What I Bought 12/1/2015 - Part 1

I actually have eight comics to review this time around. Things are starting to look up, and all it took was for Marvel to quit dicking around and release some new series. Or the same series that had been put on the shelf for months.

Deadpool #2, by Gerry Duggan (writer), Mike Hawthorne (penciler), Terry Pallot (inker), Val Staples (colorist), Joe Sabino (letterer) - And this is what happens when you aren't Robert Redford playing a character who knows Nick Fury. You get Deadpool at your niece's birthday party, instead of Iron Man.

The other "Deadpools" are concerned they're not being paid, and that the company isn't making any money as a result. Huh, who knew letting a crazy person run a company wouldn't be a path to financial success? They get a paying job, but it turns out to be them throwing a bunch of illegal immigrants out of their apartment building for an asshole landlord who wants to take advantage of rising property values to build a condo. Some of them - meaning not Foolkiller or Madcap - feel bad and give their shares to the people they just beat up. Did Deadpool teach them a lesson? Well, considering it may not be Deadpool, probably not. Adsit has come to visit Wade and tell him the truth of his parents death, and the hood wearing Deadpool stabs Adsit and laughs at how this will make his plan to destroy Deadpool even easier.

It's not T-Ray is it? Please tell me it isn't T-Ray. I hate that guy, in that Superboy-Prime, "don't even want to see him" way. But I can't figure who else it could be. The head ULTIMATUM guy is dead. So is Butler (and he'd know Wade did that already). I don't see this as Dracula's style. Cripes, it's going to be Agent Gorman isn't it? The SHIELD traitor who stiffed Wade on his money for rekilling all the undead Presidents. He somehow survived being thrown into a garbage compactor. Might explain Adsit's reaction.

Hawthorne's doing a pretty good job making all the Deadpools distinguishable from each other, but giving them noticeable little flourishes. Solo and Foolkiller are the only two I can't tell apart when they have masks on. I liked the page of the team smashing through the apartment building. You can follow Stingray down the page, to the two on the top floor. Madcap is directly above Terror, so you can track down to him, and then over to Solo, which takes you to his meeting with some of the tenants. I still can't quite figure either of them doing this, especially Foolkiller (who hasn't killed any fools so far), so perhaps Duggan will highlight how Wade roped them all in at some point. And if the hooded guy isn't the real Wade, where is he? It seems like he ought to have noticed this was happening, and at least been mildly curious.

I'm really enjoying this, and I want to see where Duggan and Hawthorne go next, even though I'm sure it's going to leave me feeling really bad for Wade when all is said and done.

Descender #7, by Jeff Lemire (writer), Dustin Nguyen (illustrator), Steve Wands (letterer/designer) - What is the thing in TIM's stomach region? Does he have a digestive tract, so he can simulate eating?

TIM, Telsa, and Quon are rescued by this robot resistance group called the Hardwire. They were actually only there for TIM (and to kill the Gnishian leader), but TIM wouldn't leave without the other two. He was not able to convince them to find Driller, Bandit, and Tullis, so they're stuck on a planet that hates robots, and probably won't love the UGC since the Hardwire is setting Telsa up to take the fall as part of the assassination. In a different plot thread, we meet a robot bounty hunter, one who is concerned only with finding more robots, and when he learns there's a bounty on TIM, he jumps at it. He's a few steps behind, but he finds the last survivor of that first crew that tried to catch TIM, and that guy has a tracking device locked onto TIM.

The last page reveal of the hunter's identity felt unnecessary. It was pretty obvious from how intense he was about hunting down TIM, combined with TIM's comments about how he wants to find his "brother", who the hunter was. On the other hand, given how obvious it was, at least Lemire and Nguyen didn't draw it out over several issues like some big mystery.

I do wonder how, whenever the hunter finds TIM-21, how that meeting is going to go. Considering his actions in this issue, it's going to be pretty hard for me to roll with it, if they decide for a tearful, hug-filled reunion. That seems unlikely, but he certainly didn't seem a sympathetic character. Although not many characters have been sympathetic so far. Psius is content to throw the entire galaxy into (bloody) chaos to suit his purposes. Telsa only considers TIM a means to some revenge. Quon's a thief who built his rep on others' work, and now is a pathetic wreck (though he's remarkably coherent for having an arm cut off). TIM-22 blew a guy's head off without a second thought. OK, the ruler of Gnish was a scumbag, and certainly responsible for genocide from the Hardwire's perspective, and I'm inclined to agree.

I was looking at the side-by-side panels of TIMs-21 and 22, and it's interesting how much Nguyen just raising 21's eyebrows adds to his sense of being alive. 22's face is purposefully blank, but if you cover everything below the eyes, they're still noticeably different. The eyebrows are the most obvious, but I feel like there must be something in the eyes themselves helping. I just can't figure out what. Other than that, I like how Nguyen uses his colors on the frozen world at the start of the issue. The massive amounts of white, but working in the blue to suggest ice or drifts. It's just impressive to me.