When you have a slow week in comics like myself, it helps to try out new things. Sometimes a comic will grab your attention with an interesting cover, or a bizarre premise, or having a favorite character appear as well. This one-shot, which was originally an original comic for ‘Marvel.com’ has all three of those ideas in mind. It has a great cover by Skottie Young, a bizarre team up, and it has one of my favorite character’s with Deadpool. So I forked in some extra cash to get this money, what is the harm?

While I wouldn’t say that I wasted my money on this, it definitely feels like Marvel is cashing in on something that was (possibly) easily available on their site. Then again we all know I am not a fan of digital comics and Marvel does a pretty poor job of making digital comics accessible. But it’s easy to tell they didn’t bring the ‘A’ talent with them for this one-shot. It might be a little unfair to Stuart Moore but let’s face it, this is a pretty generic story. Wolverine is in the middle of a fight with a big robot when he realizes that he needs a distraction (a ‘decoy’ if you will) to have any chance of winning. A few pages later convincing the Merc with the Mouth and you got yourselfs a team up. The problem is two-fold. For one thing the story is pretty generic. The second problem is that this is as simple as you can get with characterization. We learn nothing about these two but then again if your big baddie is a generic looking robot then I guess you weren’t expecting much of a story.

Then we have the art which can be all over the place sometimes. I like Shawn Crystal from other Deadpool projects because he brings a cartoony element to the characters. There are some good pages in this like Wolverine remembering Jean Grey, or the reveal of the ultimate plan with Logan and Wilson. But between those great pages are wonky character designs and changes in anatomy. Wolverine is the big culprit here as his head changes shape in every panel. Plus the action left me with something more including the robot’s deathrays which look pretty lame.

This one-shot also has a reprint of an old Deadpool story with Fabian Nicieza, Dan Slott, and Nelson. While it’s great to see an old, and even better, Deadpool story reprinted that brings the most obvious to the table: The reprint is much better then what is the marketed story. Moore and Crystal try to do their best but in the end it’s just a generic story involving a robot. You can’t get any more basic then that in a Marvel comic book these days.