Broken Frontier

Wade Wilson returns from his reality-hopping adventure thinking he has come back with the real Cable and instead finds…Baby Nate?

For the last few issues, Deadpool has been on a search for his sometimes friend Cable. After the events of the X-Force miniseries, Nathan disappeared with the Skornn, leaving his paradise island, Providence, without its esteemed leader. With the help of Forge and Cable’s personal reporter, Irene Merryweather, Wade went on a search for Cable by hopping through alternate realities that Cable’s lifeforce left an imprint on. Followed on a 3 minute delay by Siryn and Cannonball, Wade found himself alternating between battling and trying to rationalize with alternate versions of Cable. After finally being convinced that he has returned to his reality, Wade Wilson turns around looking for Nate only to find a baby version running around and causing trouble.

I’ll be honest; I wasn’t picking up this book until this recent arc. But based on the constant nagging from both my brother and a friend, I checked it out. I haven’t looked back since. This really is a great book. And the one thing I was mostly worried about, Fabian Nicieza’s writing, has been the highlight of the series thus far.

Never one to feel nostalgic about the Rob Liefeld X-Force era, I was apprehensive that this book would have a similar feel to those past books. But in fact, it is anything but. Instead of a standard superhero/anti-hero action adventure book, Nicieza has instead turned out a fantastic buddy action comedy. Deadpool’s dialogue never ceases to make the reader laugh as he continues to say stupid things and come to realizations five minutes later than everyone else and all of it with his vintage confidence. Likewise, Cable sounds like the wise sage that everyone knew he should be. Headstrong, optimistic, and confident, Cable and Deadpool work as a great combination of contrasts. And I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that the recap pages in this series have consistently been some of the funniest reads in comics.

Having such contrasts just with the two main characters, artist Patrick Zircher decides to use a predominantly cartoonist style with the book. And it works rather well. With the wide range of emotions, this style helps to keep them all understandable to the reader and highlights the differences fantastically. Likewise, it really helps to bring out the playfulness of Deadpool’s dialogue and action. When he’s hopping around through a group of assassins and spouting hysterical lines of dialogue, Zircher brings it all together with his artwork. The only issues then are on the rare occasions when the script is grounded and Zircher’s work seems a little bland. Luckily, those segments are few and far between.

At one point, these two characters were among the most popular in the Marvel Universe. No longer at such a high level, they are now just a couple of guys trying to find their way in the world. And boy, is it funny.