I ended up taking a break from Deadpool for most of 2017. The post-Civil War II arc was a waste of time of Deadpool trying to hunt down and kill Madcap, only to fail and let him escape. Then, they'd gotten in the habit of doing extra-sized $10 issues, where the extra content was usually underwhelming. Then there was a crossover between all the Deadpool related titles as Shiklah went to war against the humans. Then there were Secret Empire tie-ins.
So I skipped about 8 months. By the time I came back, they renamed the book, did the "legacy" numbering, and Deadpool was a wanted criminal for his part in HYDRA Captain America's crimes, hated by all. Although Duggan really tried hard to convince us everyone was pissed Deadpool killed Phil Coulson. Agent Preston, sure? Nice Captain America, yeah possibly. But why would Rogue give a shit about Phil Coulson?
Stryfe had saved Wade's daughter and Preston's family when Madcap exposed them to a bio-weapon, and called in his marker. First Wade was supposed to kill Cable and cut out his heart. Which he did (sorta), but the impact was totally neutered by Duggan having Cable state he never liked or trusted Wade. If Cable's just one more person who thinks Wade's a fuck-up, instead of the last person who believed in him, then who cares? Did Duggan think the audience had some sort of intrinsic interest in Cable himself? Pfft, nobody actually likes Cable.
After that, Deadpool had to kill three more people (including Cable/Deadpool supporting cast member Irene Merryweather for reasons that were never, to my knowledge, revealed), while dodging the X-Men, Captain America, and Rogue. This did lead to one good issue, where Wade repeatedly makes Cap look bad in front of the public, which had been so willing to accept the "evil, Cosmic Cube-created alternate version" excuse. I gave up on the book after that.
There was another arc of, I think, Wade putting a bounty on himself and trying to get the villains to kill him, without success. Then the final, 300th issue, that I bought used a month ago. Which opens with Wade spraying himself with some alien super-weapon and calling out the Avengers, only to learn the weapon is something that makes everyone puke. Yes, it's multiple pages of an extended vomit joke. Be glad I didn't use the full-page splash of Giant Man inundating an entire street.
Then he meets Gerry Duggan, kills him, steals his car, and tries to wipe all his memories back to at least the Gail Simone era. Unless "Black Box" was a reference to Gareb's presence in Cable/Deadpool. Hard to tell. Basically so Skottie Young could take Deadpool back to being an amoral mercenary. Well, at least there was a reason this time for the character setback. That's more than Daniel Way gave us. And I guess I can't fault Duggan for knowing Marvel would undo everything he did, and at least this way he got to do it his way.
Since it hasn't finished yet, we're skipping over the current Kelly Thompson-written run, and moving to assorted one-shots and mini-series. There's still about a month of Deadpool stuff to go, but we'll get through it.
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