Joe Kelly's Spider-Man/Deadpool Review

Why are we here again?

Joe Kelly and Ed McGuinness launched Spider-Man/Deadpool in 2016 and had a 13-issue run with fill-in creative teams in between. A couple of those fill-ins are amazing, issues 6 and 7, and deserve to be appreciated, I won’t talk about them here.

The reason for this reread is Amazing Spider-Man #1000, scheduled for this September. Before that drops, I want to have read everything Kelly has ever written for Spider-Man, partly to understand how he writes the character, partly to fill in gaps from old runs that I never finished to fully appreciate ASM #1000. Chief among them, the Itsy Bitsy arc, for the reread of the initial issues of ASM Vol 7.

When this book was running, I was reading basically everything Marvel was putting out. Bouncing off any single book back then was rare for me, which should tell you something about how this one felt. But it was ten years ago, and the me of now is not the me of then, so it deserved a second shot.

What works: the character voices

Spider-Man’s hatred of Deadpool at the start of the run tracks with what we already know about Peter, his hardline stance on killing. The early issues of the run, where Peter is fed-up with Wade, but still reciprocates Wade’s attempts at reaching out, while pulling pranks such as shocking him with a Spider-Trace. That’s the Peter Parker I love, who cares enough to keep showing up for someone he disapproves of. Also, being the more mature hero in a team-up is a side of Peter that he doesn’t get to show much, he is usually the mess (even if it’s a pretense of incompetence at times) but the role-reversal here makes for an unusual character dynamic. They bond and understand each other in the first-half of the run.

The biggest thing this run gets right is the voice work for both leads. Kelly clearly knows these characters, which makes sense for Deadpool especially, since he created the modern Deadpool personality spectrum back in his 1997 Deadpool run.

Wade’s arc is great. It’s him actually trying to become a better person, using Spider-Man as his moral compass. Over the course of the run, instead of trying to clumsily manipulate his way into getting into Spider-Man’s good graces, we see him genuinely try and change, to think about how others would feel. The reasoning he gives about why he didn’t want to tell Spider-Man about the “real” Peter Parker, really works for me. There’s a moment in the back half where Spider-Man threatens to do something awful, and Wade knows Peter is bluffing, showing that he’s actually gained a real understanding of right versus wrong and spent enough time with Peter to read him. We, as the audience, know he would never do that. And after spending time with him, so does Wade.

Spider-Man/Deadpool #4 is my favorite issue of the run. It’s the one where a planned double date with Shiklah goes sideways (Deadpool swaps Shiklah for Thor as a prank and Spidey doesn’t know that his date is a succubus) and Peter and Wade end up forced to strip and dance for the entertainment of their dates. Peter being the more enthusiastic almost-naked dancer is so goofy, but makes complete sense when you remember that this guy paraded across the New York skies in his undies as “The Amazing Bag-Man”. We can see that he is having a good time, being a goof and not being burdened by the responsibilities. We see that Deadpool can bring out this lighthearted side in Spider-Man and add something to his life that’s always in short supply, happiness. And all of this makes the issue’s ending hit so much harder.

What works: the craft

Creative use of characters. Training with Nightcrawler in #14 to fight Itsy Bitsy is a clever pull. I love myself a good training issue and Kurt’s swashbuckly nature, his sword work, the unpredictability he brings as a teleporter make him the perfect practice not-a-dummy. Similarly, The Mercs for Money cameos work very well for me, even though it was just a funny 4-page gag. The deep pull of Styx and Stone is appreciated as well. I’d forgotten who those guys were and had to look them up.

The hell / real world transitions are some of the cleverer page-craft in the run. Kelly uses them as ways to pass information between characters and between narrative settings very creatively.

What doesn’t: the villains

This is where things go south. The run has 3 main villains, with one-offs like Mysterio facilitating the plot: Patient Zero, Itsy Bitsy and Mephisto.

Patient Zero is revealed in #10 to be Weasel, Wade’s old frenemy and self-described scientific genius, who got himself killed, struck a deal with Mephisto, and came back, gunning for Spider-Man. His monologue from #8 is:

“I was infected not by a disease… but by men. Peter Parker and Wade Wilson. A life tainted by two fools. Everything that’s happened… that will happen, was bought and paid in full long ago.”

You can read this charitably as: Wade wronged him directly, and Peter wronged him by association through Mephisto, who later revived Weasel. It just doesn’t work at all in the story. I don’t care about Weasel, the run hasn’t made me care about Weasel, and the leap from “I’m mad about One More Day” to “so I will fuse human DNA with Spider-Man and Deadpool to create a murder daughter” would make people fall to their deaths.

Itsy Bitsy is a plot-device for chaos on the page. The problem is that none of that is dramatized in the way it would need to be for me to care about her character. Her motivation arrives via her own monologue and Weasel’s monologue; we don’t see her civilian life, we don’t see why she wanted to undergo the procedure. I don’t understand why she does what she does and hence, I don’t care.

Mephisto works, but only retroactively. I think Mephisto is great in this run, but mostly because of what Nick Spencer later does with him in Amazing Spider-Man (2018). The Mayday Parker reveal in Spencer’s epilogue #74 (that Mephisto specifically fears a future where Spider-Man’s daughter, May Parker, dethrones him during his time of dark reign over Earth) is what gives the Mephisto material in Spider-Man/Deadpool more weight. Without that future context, this is just a meta-reference, which sometimes works in a Deadpool book but doesn’t work for me here, maybe because I’m not a traditional Deadpool fan or maybe because it’s not done well enough to my liking.

The core problem

Not a lot happens, and what does happen happens in a weird fast-forward / slow-down / fast-forward rhythm.

The early issues, which are the better issues because of the character work, could have been compressed. You could drop a full issue from that stretch and reach the same character beats. The latter half then over-corrects. The plot speeds up and the resolution arrives too quickly and is (mostly) unsatisfying.

The specific thing that sours me on the whole run is this: Spider-Man’s hatred of Itsy Bitsy is not earned. Why does Peter suddenly want to kill her instead of stopping her? And in principle, sure, the road there is understandable and possible. Peter has wanted to kill before and it’s been done well, such as in Kelly’s own Grim Hunt. But the moments that would build a similar premise aren’t on the page. Usually with a Spider-Man villain crossing that line, you get the scene where Peter fails to save someone, and the villain kills that person, and we see the impossible weight settle on his shoulders. Those scenes are missing here. I understand we are supposed to see that Peter’s time in Hell affected him, and issues 8-9 do a good job of showing that. However, it goes off the rails after that. When the story arrives at “Spider-Man needs to kill Itsy Bitsy” in the Superior suit (I love myself a Superior Spider-Man reference), I don’t buy it. And because that’s the crux of the run, the run falls flat in the second half.

Since we are talking about Nick Spencer’s Amazing Spider-Man, which also has an ending arc problem, I need to state: Spencer’s run is still worth reading and Spider-Man/Deadpool mostly isn’t: Spencer cashes his checks along the way. We get many good character beats, self-contained story arcs and single issues before the Sinister War and ending messes. The first ~60 issues of Spencer’s run are good. The last 10 or so fall apart for a different reason: the pacing is rushed and the Kindred reveals are unnecessarily convoluted, and that soured me on the run overall. But I’d still recommend it. I can’t recommend this one.

The verdict

If you’re a Marvel Unlimited reader (or have a library that has these trades) and like these characters, sure, read it. But there are much better Spider-Man comics to read, and there are much better Joe Kelly Spider-Man stories to read instead. Which is the actual reason I’m doing this read-through. I love Joe Kelly. His Brand New Day work on Amazing Spider-Man (Extra, Rage of the Rhino, Grim Hunt!!!!) is great. Spider-Man/Deadpool isn’t. This one, for me, will be a swing and a miss.