Posted in: Comics | Tagged: deadpool, Gerry Duggan, HRL, joe sabino, marvel, Matteo Lolli, Ruth Redmond, X-ual Healing - The Weekly X-Men Recap Column

X-Men: Bland Design – Deadpool Has a Crisis of Conscience in Despicable Deadpool #292

Published Wed, 10 Jan 2018 14:00:57 -0600

by Jude Terror

Last updated Wed, 10 Jan 2018 15:03:35 -0600

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Everyone is familiar with X-Men: Grand Design, Ed Piskor's attempt to condense the X-Men's history across six decades into a single limited series. Piskor has a lot of great material to work with, with comics legends like Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Chris Claremont, John Byrne, Grant Morrison, Chuck Austen, and more contributing to the epic X-saga of our beloved mutants.

Of course, for Piskor, collecting every issue of X-Men comics was easy — at a dollar or less through most of their run, a person could buy an entire year's worth of Claremont comics for what it costs to buy a single week's worth of X-titles today at Marvel's exorbitant prices. By the same token, Piskor's job is much more difficult than it would be recapping today's X-books, because teams like Claremont and Byrne could tell a story in three pages that would take an entire issue in today's splash-ridden, cinematic, written-for-the-trade style.

And that's when it hit us — there's nothing we here at Bleeding Cool love more than an easy job, so we decided that it was time to do our own take on Piskor's X-Men: Grand Design. But instead of recapping the good old issues of X-Men, we'll recap the new ones that come out each week. And fittingly to the modern Marvel era, we'll call our column X-Men: Bland Design. And in the unlikely event that a week ever goes by without an X-book on the stands, we'll recap some old issues of X-Men drawn by Greg Land and call it X-Men: Land Design.

But not this week. This week, there are six X-issues on the stands, if you count The Despicable Deadpool as an X-book, which we do. Despicable Deadpool #292, Old Man Logan #33, X-Men Blue #19, Cable #153, and X-Men Gold Annual #1, and Phoenix: Resurrection #3. Total cover price: $25. Total time it would take you to read those decompressed stories? Probably shorter than it took to read this introduction. So technically, you won't be saving any time by reading these recaps, but at least it can help you decide which of these comics to take out a second mortgage to follow on a regular basis.

So let's get to it, in SuperginraiX's syncopated style, we said in Chris Hyatte's syncopated style. First up:

Despicable Deadpool #292
Writer: Gerry Duggan
Artist: Matteo Lolli
Colorist: Ruth Redmond
Letterer: Joe Sabino
Damage: $3.99

You're in luck today if you haven't been following The Despicable Deadpool, because it looks like we're starting off with the first part of a new storyline called The Bucket List. The recap page gets us up to speed, telling us that Deadpool killed Agent Coulson during Secret Empire and has recently killed Cable as part of Marvel Legacy, at the request of Cable's clone — or is Cable the clone? — Stryfe. But it was an old version of Cable from millions of years in the future that was going to die anyway. So Deadpool's still a good guy. Or is he?

Deadpool is killing people for Stryfe because Stryfe has leverage over him. Stryfe will withhold vital medicine from his daughter, Ellie, and his friends, the Prestons, who were all infected by a terminal illness because of Deadpool, proving Sarah Palin was right about the Obamacare death panels all along. In this brand new storyline, Stryfe wants Deadpool to kill Irene Merriweather, Cable's sometime love interest. Which he does, while cosplaying as Stryfe, and apparently for real.

There are two people left to kill before Stryfe will approve Deadpool's insurance claims. The next person on the list is Kid Apocalypse. Deadpool is having a crisis of conscience, so he goes to visit Nazi Steve Rogers in prison, which is essentially like using Nick Spencer's Twitter feed as your life coach. The conversation lasts for several pages but nothing of consequence was really discussed. Deadpool hates Nazis (even though he willingly joined them) and he wants Nazi Steve to pay, so he breaks his toilet.

As Deadpool is leaving the prison, he makes a scene and it makes the news, where we learn in a shocking final page reveal Rogue has been watching. She's coming for Deadpool next issue.

Was it worth the four bucks? That one has got to depend on whether you're the type of person who finds Deadpool hilarious. If you do, then who are we to tell you not to waste your money?

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