Skipping past Deadpool: Games of Death, which is an enjoyable, but sadly lacking in splash pages, one-shot by Mike Benson and Shawn Crystal where Deadpool goes undercover in a death stunt reality show with a bunch of parodies of various action heroes, we come to this.
Released in the post-Civil War Marvel of 2007, when the Great Lakes Avengers were part of the Initiative as Wisconsin's official super-team, and Cable was "dead". It's a bunch of short comics with two threads that run through it.
One is Squirrel Girl finding out that thanks to Mark Millar and Paul Jenkins, her crush Speedball is now the completely idiotic Penance, and setting out to fix this. This involves Doom's time machine, references to a story from the at-that-time current volume of Marvel Team-Up (the same volume Robert Kirkman used to do a Spider-Man/Invincible team-up), and Niels the bouncing cat becoming P-Cat, the penitent puss.
The other is that, after they team up to stop an AIM plot to incapacitate all the "real" superheroes with an inebriation ray created by harnessing the power of the completely wasted god Dionysus (seen above), the GLI invite Deadpool to join the team and then can't get rid of him. Eventually the two storylines dovetail and the comic ends. Speedball is still not released from the ridiculous hell the character was dumped in, but oh well.
It's silly, and treats the entire idea of Speedball becoming a character whose powers are triggered by pain so he wears an iron maiden for a costume with exactly as much respect as it deserves. I love it.
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