I'm a little bit disappointed with Cable & Deadpool #12.

We've got a nice simple plot here.  Deadpool has recovered the alien thingie that he needs to save Cable.  But parties unknown have hired Agent X to stop him from using it.  So they have a fight and, as you might expect, Deadpool gets the job done.  Cable is duly overhauled and reset to the days when he was a basic cyborg without all the ludicrously excessive psychic powers.

By Nicieza's standards, a remarkably straightforward plot.  So why doesn't it quite work?  Too much wisecracking, I think.  With Cable comatose for most of the issue, it's really a Deadpool story.  Agent X is brought in as a guest star, presumably because putting him with Deadpool seemed like a good match.  It's actually a very bad match, because either one of those characters tends to overpower a scene with his incessant babbling.  Put two of them in a room together, and give both of them some rather erratic preoccupations, and the result is that they yell nonsense at one another for as long as they can, while the plot whimpers gently in the corner. 

They're just a bit too much.  There are some semi-interesting ideas here about Agent X's sense of identity now that he knows he's a composite character (although, er, didn't he lose all those scars in the final issue of his series?).  But they really do get buried beneath a whole lot of shouting.  The question of who hired Agent X, which surely ought to be a really huge plot point, is virtually ignored because none of the characters care.  They're too busy doing their schtick.

All that said, I'm still interested in the direction of this book.  Although Nicieza has wiped out Cable's insane psychic powers, he hasn't just reset him to the gun-toting nutcase days of 1990.  The agenda is still the same, and he's still running his Providence commune on his new island nation.  It used to be his great big flying base, but he doesn't have psychic powers to keep it up any more, so it's an island now.  Anyhow, that means we're holding on to the more interesting character aspects of the humanist crusader take on the character; he just doesn't have the power to back up his grand ambitions any more, which is a promising new direction to go in.  It also, of course, solves the problem that the two title characters are on vastly disparate power levels, which has plagued the book up until now.

A misfire, then, but the general direction is still promising.

Rating: B-

back | continue