Nicieza gets away with a string of jokes based on Weasel's ridiculous new identity as the Penetraitor.

But in the wider picture, I'm not quite sure where this is heading.  Despite the best efforts of a framing sequence to convince me otherwise, this doesn't come across as any sort of fall-out from Cable's supposed death.  Instead, he seems to have vanished from the series almost completely.  To the extent that the series is at the mercy of the wider X-Men plot, that may be unavoidable, but it still feels a little odd that his own title isn't following up more clearly on his absence.

I'm also starting to wonder how much mileage Nicieza can get from his new pet character, Bob, Agent of Hydra.  The gag is funny enough - he's a completely ordinary man who happens to be an agent of the demented quasi-fascist terror group.  So the recap page is done as his blog entry, complete with a "Hydra is in your extended network" banner and so forth.  But now that he's turning into a full scale member of the supporting cast, the logic problems start to mount up - what on earth was this guy doing in Hydra in the first place?  He's too much of a joke character to really work as a regular, I think.

Still, it's a fun enough story.  If the series is treading water - which it may well be - at least it's doing so entertainingly.

Rating: B

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