*Covers Issues #14-19 of Deadpool: World’s Greatest comics. ISBN: 978-1-302-90148-6*
Deadpool has been trying to get his life together, and it’s kind of worked. He runs a business, the Mercs for Money. He has a wife. He has a kid. He’s somehow managed to become an Avenger. But balance is not something that Deadpool is good at.
His mercs aren’t exactly the altruistic type, so as he blows them off for Avenger popularity and shorts them pay their irritation grows, until they turn on him, raiding a bank that’s supposed to hold copies of their contracts so they can cut Deadpool out of the deal. Add to that, his relationship with his wife, Shiklah, was tenuous at best, seeing as she’s a demon princess, ruler of monsters that predate humanity, who was supposed to marry Dracula. Shiklah doesn’t like Deadpool’s redemption arc.
Neither do the mercs, who Deadpool confronts in their bank raid. To say that Deadpool doesn’t make the best choices is an understatement. But in this volume we see the man struck between trying to be a better person and still being wrapped up in the consequences of his own past and habits. They say the process of a caterpillar becoming a butterfly is brutal, and it’s true for Deadpool, whose violence breaks out into the street, sees his friends turn their backs on him, and leave him alone.
This is less a volume of snark and more a sad and violent few days in Deadpool’s life. Not a volume that stands alone well, it’s still an essential part of the Deadpool arc.