Writer: Skottie Young
Art Team: Nic Klein, Jeff Eckleberry
Cover Price: $3.99
Release Date: January 2, 2019

Deadpool has been a bit of an up and down book since the Fresh Start relaunch of the title, however, I have enjoyed more issues than I’ve disliked overall. I feel the book is at its strongest when it sticks to the shorter stories, one or two issues at the most, and then we move on to something else before the ‘joke’ at play gets old.  Lucky for me the first issue I review for this little ditty of a site is exactly that, so let’s waste no more time, and get right into it.

The issue starts off by setting down the goal for Deadpool to accomplish rather quickly without much puttzing around. Deadpool was hired by Silly Seal, owner and mascot of Silly Seal World, to kill fellow mascot Ziggy Pig … or not Ziggy exactly, but Zaggy, his evil cousin who Ziggy sold his portion of things too. Still following me? Good, because now add onto all that Zaggy is running guns, and drugs, in the park bringing a bad crowd around. Silly Seal having none of this nonsense wants him offed. Kind of all a bit extreme, maybe call the cops first, but whatever lets do this. Its basically what if Mickey took a hit out on Goofy, situation we got going on here, and its all just crazy enough to work perfectly for a Deadpool issue.

Now if you’ve been following Deadpool since Fresh Start began, you would know he erased his mind to revert to his crazy Merc with a Mouth persona, so he doesn’t have the best recollection of his time as a hero, and other important things … such as remembering who his daughter is. This daughter element of it all comes into play in heartbreaking fashion to break up the zaniness of this issue a bit.  See Deadpool ends up running into Elle at one point in disguise, only for her to pinpoint his voice, and follow him of course directly into the line of trouble. Kind of one of the reasons that Deadpool wiped his mind in the first place, to stop hurting people he cared for.

The two family members, Deadpool and Elle, in effect team-up throughout various moments in the issue, despite Deadpool’s frequent objections. However Elle is hell bent on not letting him become a killer for money again and will stop at no cost. This all eventually wraps around into a pretty heartfelt ending that Deadpool, for better or worse, doesn’t even realize just occurred. It got me choked up a little bit making me very sad poor Deadpool doesn’t even remember his own family, who genuinely cares about him, while simultaneously having a blast with Mascot’s taking hits out on each other. None of that appears easy to pull off so kudos to the creative team involved wholeheartedly.

Final Thoughts:

As an overall effort for a one-shot comic book Scottie Young pulled off something incredibly enjoyable here. He was able to take an issue with a premise that essentially boils down to Mascot murder, mix in a little heart, and a lot of humor, and with some solid contributions from a Nic Klein on art, put out one of the more enjoyable individual issues of a Deadpool comic I’ve read in a long long time.  Like I said previously the shorter stories really have been working for this series and I hope to keep seeing more.

9.0/10