Teaming Deadpool and Wolverine has proven to be big business for Marvel, and Wolverines & Deadpools #1 is the latest way the publisher has decided to cash in on the duo. This book teams the Wolverines, Logan and Laura, and the Deadpools, Wade and Elle, for a mystery in Simkaria. Children are disappearing from a remote villain and they pay Deadpool to put together a team to find the kids. This is where the Wolverines come in, as Wade loves to work with Wolverine, and wanted to arrange a “play date” of sorts between their daughters. This seems like a great team, but this first issue never really gets going for a variety of reasons.
Deadpool & Wolverine showed moviegoers something comic readers always knew — that Deadpool and Wolverine are great together. However, Wolverines & Deadpools doesn’t really do anything to make that apparent. Writer Cody Ziglar seems to understand the basics of each character, but can’t ever make the magic work between the two of them. Reading this and reading the superior Deadpool/Wolverine shows just how bad Ziglar is at writing these two characters. It all feels paint by numbers, and that’s a huge problem with this book as it goes on. See, the fun of Deadpool and Wolverine together is the extremes that the writer takes the character to as they bicker and fight, but also showing that there’s some affection there. Wolverines & Deadpools has an interesting premise, but the needed character interplay just isn’t there. On top of that, Ziglar’s Deadpool fourth wall breaks again feel like he understands what they are but for some reason can’t make them funny. Ziglar wrote Deadpool’s last series, and reading his Deadpool in this issue shows me why that book was cancelled.
Another problem with the book is the pacing. This issue moves so slowly, and the whole time I was reading it, I was questioning when something exciting would happen. On the one hand, this book might get picked up by MCU fans who don’t know who Elle is, so Ziglar does some clumsy exposition writing to set up the status quo for the readers. However, it all feels agonizingly show, and by the time I got to the exciting parts at the end, I kind of didn’t really care anymore. The last page reveal is pretty cool (I’m a big fan of the big bad), but judging from this issue, I don’t really have a lot of faith in Ziglar to make this story work in the long run.
Roge Antonio has always been hit or miss for me, and a lot of this issue feels like a miss in places. Antonio’s character acting and figure work are pretty good, but any time he draws long shots, things get a little sketchy. There’s some particularly egregious examples of this in one of the opening exposition scenes. Faces are never easy, and the further out you pull the camera, the harder they get. However, some of the faces in this book look really sketchy. He does better with masked faces, but the problems with his faces are apparent right from the beginning.
As for the rest of the art, it’s fine. The fight scenes have a good flow, but it’s nothing spectacular. The page layouts are his biggest strength in the action scenes — it’s certainly not the detail, which gets sketchy several times — and really help give the scenes the kinetic energy they need. The art is better than the writing, at least (although that’s not really hard), and the last page reveal looks pretty cool. There really isn’t much more to say about the art; it’s serviceable for the most part, but the problems outweigh the pros.
I can’t recommend Wolverines & Deadpools #1 at all. It’s an unfunny Deadpool and Wolverine comic, and you have to work pretty hard to pull that off. You can see that Ziglar understands the basics of the characters, but can never really make the whole thing work. The pacing is glacial and it doesn’t really need to be. There’s an exciting way to tell this same story and introduce Elle to readers that might not know who she is, but Ziglar isn’t able to find it. Antonio’s art is mostly good — it reminds me of German Garcia’s blink and you’ll miss it run on X-Men from the late ’90s in a good way — but there are a few problems with it. If you need to get your fill of Deadpool and Wolverine together, just read Deadpool/Wolverine or watch the movie again. This ain’t it.
Rating: 2 out of 5
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