Shelf Indulgence

I'd heard about this Deadpool guy on the Internet and through other friends, and I decided to give him a try a few months back. I thought I had tracked down the best place to start, but I somehow started here, which seems to be further into the Deadpool series than I realized. "The Complete Collection" is a bit misleading, since I wanted to start at the beginning of the character's run in Marvel; instead, I got the beginning of Daniel Way's run on the character.

I like wacky humor, which was what I understood the character to be, but it still had a level of seriousness to it that I wasn't expecting. I came into the series expecting Ambush Bug, but what I discovered was more Lobo. To be fair, it was more like Lobo meets Ambush Bug, but it was more serious and violent than I was expecting. The opening story, where Wolverine uses Deadpool as bait for drawing out his son, veered into some pretty heavy territory, and while I admire the emotional impact of the end of that story, it was at odds with how I expected the story to play out.

I'm not sure if I want to keep reading this series. Sure, the jokes are funny when they work (the last story in this collection featured Deadpool "working with" Bullseye, and they played off of each other pretty well), but it just wasn't what I thought it would be. I'll chalk this up to another case of having my expectations too high to fully enjoy what I was reading.