Venom/Deadpool What If? 1

by Rick Remender, Shawn Moll and a bunch of inkers; Marvel.

I’ve never read a Deadpool comic before, and it would be unwise to rely on this one for any guidance as to the character. It’s set in a not terribly serious alternate universe, one in which the Beyonder has grafted MODOK to Galactus’s ass and Galactus hires mercenary assassin Deadpool to kill the Beyonder. At their first meeting, Deadpool gets taken by the symbiote costume that had been with Spidey, and becomes Venompool.

Trouble is, it is hard to tell what difference that makes. Other than a few early panels where he takes on the look of Venom, the only thing I can identify with any confidence is that he talks with different lettering. Perhaps if I knew Deadpool I would spot more differences, I don’t know. It makes you wonder what the point of the concept was, imagining someone gave the writer the title and he sort of worked it in even though it wasn’t at all what he was interested in writing about.

Nonetheless, the writing here is pretty entertaining, full of cynical commentary on various bad tendencies in Marvel over the years: Secret Wars, the leather jacket days, heroes getting killed and resurrected and all that. At times, as in that MODOK-Galactus bit, it reads more like a Brand Echh revival than the usual Marvel comic. Some parts don’t work – the Jerry Springer pastiche scene is very laboured, as is the ending – but some of it is amusing, and there is no shortage of incident and ideas.

It’s rather let down by hopelessly mediocre art. Moll can’t do faces, especially when they aren’t directly facing us – he loses any sense of the head’s shape when at an angle. Obviously when a comic centres on a masked character, this is less harmful than usual, but it’s still dispiriting, at best. He also has no cartoony bounce or life to his work, which this story needs, and makes absolutely nothing of big dramatic moments, like the Beyonder’s Earth-destroying clash with Galactus.

A diverting enough comic, but the art is useless and ultimately I don’t imagine I will ever feel like reading it again, and it doesn’t really make me desperately keen to read more Deadpool comics either.