RIP John Cassaday

As if the passing of James Earl Jones wasn't bad enough for the nerdosphere, I learned today that comics artist John Cassaday also passed away yesterday. He wasn't as much of a household name, even among comics fans (I believe), and I don't even know the full range of his work, but I did know his work on Planetary, and honestly, the craft on that is enough to cement his place as one of the greats.

I first encountered his work back in 2000 or 2001, when Planetary was a going concern and Warren Ellis was revitalizing the hell out of the Wildstorm line. And while Bryan Hitch was giving the Authority the widescreen comics treatment, Cassaday's ultra-detailed style was doing something equally interesting on Planetary, which was Ellis's sort of meta-commentary on how superhero comics (and especially Marvel) erased the pulp characters who'd come before.

Each issue dealt with a different aspect of either 20th-century adventure fiction (like the Shadow, Doc Savage, Victorian horror literature) or 60s comics (the Hulk, the Fantastic Four, Superman and Wonder Woman), and Cassaday's style accommodated all of them. He could do beautifully craggy faces, which was notable after the 90s, when certain artists couldn't seem to depict different ages to save their lives. But he could also imply action without undue bombast - this is a talent that Hitch has, and Frank Quitely also does it quite well.

I also liked that if Hitch's Authority looked like Alan Davis, Cassaday's work on Planetary reminded me of a slightly less cartoony Kevin Maguire. Incidentally, the reason Hitch's work looked like Davis's is that he was being inked by Paul Neary, who inked some of Davis's most famous work (and who, sadly, also passed away earlier this year, a fact I only learned today when looking for reputable sources about Cassaday's passing).

I did experience a little of Cassaday's non-Planetary work, in the form of one issue of Astonishing X-Men, which he did with Joss Whedon. I didn't stick with the book, because I couldn't see how anyone could follow up Grant Morrison's New X-Men, but I've since heard that Astonishing was almost as good, so I have that to look forward to. And I've been seeing some panels from Cassaday's Captain America work, so that's another body of work to get stuck into.

But I'm sad that, having passed away at 52, Cassaday leaves behind much less than if he'd had his allotted threescore and ten. Ellis may have conceived of the strangeness of the world in Planetary, but Cassaday brought it to life, and he'll be missed.

RIP James Earl Jones

Like everyone, I was sad to see the news that James Earl Jones died today. I confess I didn't know much of his work beyond the obvious ones, like voicing Darth Vader and Mufasa, as well as in the early Tom Clancy films. But of course I knew his voice, and I knew his presence whenever he showed up on screen.

Reading his Wikipedia page, it's exciting to see that he had the same type of experience on stage as some of the great British actors, having played roles in Shakespeare as well as contemporary American theater. I've long thought that America should have an equivalent to the Royal Shakespeare Company, i.e. a group that turns out the most talented actors, like Ian McKellen, Michael Gambon, Patrick Stewart, Lawrence Olivier... I'm aware I've listed a bunch who did SFF movies or shows, but bear with me, will you?

Anyway, Jones would belong in that company, and now that I've read of his background in Shakespeare and in theater more generally, I'm sad I never got to see it. He was a great actor, and he'll be missed.

Rethinking Profit

It's not all comics and football around here - sometimes I turn my incoherent ramblings on economics. And the thing I've been wondering about lately is profit.

I know that the business of business is profit. According to Milton Friedman, that's all a business should be thinking about - any other social benefits of profits generated are out of the business's sphere of responsibility, and shareholders can use the profit for whatever social purposes they want. This then leads to the idea that a publicly held business's fiduciary responsibility is to maximize those profits, and if its management fails to do so, then the shareholders have the right to exchange the board for one that will bring the most profits possible.

The problem I have with this is, a business has to have something in mind beyond just making profit, if it isn't actually in finance. Strictly speaking, Pfizer (a stock that I own) isn't necessarily delivering the greatest profit to shareholders, because it continues to develop drugs rather than fire all its scientists, hire investment bankers, and compete with Goldman Sachs. 

That may seem like a stupid analogy, but it isn't - drug discovery is extremely expensive, even if you discount Pharma companies' own claim that it takes a billion dollars to bring a drug to market. There are a lot of dead ends, where a molecule that seemed promising at the start turns out to make people's skin fall off or just drop dead; a Pfizer or a Merck or whoever can outsource the discovery process by buying promising companies, but that's expensive too. It'd be easier if they just turned into a bank, wouldn't it?

Same with, say, Ford. You don't have to reinvent cars every year or so, but you do have to keep building them, adding features that either customers want or that will keep them alive (funnily enough, these aren't always the same thing), and you have to pay people to build the cars for you. Those people have their own demands for profit, and the longer they stay, the more they cost you.

Perhaps I'm being willfully naive - I understand that Ford and Pfizer and every other publicly held corporation can't just pivot to finance, because then we'd have the ultimate externality, in which food, clothing, medicine and basically everything else isn't being produced. But profit doesn't really seem to serve any societal function of its own - whatever industry you're in, profit may be the ultimate goal but it doesn't get shared with the people who build it. Employee pay is an expense, which is why companies sometimes make layoffs in the midst of record profits: the market is stupid and it thinks that the company is making its operations leaner.

Michael Moore has a joke in Downsize This, where Wall Street goes through the roof because one day, every company decides to lay off every employee. I read that almost 30 years ago, but it's stuck with me ever since, as did an Economist article I read about 15 years ago or so that suggested that American companies were too profitable.

Now, it's one thing when Michael Moore criticizes corporations, but when the Economist thinks that corporations are sitting on too much cash, that bears paying attention to. Their argument was that this profit wasn't filtering out into the rest of the economy, it was just going to shareholders; indeed, a piece in Forbes this past year notes that nearly half of before-tax profits of non-financial corporations went to dividends, and that capital expenditures are at their lowest level in years. Companies aren't investing in R&D or strengthening their processes, because they're trying to funnel all that cash back to investors.

Now, this might seem odd for me, as a person who owns stocks in individual companies (as well as retirement vehicles like a 401k, an HSA and a Roth IRA) to suggest that there's too much focus on profits. I might have a different idea if my holdings were a few orders of magnitude larger.

I guess I see it through the lens of enshittification, the term Cory Doctorow coined to describe when online platforms decline in quality once they've captured their audience. He sees it in terms of Google destroying the market for online search by being better than all the other search engines, and then, when network effects and habit mean that people refuse to use Bing or whatever, Google fills its results with a tidal wave of shit, like sponsored links, adds, and now AI-generated garbage. 

But it's applicable in the analog world too, as we've seen with Boeing's ongoing quality-related struggles. When a business focuses on maximizing profit over everything else, then improving the physical products it sells is contrary to the desires of the shareholders. Performing quality control takes money and slows down launch of new products, so you get a lot of products rushed out before they're ready or you get a lot of incremental improvements being touted as new products, with a price premium to match.

This is where people normally protest that no, of course they're not advocating for socialism, they're totally in favor of capitalism, yada yada yada. It's true that I'm not arguing for a command economy, because I do believe that some amount of capitalism is needed for markets to efficiently find the best solution to a problem - after all, Google may be crap now, but before it destroyed all the competition, it simply did provide a better service. But I think that, as in all things, the incentives are misaligned.

At the very least, there needs to be some way for shareholders to reward profitability over a long period, rather than every three months. And maybe the shareholders should include the employees as a matter of course, since they're the ones who've made the profit possible? Tim Cook may be great at logistics and at understanding the big picture of getting his phones to my avaricious grasp, but he's not the one assembling the damn things, putting them in boxes to the store, or taking my order when I pop into the Apple Store to pay the Cupertino Idiot Tax.

If nothing else, sharing the profits more widely with those who actually do the work might help reduce income inequality, no?

RIP Sven Göran Eriksson

My post about the Beckham doc on Netflix talked about a weird time, so it's fitting that I run this post, about the recently passed former England manager, Sven Göran Eriksson, since he was a big part of why that was such a weird time.

I was listening to the Guardian's Football Weekly today, which led off with some tributes to Sven, as he was known during his time here. Some of it was fair, talking about his rise from obscurity in Sweden to managing in Portugal and Italy, and then getting hired for the England job on the strength of his time at Benfica and Lazio. They also talked about his record as England manager (three quarterfinal exits in a row, in 2002, 2004 and 2006), and on the tabloid obsession with Sven's personal life.

I thought some of their comments missed the point, btw. Max Rushden and co were right to point out that the Sun and other tabloids' relentless reporting on Sven's affairs was a bit much, but they also didn't mention that Eriksson was in a relationship with Nancy Dell'Olio while the tabloids were reporting on his various affairs. Indeed, one of the guys on the podcast said Eriksson wasn't hurting anyone with his affairs, but surely he was hurting Dell'Olio?

Sven's time as England manager is also a little confusing in hindsight. It's held up as a period of drift, because the expectations at those three tournaments were high, especially in 2006, when a lot of England fans expected to win. Mars bars were even briefly rebranded "Believe" bars, because presumably that would fire up the fans. 

But the football turned out to be slow and ponderous, and not at all the kind of play you'd expect to win a tournament with. I even remember sitting through the first half of England's opening match against Paraguay, which was settled by a Paraguayan own goal in the fourth minute, and when the half ended and they returned to Gary Lineker and the Match of the Day team in the studio, they all looked embarrassed at having to talk up such a performance. As I recall, England's tournament didn't really improve, and my abiding memory of their exit against Portugal, even more so than Cristiano Ronaldo winding up Wayne Rooney, is both Rooney and Beckham throwing tear-filled tantrums as the game slipped out of their control.

(I also remember having to be careful about the big grin on my face as I took the train home from my friend Ian's house. Not, I should add, because of England's elimination, but because Brazil had been eliminated by France in the earlier match, which made me quite happy back then. But that's by the by)

The 2006 World Cup is remembered more for the Wags (wives and girlfriends) and their antics in Baden-Baden, where the England team was based, than for anything the men did on the pitch. It was held up as a symbol of moral decline, in which the players (chiefly Beckham) were more interested in celebrity and partying, and of Eriksson's dangerous indulgence. Indeed, the 2010 World Cup, where England were coached by Fabio Capello, was promised to be a much more buttoned-up England camp, though they actually went out earlier than they had in 2006.

I was among many who tut-tutted at the Wags' antics in 2006 (although now my writing playlist features a song by Girls Aloud, a member of whom is Cheryl, one of the chief Wags, so I've clearly changed in the intervening 18 years). Though if you consider it, Sven's England achieved an impressive level of consistency, certainly more so than the three tournaments before or after.

England had three different managers at Euro 96 (Terry Venables), World Cup 98 (Glenn Hoddle) and Euro 2000 (Kevin Keegan). The exits were at, respectively, the semi-finals, round of 16, and group stage. If we go back to World Cup 94, England didn't even qualify.

After Sven's departure in 2006, the roll call is even bleaker: failed to qualify for Euro 2008 (Steve McClaren), round of 16 in World Cup 2010 (Capello), and quarterfinals in Euro 2012 (Roy Hodgson). We can also take Hodgson on his own, since he was the first England manager after Sven to hold the post for three tournaments, and he didn't exactly cover himself in glory either, with a group stage exit at the 2014 World Cup and then the humiliating defeat to Iceland in 2016.

You can look at this from several angles. One is that England didn't know how good they had it when Sven was their manager. Certainly he and Capello are among England's most successful managers, in terms of win percentages, even if both served up some pretty dour performances on the pitch.

But that's what's frustrating about Sven's time as England manager: he had an arguably more talented group than Gareth Southgate had for his four tournaments, and got less out of them. The Football Weekly guys said something about good man-management by Sven, which is attested by the players, who all seemed to deliver stirring eulogies this week; but I also remember that the England team was riven by cliques, with the Manchester United and Liverpool, and later Chelsea, contingents not talking to one another. I'd say that Gareth Southgate was better at getting the whole squad to play for each other.

Still, I have some mixed feelings about Sven, because I appreciated that his bookish demeanor riled up the tabloids, who'd probably rather have lost gloriously with Dave Bassett at the helm. And another thing the Football Weekly gang said was, Sven, for all his faults, lived life. Those affairs were a bit distasteful (especially the one with the FA secretary who'd also had an affair with the FA chief executive), but apart from that, he seems to have been a bon vivant.

What's sad is that, overall, Sven's career didn't really hit the heights again after 2006. He managed Manchester City before Abu Dhabi bought it, then a variety of middling to low-level national teams, the lowest of which were China and the Philippines. He also managed Leicester City a couple of seasons before they were promoted back to the Premier League, so, much like his time at Man City, he missed out on the Foxes' big success in 2016.

I've done a bit of criticizing in this post, but overall, I'd say that Sven deserves to be regarded as more than a footnote in the history of England's men's national team. His time in charge coincided with my first stint living in the UK, so the England matches were a big part of my life in those years. Indeed, my favorite Sven game is the 5-1 defeat of Germany in World Cup qualifying in 2001. His tournament teams may not have hit those heights, but he deserves the credit for that result, and for giving England a confidence they hadn't had before.

Netflix's Beckham Documentary is a Weird Snapshot of a Weird Time

I try not to do this, but sometimes I'm just taken with a show and I feel the need to talk about it here, even though I'm not through watching it yet. Add the fact that I had no idea what else to blog about this week, and voila: I want to talk about the David Beckham documentary on Netflix.

I heard about it when it first came out, and gave it a hard pass, because Beckham's a footballer that I made my mind up about years ago, and I've been content not to revisit that opinion. Whenever he comes up in conversation these days, it's usually negative, like the flack he took for shilling for Qatar ahead of the 2022 World Cup. After years (decades) of playing to the LGBTQ community and presenting himself as an ally, many in that community felt betrayed by that move.

I've also been a little bemused by his whole thing at Inter Miami, not that I knew about the details. Having checked out the ownership section on Inter Miami's Wikipedia page, it looks like he received an option to buy an expansion team when he joined MLS in 2007, which I guess is the same deal the league gave to Lionel Messi when he joined Miami. Nothing too odd, at least without doing full due diligence.

So I was a little surprised when I learned, or was reminded, that the documentary had been directed by Fisher Stevens, who played Hugo on Succession and has made a career for himself as a director of well-regarded documentaries. It came up because I heard Stevens talk about the Beckham doc on Marc Maron's podcast, WTF, in an episode from last year. They talked about the various people Stevens spoke to for the doc, and that's what persuaded me to have a look.

It's authorized by Beckham, which is both good and bad. Good, because Stevens gets access to a lot of people, from Beckham's wife Victoria to former teammates, his parents, and various others. I think what made me want to check it out was the fact that they spoke to Sir Alex Ferguson, which felt like a good get. The bad thing about being authorized is that sometimes it feels a little sanitized - Beckham gets to present himself as he wants, which is his right but is also at the heart of why I'm a little disdainful of him.

On the other hand, the documentary does give Sir Alex a voice throughout, including when it discusses his rift with Beckham. The only person that's clearly thrown under the bus (so far, because I'm partway through the third episode, of four) is Glenn Hoddle, who was the England manager at the 1998 World Cup. That means he was in the hot seat to talk about the red card in the match against Argentina, which Beckham received for kicking out at Diego Simeone. In fact, it's kind of cool that they talked to Simeone about it, and he's quite forthcoming about it.

More than anything, the episodes I've seen have been a nice time capsule back to the 90s and early 2000s, and the football culture that prevailed. There's a lot of archival footage of Beckham from the time, both on the pitch and off it, which takes me back nicely. The music is pretty on-point too, capturing some of the Cool Britannia stuff that was happening around then (see also my love for the Britpop documentary, Live Forever).

There are some things I didn't know, or had forgotten about. For example, that red card against Argentina may have galvanized the whole of England against Beckham, but it was good to be reminded that his sending off didn't actually make them lose the match - they held on for penalties, which is when England came a cropper. Though it wouldn't be the last time the English collectively blamed a single individual for an early exit from a tournament...

It was also interesting to hear directly, from Beckham and Ferguson, about the incident that led to (or at least presaged) Beckham being sold to Real Madrid. I remember hearing about the boot to the face incident in the dressing room, but hadn't read up on how it was Ole Gunnar Solskjaer's boot, or how it was effectively a freak accident when Ferguson kicked a pile of laundry and the boot hit Beckham in the face. I also hadn't known that they'd originally sold him to Barcelona, only for him to ask to go to Real Madrid.

The other thing that was helpful to be reminded of is just how good Beckham actually was on the pitch. My enduring memories of him are missing a penalty against Portugal at Euro 2004 and of his tear-filled tantrum when the same opponents knocked England out of the World Cup two years later. But the documentary, without spending too much time on the intricacies of football, does a good job of showing the ways Beckham could be influential. The prime example is the qualifier against Greece, which Beckham essentially won single-handed (though my abiding memory of that qualifying campaign was the October 2001 demolition of Germany).

I suppose my memories of those years are erased by the unceasing juggernaut of the Messi-Ronaldo rivalry that dominated the 2010s, and by the importance of Wayne Rooney to the English game. Though it's worth noting that Beckham's stardom and ubiquity essentially paved the way for the circus that surrounded Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo, as evidenced by the religious ecstasy Beckham provoked in fans when he got to Real Madrid. Rooney, on the other hand, was a creature that the English fans understood better - a chaos agent with a rampaging style similar to that of Paul Gascoigne, who however didn't squander his gift like Gascoigne did.

My memories of Beckham end when he left England, though I had a good laugh at his first couple of seasons as one of Madrid's galacticos, since they didn't win many trophies, being too top-heavy to play well. I do remember when he came to MLS, and how they allowed him to break the salary cap, which has become known as the Beckham rule. I even (vaguely) remember when he went to AC Milan, though I think I didn't know he'd ended his career at Paris St-Germain. I'm looking forward to seeing what the documentary has to say about those years.

Overall, the show isn't perfect, but it's been nice to revisit those years through the lens of Beckham's career. I made a point at the time of ignoring the celebrity stuff he was involved in, thanks to his wife (who I should add was also my favorite Spice Girl), so the hoopla around his wedding and children was new to me. But it all brings me back to those years when I'd first moved to the UK, so it's fun to watch.

Also, the sections where Stevens talks directly to Beckham about his life now are unexpectedly interesting, like the joke about playing football against his son Romeo and threatening to invite his former teammates, like Zidane and Figo and Roberto Carlos, to destroy Romeo and his friends. It's nice to see that will to win is still there, even when it seemed like he was more interested in being a fashion icon.

Chris Claremont's X-Men and What Came After

As part of my ongoing reread of the X-Men, I've finally arrived at the moment when Chris Claremont, the book's most influential scribe, left. This was in 1991, when the X-Men were at the height of their popularity, spawning a new flagship title and inspiring toys and the X-Men animated series. It's also the inflection point for the X-books, where they went from the bestselling titles of the 80s to the sprawling mess that made podcasts like Jay and Miles X-Plain the X-Men necessary.

This post isn't so much an explanation of what happened (which I've pieced together via Wikipedia pages and comments on podcasts), but more how I saw it play out then, and how I see it now.

The first thing to say is that Claremont's departure after X-Men #3 was the first time that I realized how important writers were. I bought that issue soon after it came out, and continued on with the book for a couple of years, but I must have noticed something was off, because I kept coming back to X-Men #3 and its farewell to Claremont, and I put two and two together that Scott Lobdell and Fabian Nicieza weren't quite as good.

Thinking back, that must also be the point at which I became a fan of writers rather than artists, to the point that for years I barely noticed the actual art. It's only in the last few years, with my overall reread of my old collection, that I've forced myself to study the panels in many books. As a result, some artists don't hold up like they did for me back then, while others, like Jim Lee, do look as good as I remember.

Claremont's departure is likely also involved in my switch to DC. The JLA books that hooked me at that time were well-drawn, with one of Adam Hughes's earliest ongoing commitments, but overall the writers, Keith Giffen and JM DeMatteis, were the standouts powering the book. I had a similar whiplash when Giffen left both JLA and Legion of Superheroes, which drove home how important the writer's voice was to my enjoyment of a book (even if, in those specific cases, Giffen was doing the plot rather than the script).

What I didn't realize until I reread my physical copies of Claremont's old issues is how full of tics and idiosyncrasies his writing was. Much has been made of how every character always repeated their powers in the course of an issue (likely a result of the old adage that every issue is someone's first), or of how they repeated certain phrases (doing something "fit to burst"; yelling "Glory!"; and so on). 

I was also struck by how wordy his pages were, from 1975 to 1991, as he described everything and had the characters deliver long monologues. Those are probably also the result of a certain way of doing comics, in which he was plotting the book with the artist and then writing the script after the pages were drawn. It meant Claremont had to adapt his wording to whatever the artist had drawn; most notably, John Byrne drew the Dark Phoenix destroying an inhabited world, which meant Claremont had to adapt the rest of the story to that, leading to the death of Jean Grey, something he hadn't intended on at first.

I like to jokingly wonder whether Chris Claremont is the best bad writer or the worst good writer, but both are unfair. He managed to create a richer world for the X-Men than either Stan Lee or Roy Thomas had before, and having unchallenged control of that world for 16 years meant that he could introduce characters and concepts that are still playing out now, whether in the comics, in the movies or in TV shows. Wolverine is essentially his character, even if he didn't originally love Logan as much as Byrne or other collaborators did; same with the more complicated understanding of Magneto's motivations. 

In terms of Claremont's legacy, I'm still figuring that part out. I have bad memories of the issues in the 90s after he left, but now that I'm embarking on reading that era, I'll have a better sense of how it all played out. I still haven't quite forgiven Lobdell and Nicieza for (as I saw it) ruining books that I loved, but I'll be interested to see how I see their run going forward.

One problem with them and some of the other writers who followed Claremont is, as Jay and Miles put it in an episode that I listened to recently, Claremont had been writing the X-Men so long that Lobdell, Nicieza and whoever else thought that was just how you had to write them. Anybody would have trouble replicating such an imposing voice, even if they were a good writer themselves, so it's fair to say that the deck was stacked against them. And even more so when you consider that, as the flagship Marvel title, X-Men was subject to a lot more editorial interference than it had been in 1975, when Claremont, Len Wein and Dave Cockrum rescued it from the obscurity of being a bimonthly book of reprints.

Since I'm reading one issue of Uncanny X-Men per day (and now also X-Men, the series launched by Claremont and Jim Lee), I've calculated that this first year will take me through to the very eve of Grant Morrison's run on New X-Men. As I recall, there were a few reboots and new directions in that time, including Claremont coming back, and Warren Ellis being given control of the non-core X-books. But Morrison's run - divisive as it is - still strikes me as the short, sharp shock the X-line needed to move on from Claremont's influence.

I've heard some stuff about Morrison's pitch when they were plotting out what they wanted to do with the book, and it sounds bad when they talk about disregarding the existing fans. But I also think of the context, when creators, including Ellis, were just getting to grips with the internet and how easy it was to hear about how pissed off certain fans were that someone was doing new stuff with a book. I don't know how much of a link there is to the toxic fandom of today, but it certainly seems to prefigure stuff like Comicsgate, which has also served to radicalize a bunch of nerds to be culture warriors. If that link really is there, then I kind of wish Morrison's run really had driven all the old fans off. But I'll have to study it myself in more detail when I get to those issues...

The other thing to consider is that, influential as Morrison's run was, they also became something of an albatross on the characters after they left. At the very least, Joss Whedon's Astonishing X-Men is meant to be a good continuation of New X-Men, but in the 20 years since Morrison left, there haven't been that many notable characters introduced - certainly not many that stuck. As far as I can tell, the exceptions are Hope Summers and Pixie, but I'll have a better sense of it when I get to those issues.

As for Claremont himself, I'm kind of looking forward to X-Treme X-Men, but also not. My sense is that he's never really recaptured the lightning in a bottle of his first X-Men run, so that series may end up just complicating the continuity further. But we'll see.

Let's Fucking Go: Spoiler-Filled Thoughts on Deadpool & Wolverine

I just got home from watching Deadpool & Wolverine, and yeah... it was pretty fucking good.

Maybe it's not quite as good as the first one. The first Deadpool benefited from that tight focus on Wade and his desire to get back to Vanessa, with only a minor nod to the wider X-universe, so we got more of the unfiltered Ryan Reynolds as Deadpool. This could be good or bad, depending on how much you like Reynolds, but it feels like it was the breakthrough role for him, in that his public persona then became Deadpool.

But if this one is a bit more sprawling and laden with references, and the jokes about Deadpool fucking Wolverine get old after a while, it's also a fun movie in its own right. The first thing to note is that the references, in the form of Marvel Multiverses, are part of the movie's grand joke. The wasteland that Wade and Logan find themselves in features not only the 20th Century Fox logo, following Disney's acquisition a few years ago, but also various characters from the X-Men and Fantastic Four movies. I guffawed pretty loudly when Chris Evans's character in this sequence was revealed to be not Captain America, but the Human Torch.

(Incidentally, per the expletive-laden post-credits scene, I couldn't shake the feeling that Chris Evans was really enjoying playing against the Boy Scout type that he's played since 2011 as Cap)

All the Multiverse stuff was used well here, to poke fun at the way the concept's been used. The main joke delivery mechanism was Channing Tatum as Gambit, whose lines all talk about forgotten characters or those "who didn't get a chance", which is surely a reference to the Gambit movie that was in development but never came to pass. At any rate it was good to see Gambit doing his thing on the big screen.

Along the way we get to see a bunch of versions of Logan, from the one that's close to his height in the comics, to the Age of Apocalypse version, to a version played by Henry Cavill (who I think would make a good Cyclops - if we discount Matt Bomer). We also get a bunch of different versions of Wade, and they all get massacred in hilarious and satisfying ways, even if they get better because of Wade's healing factor. I also appreciated Wade's fourth-wall breaking plea to stop using the Multiverse as a gimmick, though I suspect Marvel's not going to listen to that plea.

Another thing that made me happy about this movie was the presence of X-23, as previously seen in Logan. I know we saw her in the final trailer, but I was still worried that she appeared as a flashback or a character in Logan's head, so it made me happy to see that she wasn't only in that scene, and that she played a key role in Logan's character development for this movie. Since I started reading newer X-Men comics, she's become one of my favorites of the new characters (i.e. the ones introduced since 1993), so it was good to see her, and the actress who played her, Dafne Keen, have those good moments with Logan.

For me, the best thing about this movie, beyond seeing Hugh Jackman back as Wolverine in a role that doesn't diminish his last appearance in Logan, was the hard R. Marvel's gotten a lot more violent and sweary since the 1990s, when they couldn't even say hell or damn, but even now, you don't really get to see the effects of Wolverine's claws or Deadpool's swords or Gambit's explosions. This movie didn't pull its punches, either in terms of violence or language, and given the consistent PG-13 tone of the rest of the MCU, I'm not complaining. Though it'd be boring if they all turned into this.

I don't know if there's going to be another Deadpool movie, and I kind of hope not. This does, however, make me feel a little more confident about the MCU accommodating the X-Men, whenever that's going to happen. It's also a nice companion piece to X-Men '97, which kind of kicked off this annus mirabilis for the X-Men - but whereas that was full of loving homages to the old show and to the Chris Claremont comics, this was an irreverent (but still loving) take on the same corner of the Marvel universe. If we can keep an energy somewhere between those two extremes for the MCU X-movies, the future should be bright indeed.

Or as Wade, Logan and Laura say at various points: Let's Fucking Go.