'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.

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