It's Christmas, and it's a very quiet week for X-books, so it seems like a great opportunity to not write very much.  After all, you're getting the review of the year next week, and that's usually on the large side. 

There are only two X-books this week, and they're both single issue stories.  Cable & Deadpool #35 is a transitional story which presumably exists to set up the next arc - a multi-part Deadpool story which, no doubt, has the happy side-effect of allowing this book to keep its options open while it waits to find out what X-Men will be doing with Cable.

Remarkably, Cable & Deadpool is now coming up for its third birthday.  In this day and age, it's hard for any new title to make it to three years.  On top of that, in this case, not only were both lead characters were coming off short-lived, unsuccessful solo titles, but they had no terribly obvious reason to share a book.  To his credit, instead of shoehorning them into a contrived status quo, writer Fabian Nicieza has allows the book to remain continually unstable, with the characters never quite able to drift apart, but unable to tolerate one another's company for more than a few issues at most.

That's part of the point of this issue, in which Cable embarks on an utterly bizarre plan to get Deadpool back on side, by hypnotising him so that he ends up seeing ghosts of all the people he killed.  The theory is that he'll have an attack of conscience and come for help.  Unfortunately, Deadpool doesn't have a conscience, at least in any conventionally understood sense, and just regards the ghosts as a confusing nuisance.

Clearly we're leading into a story of Deadpool becoming uncomfortable about his lack of morals and trying to do something about it.  I'm wary about this, since Joe Kelly already explored the subject very thoroughly a few years ago, and it's going to be very tough to find a new take on the idea.  For much of this issue, the book doesn't quite hit those heights - it's hindered, in part, by the fact that many of Deadpool's victims are extraordinarily obscure characters and the stories in question are fading from memory.  But there are some great moments of comedy, and at the end, it does pull off a nicely timed moment of pathos, so for the moment it gets the benefit of the doubt.

Reilly Brown's artwork continues to impress me. He's got a much surer sense of body language and expression than most artists, and he's able to walk the fine line between comedy and drama that the script calls for.  He's a sound storyteller with a clear (but understated) manga influence, and the story is lucky to have him.

Not an entirely successful story, then.  But mostly it works, there's plenty of entertainment value, and the art is lovely.  Fine by me.

Rating: B+

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