There are plenty of X-books this week, but luckily for me they're all in mid-storyline.  That just leaves the Deadpool/GLI Summer Fun Spectacular, a comedy one-shot that really should have been funnier than it actually is.

The basic set-up is that Deadpool teams up with the GLI in the first story of the issue, and on seeing their shiny new government-funded headquarters, he promptly moves in.  The rest of the issue mostly consists of the GLI trying to get rid of him.

If you're not keeping track of extremely obscure Marvel characters, this might be a good time to point out that the GLI are the Great Lakes Initiative.  After twenty years of floating around the Marvel Universe and working through every name they could think of, the bozo squad have finally reached the (relatively) big time, appointed as the Initiative's official superhero team for Wisconsin.  They're still useless, but nothing much happens in Wisconsin, so what harm can they do?

Fabian Nicieza's Deadpool stories are usually funny.  Dan Slott's GL-whatever one-shots have also been winners.  So in theory this sounds like it should work.  And yet, and yet...

The lead story doesn't quite fly.  It's got a cute premise - AIM develop a ray to make all the proper superheroes act drunk - but it never gets to grips with the comedy potential of that.  Instead, we end up with a relatively straight team-up between Deadpool and the GLI, and it turns out that that doesn't work.

The problem is that Deadpool is a loudmouth character who dominates every scene he's in.  He just bulldozes the GLI off the page, leaving them to play the straight man as best they can.  But that's not the best use of the GLI.  We've seen a similar dynamic before when Deadpool has teamed up with baffled and appalled superheroes, and it works precisely because they're proper superheroes.  With the GLI, the chemistry's wrong.  It's just... not very funny.

In fact, the strongest part of the issue is a series of Squirrel Girl interludes, in which Deadpool doesn't appear at all.  A previous special had established that Squirrel Girl had a crush on Speedball.  This time, she belatedly learns that he's turned into Penance, and heads off to set things straight by explaining to him at painstaking length just how stupid the whole concept is. 

Nobody in their right mind could possibly take Penance seriously - even in Thunderbolts, Warren Ellis has marginalised him - and the story absolutely deserves the thunderous kicking that it gets here.  As for Penance, he just resorts to repeatedly headbutting a wall while yelling "I'm deep now!  And that means I do deep stuff like this!"  You couldn't put the boot into the character's pseudo-meaningful pretentiousness more effectively if you tried. 

That aside, though, it's an underwhelming issue that doesn't quite work.  Deadpool and the GLI sound like they ought to be a good match, but in practice, they don't fit.

Rating: C+

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