After Captain Britain used the Skrull invasion to launch himself back to stardom, this week sees another of Marvel’s niche characters looking to repeat the trick. After the X-office decided to kidnap his Cable and Deadpool co-star for babysitting duties, Wade Wilson effectively held down a solo book for ten issues, but the title always felt as if it was just treading water until cancelation. There’s no shortage of effort here, with big name cover-artists, extensive advertising and a detailed prose back-story for the book’s star, but the tale itself still lacks both direction and genuine laughs.

Deadpool’s perennial problem is that there’s nothing inherently funny about Spider-man with guns. His wisecracks alone aren’t enough to make his book a comedy, making him very dependant on the scenarios his writers place him in. His most successful eras, under Joe Kelly and Gail Simone, have seen the book written as a sitcom, with Wilson’s adventures always conceived with comic potential in mind. However, situation comedy requires a situation, and here we simply have Deadpool rolling up for a fight. Unlike the official state defence force of MI13, the Secret Invasion is hardly an ideal launching pad for Deadpool, but Daniel Way’s structuring of his story is still distinctly questionable. The writer is careful to introduce a fresh tactic to each phase of Wilson’s scattershot assault on a Skrull assault craft, but is hampered by his decision to show Deadpool working towards a serious goal in a comical way, rather than the reverse. Although an Asterix-style running gag about Skrull translation is carried off with aplomb, most of the comic material in the book falls flat. Typical of the writing is the parodying of ‘Pool’s trademark yellow thought bubbles as being a multiple personality disorder, with Way never quite finding a genuine punch line in his material. Considering the lack of supporting characters in this issue, it’s understandable that Way seeks to play with the copious narration the issue contains, but his approach is a rambling series of riffs rather than an actual planned gag.

The multi-page recap to Wilson’s life makes clear that he’s still a part of Simone’s Agency X organisation, although this is entirely absent from the issue, with the focus remaining on the book’s star. Despite the issue’s minimalist plot, there are still holes in the story. Wade has obviously prepared his offensive in advance, with his mascot costume constructed out of body armour and a remote means of triggering the stadium’s roof set up. But how did he know that the Skrulls were about the show up there? Either Deadpool had advance warning of the invasion, from a means unexplained in the book, or he just likes to hang around baseball games with a considerable amount of munitions. There’s comic potential in the latter option, but Way is obviously determined to leave the fourth wall alone for the time being. There’s no sense that the book has pinpointed its direction, with the gritty cover at odds with with Paco Medina’s clean, bright art. Given that the book’s pre-publicity has focussed on Deadpool’s possible siding with the Skrulls, it seems another odd choice to choose his surprise pitch to them as the first issue’s cliff-hanger. There’s storytelling, decompressed storytelling, and taking an entire issue to reach the scenario described in the series’ promotional tagline. Wade’s healing factor will be pushed to its limits to recover from the injuries sustain here.