Tuesday 24 February 2009

Comics Stuff : Daniel Way and Deadpool

Why am I writing this blog every day? Why? I swear that I'm gonna start posting sequential photos of the ceiling of my appartment soon until I've covered the entire surface area. It'll be awesome. It'll be a fuckin' meme. You watch.

For now, comics.

There's this writer, Daniel Way, who writes for Marvel. I first heard about him through an insane interview he gave about an Ant-Man comic he was going to write. Ant-Man... what can you say... the concept is not enough to enthuse most people. Is Edgar Wright still working up that comedy treatment for a movie? I'd really like to see that. Anyway, Way gave a bizarre, hilarious, interview where he came off like a man who didn't give a crap about Ant-Man and just wanted to write a comic book. Stuff like this:

The Pulse: "Hank Pym in the Ultimates universe seems a little 'Max' but the mainstream universe Hank Pym has never seemed that cutting edge or mature - at least before the Avengers 71 issue - so why was this Ant Man (as opposed to Scott Lange ) chosen for the Max series?"

Daniel Way: "I don't know (just like I don't know about this 'Avengers 71' thing). Marvel sent me this big book of old Ant-Man stories and said 'go.' I flipped through it--sometimes he got really small, sometimes he got really big ... I didn't know what the fuck was going on. So I just read the first 6 or 8 pages of the first story, got it and went off."


Sadly most people didn't get the joke and just thought he was an asshole, so he seemed to have been shelved as a writer for a while before he started writing for Marvel regularly a few years ago. I was pleased at first, but frankly I haven't really liked anything he's written for Marvel since he started on the high-profile books. Until he started working on Deadpool.


I love Deadpool, and at last Way seems to be cutting loose. How do you solve the problem of having no-one to play off in a comedy action book? Have your hero banter with the voices in his head! It's not the greatest thing on the stands or anything, and probably no Deadpool joke will ever beat the very first one in the very first comic of his ongoing series, but it's at last living up to the Daniel Way I saw interviewed. That interview's gone from the website it was originally on, but I could still find stuff like this quote online:

The Pulse: "What do you view as Hank's greatest assets?"

Way: "Well ... he can make himself really small. That's what we call his 'power'."

The Pulse: "What do you view as his greatest weaknesses?"

Way: "Insecurity. Egomania. Totally gay outfit."

Mister Way, please... if you can make Deadpool any crazier than it already is... that'd be awesome.

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