It’s been said that Alien was brilliant because of its nuance. You didn’t even see the alien for much of the movie. If the first movie was a creepy, dark room terrorizing the viewer with suspense, though, the second was a roller coaster grabbing the audience by the throat and never letting go. I assume that writer Cullen Bunn’s intent was to exploit a similar dynamic with his second installment of his new Deadpool miniseries, but the results are catastrophic. Really catastrophic.

Where Deadpool Kills the Marvel Universe #1 had strong character moments that evoked revulsion and horror from its readers, issue #2 slips into a hemoglobin-tinged blur of anti-climactic executions. Look, we all know what’s going to happen. It’s in the title. The allure for this series is in the emotional pain driving Deadpool to destroy everyone and everything around and the crippling agony of those who are forced to watch their friends and heroes senselessly being culled. Instead of offering a rich tapestry of emotions, Bunn eradicates emotion from his script entirely, leaving the story as hollow and numb as Albert Camus’s protagonist, Meursault.The worst part of the characterizations is that you don’t have anyone to care about. I was expecting more justification for Deadpool’s actions, but it seems that last week’s initiating events are all that we’ll have to go on. Deadpool’s soliloquies offer nothing more, and supporting characters are good for nothing more than katana fodder.Even as a portrayal of an awesome killing machine in the vein of the Terminator villains, the book fails. The conflicts are very one-sided, and they’re so abbreviated that it’s hard to invest in them before they’re over. The actual deeds are occasionally clever but never impressive enough to justify the issue’s existence. Also, there are just so many killings that it’s hard to feel like any of them are terribly important. It’s like running down a list of names rather than portraying the loss of individuals that we’ve loved for so long.Dalibor Talajic’s work isn’t particularly praiseworthy in this issue either. The entire sequence with Spider-Man looks as though both he and Deadpool have the ability to fly (the irony of that situation should hit you by the end of the sequence), and Talajic's characters’ gestures throughout the book are often irritatingly melodramatic. Many of the shots in this issue look overly posed as well, especially when compared to the moments that highlighted issue #1.The one thing that I did enjoy was Bunn’s meta-commentary on the usage of Deadpool as a comic book character in his recent Marvel appearances. He’s been turned into a parody of himself (which is strange because he was a parody to begin with), and the character is enraged by it. Bunn’s jabs at comics’ big publisher editorial offices are so cutting that I’m stunned that it was allowed to reach the printed page. The problem is, we don’t need a four-issue miniseries to get that point across. Perhaps Bunn will tackle senselessly drawing out events and introducing must-have minis for the purpose of milking as much money as possible from their readerships in the next issue.Maybe it’s just that I don’t particularly identify with existentialism, but this issue is a huge disappointment. It’s entirely bereft of emotion – the one thing capable of driving this series to success. If you know that Spider-Man and the Avengers are in this issue, I’m pretty sure you can imagine a story of equivalent plotting and comparable quality for yourself without too much effort at all. The future for this series is ominous as it reaches its midpoint, with an underwhelming introduction capping off a general expungement of the series’ emotion.

Poet is a freelance writer, mid-core gamer, and frequent IGN contributor. Follow Poet on Twitter , or post a message on his IGN profile