A review by jnikolova
Deadpool, Vol. 1: Dead Presidents by Brian Posehn, Gerry Duggan

3.0

Also available on the WondrousBooks blog.

Aaaaand... eh.

The thing is, whenever I read superhero comic books, they never build up such tension as superhero movies do. The scale of the events of one comic book volume vs a movie is hard to compare, and therefore, I usually end up with less than I hoped for.

Dead Presidents was not bad or anything, it was just not that good, either.

The biggest gap for me between expectations and reality was the humor. I expected something hilarious, and instead all of the jokes were like:

Blah blah, okay, laugh now. Seriously, this is funny, guys... Actually, nevermind, it is kind of sad and depressing. Err, I will shut up now. Ha-ha.

This being my first comic book contact with Deadpool, I couldn't help but find it sad that he is such a despised character. He might have dumb, raunchy humor, but so far, he seems to be on the right side. So the general attitude of characters toward him just seems strange and uncalled for.

The best part of this volume were the actual dead presidents, all of whom had their weirdness. I also liked how most were mentioned for what they were most famous for, including Deadpool dressed as Marilyn for JFK.

I will continue with the next volume, as I have it at my disposal, but I am not sure whether I should give in to the temptation to expect something cool the second time around.



And... ALTERNATIVE REVIEW

(Because I am an overworked dork and I reviewed this volume twice.)

This was not exactly what I expected. Not sure whether that's a good thing or not.

For me, before the movie hype, Deadpool was a rather obscure comic book character. I remember his appearance in that terrible Wolverine movie, but because of how generic that version of Deadpool was, I seem to have completely wiped it from my mind until the new Deadpool came out.

In the meanwhile, right before the movie was released I started hearing more and more about Deadpool, so I finally got around to also reading the comic book.

For starters:

1. It was not as funny as I expected. Don't get me wrong, Deadpool is funny. But unlike the movie, there was more bitterness and sadness in his humor. For the most part, I didn't think "Ha-ha", I thought "You poor bastard...". I also still don't get why he is so hated. Sure, around him everything's a bit bloodier, but that's not to say that he's a bad guy. At least not the version that I saw in this comic book. It just seemed that everyone hates him because he is a hated character. Which kind of makes me pity him.


2. The story was way more out there than I would have thought. Considering that Deadpool is a mercenary and an assassin, I expected more fists than dead presidents. Title and all.

Essentially, I enjoyed the bit about the dead presidents, though. It gave the volume a funky edge. The dead presidents of the USA rolled up like some rock band and I thought it was hilarious how they had ganged up in groups by common traits.

Also, that element of magic set interesting grounds for Doctor Strange's cameo, which, for me, created another unlikely event in this comic book. From the little that I knew about Deadpool, I imagined him hanging out more with X-Men, than with Avengers and the likes, but this was a good example of how movie studios owning different characters and separating them does not influence comic books. Which is very, very cool, because there are several characters that will probably not appear in movies together, but I might end up seeing in a comic book. Wink, wink...