MARCO SPEAKS SPIDEY: Deadpool #10 (‘King in Black’ Tie-In)

Admittedly, I hadn’t been religiously following this latest volume of Deadpool, but when I did my recent Savage Avengers review, I ended up curious about what Marvel’s favorite Merc was up to in his own pages. I also found it quite interesting that the latest Deadpool run would end its final issue with a ‘King in Black’ tie-in. In Deadpool’s own words, he and his team of monsters were jumping from one big black goo to another. But the parallels in this issue are just simply too entertaining. We have the King in Black versus the King of Monsters. And we got a special kaiju versus kaiju special… giant monster jelly versus humongous symbiote space dragon edition!

OFFICIAL MARVEL COMICS DESCRIPTION

FINAL ISSUE

Deadpool #10

STORY BY: Kelly Thompson

ART BY: Gerardo Sandoval

COVER BY: Gerardo Sandoval

KING OF THE MONSTERS VERSUS KING OF THE DRAGONS!

• An evil, ancient cult wants to kill DEADPOOL.
• An evil, ancient space god wants to kill Deadpool.
• Why does everyone want to kill Deadpool??? (I mean, we know why…)

LAST BUT NOT LEAST…

PROS:

• I am proud of Deadpool: he has his own kingdom, his own island and his own Knights of the Round Table. The fact that he is his own king now puts him up there with the likes of Black Panther and Namor, royal highnesses also fighting their own war against the King of Alien Space Dragons. For this issue, Deadpool picks and chooses the most interesting and entertaining members, as expected from such a wacky book. My personal favorite is the adorable land shark, and I swear… Marvel can make a children’s book out of this cutie if they wanted to. The group’s composition is one for the books.
• Again, as shown by my love for the recent Planet of Symbiotes issue, I am a sucker for kaiju fights. It seems extremely fitting that Marvel is creating all these larger-than-life monster duels as we fast approach King Kong versus Godzilla. But in this book, we have a gigantic jelly Jelby, with Deadpool and his crew literally inside, locking horns with the colossal space dragon. The page showcasing Jelby with Deadpool and the crew operating from within his body feels like an episode of Voltes V or Power Rangers and is already instantly worth the price of this single issue. You won’t be able to remove the image of that from your head any time soon. And that’s a good thing.
• Freeing the land shark from the grasp of the evil symbiote by blasting Wu-Tang Clan’s ‘Tearz’ was a stroke of genius. If there is any song that you have to put on full volume, using an overly sized speaker to boom it to the heavens, this is the song you want… the song you need.
• Deadpool breaking the fourth wall is practically a staple already whenever you are reading his books. So, it is quite hilarious when he overly states how his title is now a cross-over, how his team jumped from one black goo incident to another, and how the narrative was done in such a way where readers were given a teaser, a foreshadowing, and a shocker at the same time. The way that Deadpool embraces the insane nature of these comic book stories is always a welcome refresher for us all not to take life too seriously.

CONS:

• As mentioned earlier, I never really updated myself on this most recent, current run of Deadpool, so I, along with other more focused Spider-Man readers would have probably skipped on this without any prompt. SO… it felt a bit strange that they were going to end this volume with a tie-in to the bigger Venom event. This could have totally acted as a separate Deadpool tie-in mini-series, or perhaps even a one-shot, stand-alone story. Never subtle, the last pages literally tell us that another creator is going to make another Deadpool comic, so this is definitely not the end, but rather, a new beginning.

FINAL GRADE: B+

This year is going to be epic for Deadpool, and thanks to ‘King in Black,’ I was able to check up on his misadventures. I do hope that they continue his stint as a King of Monsters, because they actually already feel like family to me. And… Are land-sharks real?