Written by David Lapham
Illustrated by Kyle BakerThey say women change after marriage. They say they stop caring about their looks and stop cooking meals and stop cleaning your socks. They say they change their hair color and their name and start lying about their whereabouts and sleeping with rich men and killing them and making deals to sell state secrets with terrorists and stop wearing perfume. They say all that, but Deadpool never thought it would happen to him. He never thought his new life as a non-killing dad would start out so blissfully and end up like this — with his wife having all the fun and him at home taking care of a screaming baby, wondering when its batteries will run out. Can Deadpool pull his life back together, save his marriage, and stop the spread of the deadly Liquid X? Probably not, but one out of three ain’t bad.
I’ll admit it — I tried a couple times, and just couldn’t get into Deadpool MAX. I didn’t know if it was the writing, or the art, or if I just didn’t care that much about Deadpool anymore. Then, on a lark, I checked out #7, and something clicked. It all fell into place, and I was laughing myself sick. So what happened? Let’s talk about it after the jump.
Maybe the key was that the day I read it, I was thinking about the comedian Norm Macdonald. Don’t judge Norm by his TV sitcoms — they were terrible, and he’s the wrong guy for sitcom gigs. In his element, though, he’s like the twisted inverse of Steve Martin’s experimental comedy-lounge-lizard persona from his 70s peak, or a crystallized, razor-sharp riff on the Tony Clifton gimmick. Norm Macdonald’s strength is that he doesn’t seem to care if he wins or loses with the audience; his deadpan jabs and brutish asides seem to gain strength when the crowd is hostile. (Look at the wonderful moments when he’d get heckled on Weekend Update.) Anyway, this is a comic book review.
Deadpool MAX takes place far outside of continuity. Deadpool is hideously scarred and endlessly loopy, but a secret agent taking out terrorists and scumbags. Instead of trying to cram wackiness into every possible orifice, from zany plotlines to Wade arguing with his own internal monologue, Deadpool MAX has a quieter sense of humor. Look at how #7 opens: “After spending a lifetime as a secret agent and a killer of men, I realized all I ever wanted was to be a dad.” This line is played totally straight, despite being completely ridiculous. I don’t know why this tongue-through-cheek tone never connected with me before — I think it might be because superhero comics are so full of bizarre leaps of emotional logic that statements like the one I just quoted don’t seem that ridiculous. Deadpool MAX is just as dumb as the usual stuff, but it makes you think about why it’s so stupid.
The plot: Deadpool has been seduced by an insane woman posing as Domino, who is apparently carrying his baby, and has married her. They are now honeymooning in Hawaii, and it goes about as terribly as things can possibly go. This is an issue where both David Lapham’s cruel, deadpan dialogue can shine, and it can be complemented by Kyle Baker’s at once ostentatious and grounded art. Baker’s modern style has an element of the surreal to it, and it works better than it ever has in this issue, illustrating things like Deadpool’s disarmingly low-key fantasies about fatherhood. His art on Deadpool MAX is both cartoonishly loose-limbed and realistically straight-faced, which is exactly the same tone as Lapham’s snide, often bizarre dialogue.
When putting Wade into conventional situations — as far as comics go, anyway — like attacking a bunch of Nazis or breaking out of an asylum, Lapham’s laid-back humor tends to slip too far out of reach. These are jokes whose punchlines are that there are no punchlines, just absurdity reveling in its own hidden pleasure. At one point, after his insane bride has stopped pretending to be Domino and started pretending to the Black Widow, the following exchange occurs:
Deadpool: Well, did you learn a lesson, at least?
“Black Widow”: Yes. (pause) It’s fun to kill after sex.
Or when their robot baby doll, which Wade insists is real, is thrown into the trash, Mrs. Deadpool’s casual response: “What? It’s like a tiny playpen.” This is the comic book equivalent of Curb Your Enthusiasm, albeit without the sense of watching a car crash in slow motion that that show often becomes. It’s just as subversive of the form, though — while recognizably an action/spy/super-whatever comic, it seems to have swapped out most of the parts for ones that look the same, but do different work entirely. The story runs through the motions of one where, in a “serious” comic, the character would learn an important life lesson. Instead, Deadpool learns nothing, except perhaps the wisdom Jeffrey Tambor once proffered, which is “Never promise Crazy a baby.” Sometimes, though, it’s funnier to know nothing. Deadpool MAX #7 finally gets that balance right.
Final Verdict: 9.5 / Laugh it up, fuzzball
