Slapstick - That's Not Funny

There may never have been a truer title. Maybe it read better in digital form.

This was a digital-first mini-series Marvel put out in 2016 or 2017, when they did that whole "Deadpool and the Mercs for Money" thing after Secret Wars kinda-sorta rebooted maybe rebooted shit.

The whole story is Slapstick trying to find a way to stop being a living cartoon, mostly so he can get his dick back. If you took a shot for every use of the word "dingus" in this thing, you would easily die of alcohol poisoning. He fights a lot of stuff: Spider-Man, Quasimodo (the Marvel villain, not the Hunchback of Notre Dame the villain's based on), sort-of SHIELD types, and lots of cartoon characters.

Slapstick keeps up a real stream of consciousness for the banter, but none of it is funny. He makes Deadpool look like a comic genius. Most of attempts at humor are other characters commenting on how much Slapstick sucks, or how much of a loser he is. Points he doesn't do much to disprove, so it's just kind of sad.

Reilly Brown storyboards and Diego Olortegui draws the rest, with Jim Campbell handling the color work, and they do a nifty job using a much simpler style and colors for Slapstick than everyone from the Marvel Universe. The characters that cross over from Dimension Ecch get the same color work and art style as Slapstick, more simplified, more old-school cartoon approach. That side of things works pretty well.

I'm not sure the point of de-cartoonifying Dimension Ecch. It could be commentary for this incessant need to make everything grimmer and more "adult". The people from a universe where folks get maimed and injured marching into the cartoon place where no dies (but everyone is actually miserable), and "saving" it, by making it just like their universe. But it's treated like it really was a good thing they did, which is just kind of stupid. Yes, make Dimension Ecch just like every other freaking universe Marvel has now, depressing and realistic, and blandly, muddily colored! That's what we need more of!

Anyway, I'm not sure if Slapstick has shown up anywhere since this, and if he has, I doubt this story got referenced since the only significant change would be he might have a girlfriend, and it would be easy enough to say they broke up off-panel.