ComicBook All downhill from here...
I used to have a soft spot for Deadpool. He was a kind of funny b-list character with a neat gimmick of breaking the fourth wall. Then he became a popular joke, and then Marvel decided to run that joke into the ground and keep going until the Mole Man could see it. He's left now as a walking personification of 9gag/Family Guy and serves as the new Wolverine/Batman, a husk stripped of all interesting traits and left as a marketing tool.
Case in point... this piece of shit book that exists solely to milk money of the Deadpool fan horde. The plot, and that's being generous, is that Deadpool gets mentally tortured and this makes him turn evil. As torture tends to do, apparently. And from there the plot is kind of abandoned and the story descends into a gorefest with some hackneyed concept of Deadpool going on his spree to rebel against Marvel Comics.
It's pretty much a case of 'Exactly what it says on the tin' with Deadpool killing everyone from Spider-Man to the Avengers, usually in ways that make absolutely no sense. But really you shouldn't expect as much. Deadpool's just THAT AWESOME that his methods of killing gods and unstoppable rage machines don't NEED to make sense. It reminds me of those 'who would win in a fight' debates that involve Batman, which essentially devolve into Insane Troll Logic to prove that Batman by virtue of being Batman. Now just replace Batman with Deadpool in that last sentence and you get the idea.
If you're into that 'super grimdark hardcore bullshit' genre of comic books, then this might just be for you. To me, it's just mean-spirited fanboy tripe relying on Deadpool's popularity to draw in attention.
What I find most hilarious is that the idea and very title come from an exceptionally crap Garth Ennis book, and it manages to actually be worse than that. You have to be exceptionally bad to be worse than Ennis, I mean he's the sub-basement of the bottom of the barrel.
ComicBook Inexcusable. (first series)
What a baffling story.
Punisher Kills The Marvel Universe is, not to belabor a point, not good. It's a hackneyed mess with weak character work and a nonsense plot, and one of the worst comics Ennis has ever written (certainly his worst Punisher comic, which makes sense as the good stuff was way later). But it had a few moments of black comedy that worked, and it made sense as a Punisher pitch (what if he hated superheroes instead of criminals?).
And then there's this, which decides to take an already bad concept and make it longer.
Where Frank Castle declaring war on superheroes at least sort of works as an extension of his character, Deadpool doing the same thing is nonsense. Surely, Deadpool's original appeal was that he was a put-upon everyman by the standards of regenerating mercenaries, a laidback jokester trying to pay the bills. Giving him genocidal motives is profoundly out-of-character, even given the absurd meta-reasoning, and so he is tortured into further madness, turning him into a character unrecognizable as Deadpool. It's the worst excesses of the Way era taken to new heights; the only thing this Deadpool has in common with any take is cracking one-liners. The best alt-universe stories are the ones that provide deeper insights into how a character works, but DKTMU has no interest in that.
So having replaced Deadpool with Freddy Krueger, surely the story could at least have decent fight scenes? Seems like the point, after all; showing a dedicated street-level fighter fighting gods. Turns out, not so much. Of the kills in the comic, when the story can't put them offpanel, only a handful seem plausible, and many rely on characters either forgetting about their powers or being incredibly stupid.
Some cite Spider-Man forgetting his senses, or Thor forgetting he can control Mjolnir, or a handful of bombs killing half the Avengers. For me, it's the first issue, when the Watcher, who is defined by his ability to see everything, somehow gets sneak-attacked and killed by Deadpool, who found a cosmic-entity-killing weapon in Reed's lab and figured how to use it in seconds - because Reed has guns that can kill a guy who could smash a galaxy, but not something that can handle a guy with quick healing.
Then maybe it can be funny? Nope. Part of slapstick is knocking people off their pillar, but no such luck. There's no setup, no comeuppance, they just sob and beg and try to run away. It's like the scene in American Psycho where Patrick Bateman curbstomps a homeless man, but four issues long. Any humor to be found in Deadpool's one-liners is on the level of a school bully punching you in the face with his own hand while shouting "Stop hitting yourself!"
All in all, it's a spiritually bankrupt, perplexingly boring, creatively void, and entirely worthless monument to the worst parts of the character's fandom. While rereading it for this review, I discovered it's also a strong seller in trade. Make of that what you will.