The present state of Cable & Deadpool is a little confusing.  With Cable supposedly dead, in the service of a wider X-Men storyline, the book has warped into an unspoken Deadpool Team-Up series.  Cable, we know, is getting an ongoing solo title after the "Messiah Complex" crossover.  The obvious inference is that Cable & Deadpool is either killing time in a transitional phase, or simply waiting for the inevitable.

This month's guest stars are the Fantastic Four.  Thanks to an ongoing time travel story, Nicieza is able to use them twice - a Lee/Kirby version who can't understand why Deadpool thinks it must be 1967, and the current version with the Black Panther and Storm.

The point to all this doesn't really become clear until the final scenes.  The idea is that once again, Deadpool is inspired to try his hand at being a hero, following Cable's heroic sacrifice, and his recent team-ups with iconic heroes such as Captain America and the Fantastic Four. 

Now, we've been here before.  Deadpool's awkward attempts to become a hero were a central theme when Joe Kelly wrote his stories.  But it can work, and there are certainly worse things you could do with him.  The key in Kelly's stories is that Deadpool doesn't quite have the right motivations to become a hero.  He doesn't actually have any altruistic urges to help people.  Instead, he's ashamed of the sort of person he is, and also hopes for the respect of his peers.  So he tries to do the right thing, not entirely successfully, and for reasons that are slightly dubious.  Nicieza seems to be going for a more straightforward approach of actually inspiring Deadpool to do good, and I'm not sure that's necessarily the most interesting way to go.

Anyhow, the wider purpose of this story is to expose Deadpool to the Fantastic Four, and allow him to be impressed by them.  That's fine.  But it only works if there's a story along the way, and unfortunately, that's where the issue falls down. 

Nicieza has always had a weak spot for writing pseudo-scientific gobbledegook, and then placing it at the heart of his story.  This story does it in a self-deprecating way, but it still does it.  The plot, put simply, is that Deadpool and his sidekick Bob show up in the Baxter Building in the past, because they're lost in time.  The past FF agree to stick them in a time machine and send them home.  On their way, they bump into the present day FF who are coming back to retrieve them, and they nearly get lost until the two FFs team up to retrieve them.

That's basically it.  But to follow that, you've got to hack your way through dialogue like "Can you narrow the egress points for their chronal signatures to minimise our search parameters?" and "They're creating bifurcated timelines with themselves as the fulcrum for the divergence stream."  The story certainly acknowledges how silly this stuff is, but some of the dialogue is actually essential to explain what's going on. The latter, line, for example, is as close as the book comes to explaining why the FF are so worried about Deadpool becoming lost in time again.

The other problem here is a lack of drama.  There are no villains, no antagonists, and no moral choices.  Deadpool shows up in the past, has the obligatory misunderstanding fight with the FF, and is then offered a lift home.  From there on, everyone is simply solving a minor practical problem described in gibberish.

Now, it's a perfectly readable issue.  There are some fun moments, and some cute dialogue.  Reilly Brown's art is always charming, and the sequence with Deadpool and Bob in the time vortex is visually impressive.  And at least there's a serious attempt to advance Deadpool's story.

But overall, this suffers from the curse of most team-up books - the need to shoehorn a fresh guest into the plot every month seems to be taking precedence over the stories.

Rating: B-

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