I’ve never read any of the MAX comics before, so I’m not familiar with the line. I am a big fan of Deadpool, though, so when they came out with Deadpool Max this year, I figured I’d give it a shot. So I read the first issue, which I reviewed here, and I thought it might just be the worst thing I’ve ever read from Marvel. Issue #2 isn’t much better.
The best thing about the issue is the art by Kyle Baker. That’s not to say it’s good. Most of it is subpar and I don’t like the style at all. The backgrounds and flashback sequences are very minimalist with little detail. The foreground characters are maybe overly detailed and they strike me as very messy and busy. It’s not terrible, but it’s not very good either.
The rest of the comic is terrible. The plot is something directly out of a b-list horror movie. There is a mental hospital where an evil doctor is using patients with mental illness to lure people to the hospital so their organs can be harvested and sold on the black market. Deadpool is one of the people lured to the hospital and, not really a spoiler if you read Deadpool stuff, he stops the evil doctor using extreme violence (which is graphically depicted).
So that makes for a bad comic, but it doesn’t turn into a terrible comic until you bring in some of the other factors. There is a scantily-clad (and sometimes naked) female patient who uses sex to lure people to the hospital. When Deadpool meets her, he thinks she’s a psychiatrist who is helping him out, but each time she says something clinical, his mind replaces her words with sexual come-ons. The “twist” is that he later finds out that he isn’t imagining things and that she really is saying these explicitly sexual references and she is dying to have sex with the scarred and misshappen Deadpool. After Deadpool has sex with the mentally-ill woman, we find out that part of her illness is that she’s a nymphomaniac, something the evil doctor takes advantage of in order to lure new victims. Later, Deadpool realizes that he, himself, isn’t crazy, but that the woman is, so he dumps her, despite her love for him, because of her mental illness, leaving her in the hospital in a hail of insults while he goes back out to his job in the real world killing people for fun and money.
This doesn’t even get into the subplots about child abuse, spouse abuse, parental abandonment, homosexuality as a veiled mental illness, the use of words like “nigger, spic, dyke, kike, gook and homo” coming from one of the “good guys,” and Deadpool leaving his friend (a different friend) behind to be tortured or worse as he leaves the hospital.
So is the point of MAX comics to find every possible way to be offensive and cram it all into the same comic? I’m not sure the world needs comics like that. If the idea is to be able to tell stories that aren’t limited by the normal confines of comic book standards and censorship, then that’s a great idea. This certainly isn’t that, though, and it makes me wonder if MAX comics are worth the paper they are printed on. I’ve read two MAX issues to date and so far, I’m thinking they aren’t.
Plot: The overall story is a horror-movie cliche and it’s done poorly. The details make it much worse. Rating: 1.0
Art: As I mentioned before, it’s not terrible, but it’s not very good, either. Rating: 4.0
Overall: At this rate, I guess I’m still reading Deadpool MAX just for the purposes of being able to write bad reviews of the terrible content. Overall rating: 2.5
Recommendation: Do NOT buy. Protest would be a better recommendation.
