'Cable & Deadpool Volume 1: If Looks Could Kill' – Nicieza, Brooks, Zircher et al (Marvel)



Me and Deadpool (ok ok, Deadpool and I...) have been through some tough times together, by which I mean that the only comics I didn't sell, when I was moving around Lewisham, were those featuring the Merc with a Mouth. No matter who is on writing duties, Iydo the job nicely.
I knew that Deadpool and mutant time traveller Cable are supposed to be on fairly good terms but I've never read any of their early stories so when I saw 'Cable & Deadpool Volume 1' going crazy cheap on Amazon... Well, it was way past time I gave it a shot. And check out the Liefeld art on the cover, strange how you can't see their feet isn't it...?
Well, 'Cable & Deadpool Volume 1' was alright but... I'm not in a massive hurry to pick up Volume 2, lets put it that way.

Wade Wilson and Nathan Summers are, and this time they're stuck with each other!
Can two grown men armed to the teeth with deadly genetic weaponry live together without driving each other crazy?! Action, adventure, black humour, black ops, face changing viruses, gratuitous France bashing and lots of gunfire mark the return of two of Marvel's fan-favourite anti-heroes!

I love a blurb like this one as it is so honest, seriously. Look at it again, this blurb is promising so much but by omission, it's also telling the reader that there's one thing that you are not going to get here.
Yep, 'If Looks Could Kill' is crammed full of everything that the blurb promises but the one thing that this book doesn't have is a story.

To be fair, this is the opening book in a series so there is still plenty of time for the plot to kick in further down the road. There's also a teeny tiny little plot about the One World Church wanting to turn everyone blue but that hardly counts, not when everything is clearly set up for Cable and Deadpool to face off and start knocking seven shades of you know what out of each other.
So what you have then is the vague promise of a story kicking in (at some point, in another book) but plenty of everything that the blurb promised in the meantime. Is that payoff worth it?

Well, what 'Volume 1' does is done very well. I laughed in all the right spots (Cable blowing a hole in Deadpool's head, knowing that he'll regenerate, made me chuckle every time) and there is enough intrigue to keep the pages turning. It's when you realise that what the intrigue is hinting at is not enough to carry this volume... That's when it starts to feel a little hollow really. The punch-ups are fine but I wanted more and I'm not sure that I'm ok with hints of story to come, what's wrong with doing a little more with what you already have?

'If Looks Could Kill' is a perfectly serviceable comic book then and the shifts that Brooks and Zircher put in resulted in some frankly gorgeous looking art that unfortunately, were ultimately the only thing that kept the pages turning this time round. Maybe I'll read Volume 2 one day but it's way down the list of priorities.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

‘The Long and Hungry Road’ – Adrian Tchaikovsky (Black Library)

Image
After not finishing ‘Witchbringer’ (not the book’s fault, I still think it could be worth your time), I thought I’d change pace a little and go for a short, sharp burst of something instead. Something that would blow a few cobwebs away and wake me up a bit :o) Now in my experience, there’s nothing shorter and sharper than a Warhammer short story so that was the direction of my reading taken care of. And as far as the focus went… I’ve read a few Warhammer tales, in my time, but I’ve never read a tale that looks at the events of the 41st Millennium through the eyes of the rapacious Tyranids. So when I saw ‘The Long and Hungry Road’ on Amazon, it pretty much chose itself. To face a Tyranid invasion is a waking nightmare. The skies darken with spores, your mind echoes with alien screeches, and countless weapon-organisms descend upon you with razor teeth and claws. How much greater would your horror be, to realise that the hive ship above thinks nothing of your fate – that it crushes you
Read more

'Mad God' (2021)

Image
It's that time again where Youtube throws me a 'Shudder' advert and I think to myself, 'I'm paying five quid a month for this, I really should watch something, lets give it a go...'   This time round, 'It' was the film 'Mad God' and the trailer was this mad batshit crazy shot of stop-motion horror that was over before I'd had a chance to get my head round it; leaving me pretty unsettled but with no clear idea just why that was... That's all I need sometimes, I was in... It's almost an hour later and, damn, that was grim, bleak and... What the hell just happened? A corroded diving bell descends amidst a ruined city and the Assassin emerges from it to explore a labyrinth of bizarre landscapes inhabited by freakish denizens. That is about all I can tell you about 'Mad God' and that's only because I had a quick look on IMDB and that was all IMDB could tell me... 'Mad God' is any number of things but it's not
Read more

‘Worms of the Earth’ – Robert E. Howard.

Image
Page Count: 27 Pages I have a copy of this on my shelf and the plan was to pick it up for a read on the way into work this morning. Well, that was the plan but I was half asleep, leaving the house, and totally forgot… No matter though, that’s what the Kindle app is for (although if I’d been a little more awake, I’d have read it off Project Gutenberg instead, you can find ‘Worms of the Earth’ Here ). 99p later and my ‘commute reading’ was secured 😉 I always seem to fall into the trap of just reading ‘Conan’ stuff whenever I fancy reading a little Howard. Not that that’s a bad thing, it’s just that there’s a lot of his other stories out there that are more than worth your time when you come across them. ‘Worms of the Earth’ is very much one of those tales but you knew that already, didn’t you? You didn’t? You should do something about that, take it from me… After witnessing one of his subjects die at the hands of Roman governor Titus Sulla, Bran Mak Morn vows vengeance on Sulla but at w
Read more