It's Christmas, and you know what that means - absolutely tons of X-books.  It's a very heavy week, so you'll forgive me if we take some of these briefly.

Cable & Deadpool is now closing in on cancellation, with another two issues to run before the finish.  You may recall that Cable was written out of the book several months ago to coincide with his death in X-Men, since when the series has effectively become Deadpool Team-Up.  Cable's return in "Messiah Complex" hasn't changed that (although frankly it would be nice if he could at least pop his head around the door for the finale in February).  This is still a Deadpool series.

There are difficulties with this format.  By their nature, team-up books tend to become a little contrived.  A high-profile guest star - or at least a reasonably established one - has to show up each month and play a significant role in the plot.  But at the same time, Deadpool is trying to get on with a story of his own, in which those guest stars naturally don't have much of an interest.  It's not ideal.

What's more, when Cable was around, he was the real focus of the series.  Deadpool's story was mainly about how he related to Cable.  Now, with Cable nowhere to be seen, we're back to the old standard Deadpool plot - beneath the anarchic behaviour, he wants to be a better person.   He learns moral lessons about how he could be a better person.  The problem is that we've seen this many times before, and it never really seems to lead to anything.

This issue, for example, Deadpool is teamed up with Brother Voodoo in a very odd and hard-to-follow story in which he apparently has to "educate" the soul of his arch-enemy T-Ray so that it can be rejoined with T-Ray's body.  Or, possibly, the whole thing has been put on by Brother Voodoo to try and teach them both a moral lesson to encourage them to be better.

Reilly Brown's art is effective, and the jokes are generally funny.  Bob, a supporting character who doesn't really work, is sidelined for most of the issue.  But the story is one of those inexplicable mystical plots in which essentially random things happen for the length of a story and the significance of anything the characters choose to do is, at best, elusive.  Nicieza doesn't really seem that interested in T-Ray, who seems to be in the story as a grudging concession to the fact that he's the closest thing Deadpool has to an arch-enemy.

It's diverting enough, and there are a couple of moments that work, but the whole is definitely less than the sum of its parts.

Rating: C+

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