The issue before this had a full-page splash of Domino basically drooling over Shang-Chi. I'd have used it if I went with the "Domino in a bikini" splash page two weeks ago. Should try for equal opportunity objectification, right?
So Domino got her first shot at an honest-to-goodness ongoing series in spring of 2018, roughly coinciding with the character's big screen debut in Deadpool 2 (the series started in April, the movie was released in May in the U.S.) Gail Simone wrote the book, no stranger to the world of Cable-adjacent characters (see Sunday Splash Pages #5 and #132).
Where the two earlier mini-series focused on Domino's past, either her questions about it or ours - I assume someone was asking about if she'd been married - Simone gave her a small mercenary team to lead, consisting of Deadpool supporting cast member Outlaw, and old Serpent Society and Captain America love interest Diamondback. Diamondback being a sort of well-to-do upper crust type didn't seem to track with any previous characterization, but oh well. That way they could get hired for jobs and encounter complications, ala Simone's Secret Six, or Birds of Prey. It's a reliable storytelling approach.
Which isn't to say Simone didn't some use of the character's backstory. The first arc was Domino being menaced by two other subjects from the same program that Pruett and Stelfreeze established as having experimented on her in their mini-series. Simone took a love/hate approach for Domino and her luck power. That she sort of blindly trusted it would keep her alive, but it might leave her bruised and bleeding for the privilege. She also made Domino a little more, I want to say spastic? Not so much a cool, composed mercenary. Maybe that's meant to be a result of knowing your power could save your life in the most embarrassing way possible.
David Baldeon was the series artist for most of the run, although he drew very little of the last two issues, where Domino's hired to kill Longshot to save the world. He has a fluid enough line to draw a Domino that looks exhausted, messy, and confused in bunny slippers and an X-Force commemorative t-shirt, but can also thicken them to make characters look extremely intense or psychotic. Which comes up fairly often in this series.
The series got canceled after 10 issues and one Annual, although there was immediately a five-issue mini-series, which we'll get to next week. My biggest issue with this series was stories seemed to just end abruptly, with major points relegated to offhand comments. The first story raises a question of someone on Domino's team being a traitor, and that's explained and brushed off in one panel. The characters would be in dire situations, where it seemed like someone was going to do a heroic sacrifice, then they were simply OK. A repeated, "Is that it?" reaction.
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