Last month in Cable & Deadpool, Deadpool spent the issue ineptly investigating the murder of a thinly-disguised Osama Bin Laden stand-in, only to find that it was him.  Which came as a bit of a surprise to him, because he couldn't remember it at all.

The traditional ending to this story, of course, is that the hero discovers that he's been framed and that it wasn't him at all.  This being Deadpool, things go a little differently.  The idea is that it was in fact Deadpool, and his mental health has now deteriorated to the point where he's wandering around killing people and doesn't even remember it.  Even Deadpool finds this a little disturbing.

Cable & Deadpool is an "odd-couple" team-up book, and thus far Deadpool's role has generally been to provide the comic relief while Nicieza worked on reshaping Cable into a more workable character.  With that side of things completed in the first year, the focus shifts to Deadpool, a character who's become such an anarchic loudmouth comedy figure that it was starting to become debatable whether there was much of a personality in there at all.   The reversal here is to have Deadpool himself realise that, and finally recognise just how disturbed he actually is.  Not that this sobers him up any - it can't, that's just how he is - but at least he gets a moment of lucidity out of it.

Playing on Deadpool's mental health problems to buy him sympathy has worked before.  Joe Kelly got a whole series out of it.  But Nicieza's take on the character is significantly madder than Kelly's.  Kelly's Deadpool was more emotionally disturbed.  Nicieza's version is losing touch with reality.  Playing this sort of character for tragedy is tricky, but the issue more or less manages to pull it off.

While that's going on, Nicieza sets about unscrambling the mess he was left from the X-Force miniseries.  Cable duly wanders off to appear in that book, so that he can vanish in X-Force #6 and set up the next storyline.  Ah, the good old days when people actually tried to resolve dangling plots. It warms the heart.

As usual, great fun, wisely not taking itself too seriously.  Always one of the most entertaining X-books.

Rating: A-

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