Well, they can’t all be winners.

Daniel Way’s Deadpool series has been a great outing for the now omnipresent Wade Wilson, providing great silly and slapstick comedy. It seems Way has a great handle on the Deadpool character, but that proved not to be enough for Deadpool #19. Being as this was a Spider-Man/Deadpool team up story, writing a good Deadpool is only half the battle, as Way would also have to write a charismatic Spider-Man as well, but unfortunatly fails at this task. Spidey is written as the straight man to Deadpool’s wacky banter, and it just doesn’t ring true. It’s beyond me why Way thought Spider-Man would be a good straight man to Deadpool’s antics, but it really made Spidey seem out of character. The relation between these two characters can indeed be interesting, as proven by Joe Kelly’s Amazing Spider-Man #611, though the relationship in that issue was vastly different than in this issue. Kelly wrote these two characters in a way that both their types of humor were able to bounce of each other flawlessly. Spidey’s humor seems to be MIA here, and it’s a real shame, because it caused this issue to be inferior to the great issues that preceeded it. Hopefully the inclusion of Hit-Monkey, my favorite recent jokes in comics, in the next issue can make this slump a one-time occurence.