Badass Panels Volume 10: Agent X #5

Back before she was writing the witty, fast-paced adventures of deadly super-villains with hilariously skewed interpersonal relationships in the pages of DC's Secret Six, Gail Simone was... uh...

Well, as it turns out, she was writing the witty, fast-paced adventures of deadly super-villiains with hilariously skewed interpersonal relationships in the pages of Marvel's Agent X.

See, in 2002, Marvel briefly came to their senses and decided to thoroughly divorce themselves from any Rob Liefeld creations they still had laying around, leading to the cancellation of three series and their relaunch under new titles, and as far as Deadpool was concerned, that was a long time coming.

Following the departure of Joe Kelly and Ed McGuinness, the series had taken a massive nose-dive in quality, including runs by Christopher Priest, wherein the sharp action and humor from his run on Black Panther was nowhere to be found, followed up by Jimmy Palmiotti and Justin Gray, who were in turn followed by Frank Tieri. To say the least, it was a rough couple of years.

Fortunately, it was worth the wait when Gail Simone, springboarding from her CBR humor column, You'll All Be Sorry, arrived on the book and proved what every ISB reader already knows: People who write jokes about comics on the internet always know what's awesome.

Take, for example, this scene from Agent X #1, wherein Our Hero (who is, for all intents and purposes, Deadpool with Amnesia) goes out to find clients on his first night as a mercenary, after a lengthy training session that mostly consisted of being stabbed by the Taskmaster:



And then he fights a tiger.

And the whole run's full of great moments like that, including an issue where Agent X and the super-powered great-granddaughter of the Outlaw Kid try to steal the Punisher's guns. But nowhere in the entire series--not even in Evan Dorkin's Fight Man issues--is it nearly as badass as in Agent X #5, wherein the last surviving member of a group of gangsters assassinated by Deadpool finally makes the connection and sends a metric ton of hitmen after them.

It's fantastic. And not just because it opens with Arcade showing up for a meeting to discuss the rennovation of Agent X's abandoned amusement park headquarters and performing an emergency trachaeotomy on him, or even because of a scene where the Taskmaster--pictured here in his UDON-designed costume that I am apparently the only human being alive that actually liked--shows why having the ability to copy everything you see is an incredibly useful super-power to have:



No, although that's one of my favorite moments in Simone's entire run, it's topped a few pages after that, when Agent X shows up to rescue his business manager and love interest Sandi Brandenberg, and finds himself cornered and unarmed in her bathroom, facing a team of highly trained assassins.

So of course, he does what any total badass would do, and beats them to death...



...Wait for it...



WITH A TOILET.

Trust me on this one: That's one of the single greatest acts of violence in the history of the Marvel Universe. And the sound effect just makes it better



Don't Apologize! Just Read the Badass Panels Archive!

| Volume One: Captain America #194 |
| Volume Two: Ode to Punching |
| Volume Three: The Question #2 |
| Volume Four: Impulse #3 |
| Volume Five: Batman Adventures #3 |
| Volume Six: Iron Man #200 |
| Volume Seven: Daredevil #276 |
| Volume Eight: Ghost Rider #63 and #67 |
| Volume Nine: Fantastic Four #55 |