My body tried to speed-run something last week. Scratchy throat Tuesday, head jammed full of snot Wednesday, hacking up yellow stuff Thursday. It has subsequently settled into occasionally coughing, occasionally runny nose since, which isn't great, but I can operate around it.
Nicki, Ben and Alicia's Skrull daughter, observes that Earthling myths and legends consistently portray shape-shifters as untrustworthy and evil. So she tries to prove they're actually cool and good. By pretending to be the Fantastic Four to get her siblings out of trouble with the principal. Also by flawlessly impersonating her dad to rent PG-13 movies.
She eventually gets caught, and Ben tells her not to impersonate other people at school, and not to do it elsewhere without asking first. Which she initially perceives as having to get permission to be herself, but by the end of the issue has concluded that she's really been using shapeshifting to try being liked by being other people, and she should just be herself. Using her powers openly to defeat the Mole Man when he attacks the school to get at Franklin and Valeria probably helps.
It's a nice idea to play with the cultural differences Nicki has to deal with coming from the Skrulls culture, where shapeshifting is the norm and you're expected to use it, versus Earth where it's a relatively rare trait, and most of the people get spooked if they eventually learn they weren't talking to who they thought they were. Hopefully North will do something similar for Nicki's brother Jo-Venn and having grown up among the highly militaristic Kree at some point.
Cummings struggles drawing The Thing consistently, as he sometimes seems to have a neck and other times doesn't, and the shape of his torso changes a bit. For the more regular characters, he's fine (I feel like he used Abe Lincoln as a starting point for the principal), and when Nicki is just stretching her limbs or bulking herself up, there's no problem there. And Mole Man's 3-headed, fire breathing, beady-eyed creature looks cool, so overall, it works.
Eleanor, Princess, and Valentine fight MODOK for half the issue. This is mostly Ellie getting increasingly battered, as she runs up against the limits of her healing ability, but keeping MODOK occupied until Valentine can get close and pump him full of a hallucinogen from mushrooms. Odd that Valentine says they both know he won't enjoy the trip, but the one panel we see, MODOK's got a giddy look and is proclaiming (in multi-colored text) "The colors taste like colors!" Seems to be enjoying it to me. It's when he wakes up he'll be pissed.
So Ellie's in bad shape, but Valentine's got a plan to use some magic powers she gained partway through the Alyssa Wong-written series to essentially do an alchemical transfer of Ellie's healing to Wade to make his cells heal like they're supposed to. It works, Deadpool's back on his feet, Ellie doesn't die, Wade and Valentine have a brief conversation where Valentine whispers something to Wade he claims not to have heard, but will doubtlessly come up later.
Most significant, during the ritual, Ellie saw her mother. Or something claiming to be her mother, who tries to warn her of the cost of this procedure. But Ellie inherited her father's attention span along with his healing factor, so she doesn't listen, or even give her mother time to explain. So she doesn't know what's going to happen, and neither do we. But now Eleanor sees her mother's spirit. Or, again, something passing itself off as her mother's spirit. I don't know if that's going to be something different from what Valentine tried to tell Wade, or if they're the same thing and neither Deadpool got the message.
I really thought Deadpool's resurrection would involve finding Death Grip and learning what he did wasn't exactly death. The fact that Wade wasn't rotting seemed to suggest this was something other than true death, so I thought maybe it was a state similar to it, because Death Grip wants to learn something from a man who can't die coming to a state like death. Maybe we'll find out that was Death Grip's plan, and Ellie messed it up.
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