“Holy Toledo, bad.
Listen, people who don’t write comics need a comics-writing buddy to help them write comics. It almost never works. Even really good novelists, essayists, TV writers, all kinds of top notch writers fall flat when it comes to comics.
In this volume, it was the classic pitfall: Been There, Done That.
When someone hasn’t read a shitload of comics, it shows when they do things that they think are cute, and WOULD be cute, but we’ve seen them. Like, a lot. Many times, many ways, and done better.
The Scott Aukerman issue, the dude’s funny, but the last thing we needed was “Deadpool Goes Hollywood!” C’mon, dudes. I know it’s what Aukerman knows, but it just didn’t provide what I was looking for. The second issue, I don’t even remember who wrote it, but by that point I was like, “Waitaminute. When are we getting back to the story already in progress from volume 1?” THEN, the second issue ended with an explicit statement that we’d be back in business in issue 3. Which turned out to be total BULLSHIT. <-- I want credit for this pun as issue 3 was written by Penn and Teller. Which, again, fun idea on paper, just don't care. It turns out we do side quests for the entire volume. I don’t know what was going on with this book and its writers at the time, but this idea didn’t pan out. If you’re going to have authors or celebrities write a book, let me lay out some suggestions: 1. Don’t give them a difficult book. Combining Spider-Man and Deadpool doesn’t really work, so handing it over to a beginner is a terrible idea. Put ’em on Dazzler. That’s fun. 2. Give them a mentor. These are definitely books that should be strongly co-written, pairing a comics writer with a non-comics writer. 3. Don’t do too much. Keep the story small and simple. Don’t fly all over the world or time travel or any shit like that. 4. Don’t throw these in mid-story-arc. That’s just some bullshit. <-- That one's not a joke. Unless you laughed. In which case I'll take it. "