Deadpool Kills the Marvel Universe

            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.