Deadpool (or I
should say "a Deadpool,"
because this is definitely a What If…)
is institutionalized, but the doctor providing his care turns out to be the
Psycho Man, who breaks something in Deadpool's brain. Deadpool realizes, for
reasons not revealed until the end of the story (but which are
character-appropriate, and which I'm going to spoil later on), that it's his
calling to kill all of the superheroes, supervillains, and cosmic entities in
the Marvel Universe, so he does. There's more to it than that, but that's just
the particulars, and if you're the type of person who's going to enjoy this
story, the particulars are going to be your bread and butter. And if you're
going to read it, you should go and do it, because I'm going to start spoiling
things now.
I'm not entirely sure why I don't
like this more. Everything about it would seem to be up my alley: I like
Deadpool, I like Cullen Bunn and Dalibor Talajic, and I like it when stories
get meta, something Deadpool is a character uniquely suited for. Deadpool Kills the Marvel Universe
should be a home run for me, and it's more like a ground rule double. It
reminds me—you're not going to believe this—of The Punisher Kills the Marvel Universe, is, in fact, the superior
version of these very similar stories, but I think it ends up suffering from
most of the same shortcomings.
This is, for the most part, a dour,
mean-spirited book. Deadpool skates around offing your favorite characters and
being a dick as he does it. This works for the Punisher—or it fits the
character, at least—but a big part of what makes Deadpool tick is his sense of
humor. While he slings the occasional quip, the switch Psycho Man flips in
Deadpool's head turns him grim n' gritty and immediately drains 90% of the fun
out of the story. I feel like the title promised me a darkly funny cartoon—Bugs
Bunny and Elmer Fudd, if Elmer could die—but what I got was Ryan Reynolds as
the Punisher.
This ties in to another problem:
it's way, way too easy. Just for
instance: ¾ of the Fantastic Four die off-panel. How? I couldn't tell you, but
if other scenes are any indication, Deadpool stabbed them to death with his
swords. How'd he kill men made of rock and rubber and fire with swords?
Couldn't tell you. The Invisible Woman explodes his head from the inside-out
with a force field, which is the kind of thing you'd expect to see more of, but
then she immediately turns her back on him to congratulate herself on a job
well done, which is how he manages to stab to death a woman who can turn
invisible and make force fields and fly.
When we check in with Wolverine and
his near-identical progeny, Deadpool has already defeated X-23 and Daken and
strung them up in a room full of flamethrowers. "They can't be killed
because of their healing factors," he reasons, "but they can't heal
when they're on fire." But when Wolverine shows up 5 seconds
later—Wolverine, who has the exact same power-set as X-23 and Daken, but is the
original—Deadpool just kills him with a sword. There's slightly more to it than
that: he identifies the sword as one of Marvel's made-up, magical alloys,
Carbonadium, which "wreaks havoc on your healing factor." But if
that's the case, why not just use that sword to kill the baby Wolverines? And
Deadpool's only superpower is literally an off-brand knockoff of Wolverine's
healing factor, so if it's that easy for him to kill 3 Wolverines, why is it so
difficult for every other character in the universe, many of whom are
super-strong or bulletproof or super-fast or able to control people's minds
with the pheromones generated by their weird purple skin (just for instance),
to kill Deadpool? There isn't much consistency to any of it, which makes most
of the proceedings feel pretty meaningless.
Deadpool does push the overarching
metafictional plot forward a few inches when he kills Wolverine. He says,
"Your mutant power isn't regeneration. It's popularity," implying
that the real reason Wolverine can't die is because he's one of Marvel's most
popular characters. That's kind of interesting, right? But again, Bunn doesn't
do much of anything with it. Literally the next panel is Deadpool cutting off
Wolverine's head off and saying, "I've got big plans, and all the
popularity in the world can't save you this time!" Okay, sure, but why
not?
Yup! Couldn't tell you.
There's a scene toward the end of The Punisher Kills the Marvel Universe where
all the surviving heroes and villains show up in a field somewhere, and
basically say, "I thought you called
me," and then the Punisher is
like, "Ha-HA!" and a
nuclear bomb goes off. I don't know the writer, Garth Ennis, I've never read an
interview with him about this story, but I'm absolutely certain this scene came
about when he sat down at his laptop one morning and said, "Shit! I'm
running out of pages!"
Similarly, toward the end of this
story, Deadpool tricks the Punisher into killing the Puppet Master, then holds
up a little clay man who's vaguely Galactus-shaped and says, "Puppet
Master made me some special puppets."
Next panel: Galactus, the Silver Surfer, Thanos, et al, all floating in space
dead. I wasn't thinking about Thanos or Galactus until you brought them up,
Cullen Bunn, and I don't think they really need to be in this book, but if
you're going to include them, at least come up with something a little more
compelling than, "… and then Deadpool murdered them all off panel." I
don't mind a Deus Ex Machina, especially not in a story like this, but the
Puppet Master? The greatest heroes in the world have been struggling and dying
and sometimes even losing to Thanos and Galactus all these years, and all they
needed to do was get the Puppet Master's help? The Puppet Master? The tiny, elfin man whose power is basically voodoo
dolls? Really? Really?
If it seems like I'm being too hard
on Deadpool Kills the Marvel Universe,
well, I am. I just see so much potential here, and quite a bit of it goes
unrealized. When Deadpool reveals why
he's killing everybody: he's always known that they're all characters in comic
books, and he's come to understand that the fuel of fiction is its characters'
suffering, so he is, in essence, mercy-killing every fictional character who
ever existed, it breathes a bit of life back into the story. Because that's a great idea: not only specific to this
kind of story, but in perfect keeping with Deadpool as a character, because
other than being a blatant rip-off of Wolverine's powers and Deathstroke's
everything else, Deadpool's big thing is breaking the fourth wall. And if you
realize you and everyone you know are characters in a superhero comic, how can
existential angst be far behind? Deadpool's hundreds of murders in this book
can almost be framed heroically when you look at them from that perspective.
The story just doesn't do enough with that, and I think that very serious and
thoughtful underpinning is what drove the tone of the book from whimsical to
relatively dour.
The last few pages give us a glimpse
of what might have been. Deadpool realizes that Marvel's comic book universe is
actually a multiverse, and that it'd take him forever to kill every possible
iteration of every character, so he travels to the "real world" and
the offices of Marvel Comics. He finds cartoon versions of Bunn and Dalibor
Talajic, both of whom take every opportunity to make fun of themselves (Talajic
mostly draws himself as a pair of ill-fitting jeans and a buttcrack sticking in
from the edges of the panels), along with the book's editor, Tom Brevoort, and
Marvel EIC Axel Alonso, all of whom are hard at work on the very pages we're
looking at. It's a little Metafiction 101, but it's fun and it doesn't take
itself too seriously.
There are multiple sequels to Deadpool Kills the Marvel Universe (the
next volume is Deadpool Killustrated,
in which Deadpool takes it upon himself to murder the characters of classic
literature), and I'm going to read them, because of all the potential I've
mentioned, and because I bought them as part of a bundle on Comixology. I hope
now that Bunn is warmed up he lets himself have a little more fun with the
concept.
