Sunday, November 22, 2020

Sunday Splash Page #141

 "Not Appropriate for Young Audiences" in Deadpool Team-Up #899, by Fred van Lente (writer), Dalibor Talijac (artist), Jeff Eckleberry (letterer)

During the time of Daniel Way's Deadpool run, the Merc with a Mouth became incredibly popular, to the extent Marvel gave him the treatment once reserved for Spider-Man. He got a second ongoing (Deadpool: Merc with a Mouth), almost a third ongoing that became a mini-series by Rob Liefeld (Deadpool Corps), and this team-up book. 

I can't actually remember what made him so popular at that point, seeing as we're still over five years away from the Deadpool movie. Heck, in this very comic, Deadpool describes this level of popularity as 'inexplicable and totally undeserved'.

Anyway, they did an oversized, one-shot 900th issue of Deadpool in late 2009, then started the numbering for this series at 899, and started running backwards. Made it all the way to 883, which isn't bad for Marvel these days. As every issue was by a different creative team, it was basically an opportunity to write their pet characters and/or do whatever random nonsense they felt like.

This was the only issue I actually bought at the time, because Arcade was in it, and van Lente and Talijac had done good work on a short story in that Deadpool #900 issue, but I've picked up maybe another 7 issues since then, and it's as much a mixed bag as you'd expect.

Jeff Parker brings in Gorilla Man from Agents of Atlas. Tom Fowler and Cullen Bunn do an issue harkening back to the Thing's days of pro wrestling. David Lapham and Shawn Crystal have Wade get married to Satana, which googum has gotten a lot of use out of at Random Happenstance over the years. Skottie Young and Ramon Perez make Wade Galactus' Herald. Stuff like that.

And with that, we are past all Deadpool-related titles. But we aren't out of the "Dead" woods yet.

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