The horror! The horror!

(Panini Books)

There comes a point when even the most ardent Deadpool fan has to question the merits of a title which serves no other purpose but to illustrate how bad-ass Wade Wilson is when he is unleashed without conscience or compunction, and then proceeds to brutally butcher the inhabitants of the Marvel Universe (or an alternate dimension variant, unless Marvel is serious about wiping out its entire array of characters in one five-part mini series).

After all, how many times can you watch the Merc with the Mouth decapitate, destroy and even defenestrate costumed characters with reckless abandon before it becomes tiresome and repetitive? For this reader, the moment this title finally jumped the shark was when Wade turned his attention to the likes of Power Pack, Ms Marvel and Moon Girl – was there really any need to see him murder children? Arguably not.

The follow-up to an unrelated previous series with a similar paper-thin plot, the premise of this title is that a cabal of supervillains turned Deadpool into a killing machine through the use of deep subliminal programming, with a trigger phrase used to set him going against predetermined targets. Before long he’s worked his way through the ranks of the Avengers and the X-Men, and that’s just for starters, but what happens when he runs out of superheroes to kill?

It would be nice to think there is more to this title than wholesale slaughter, but it’s relentlessly grim, and you’ll struggle to find any humour in Deadpool’s usually amusing banter, knowing that it’s actually disguising his internal pain at killing his friends. Writer Cullen Bunn and artist Dalibor Talajic do what they can with the narrative they’ve been tasked with completing, but at the end of the day it’s hard going and likely to leave you feeling dirty inside at the conclusion. Not Deadpool’s finest hour.