Deadpool

• 1. Introduction

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  Deadpool, the masked mercenary of Marvel Comics, once ended a storyline by breaking out of his own book and into the real world. There he confronted the writers and artists who were making the comic, and he turned to the reader with a threat: "I'll find you soon enough." The book was Deadpool Kills the Marvel Universe. The scene only works because of who he is. Under the mask is Wade Wilson, a scarred Canadian mercenary who knows he is a character on a printed page.

  He first appeared on the 11th of December 1990, in an issue of The New Mutants cover dated February 1991. His creators built him from pieces of other, more famous heroes, and for years his future looked doubtful. This documentary asks how a character assembled from borrowed parts earned a following. It asks why that following nearly vanished, and what brought it back. And it asks who Wade Wilson really is, when even the comics cannot agree on his past.

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• 2. Borrowed Parts

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  In 1989, artist Rob Liefeld joined The New Mutants, a title selling about 100,000 copies a month. The core X-Men books were selling around 500,000. Within months, Liefeld's issues were adding roughly 50,000 copies of monthly sales, and the gap with the flagship series was closing. Marvel rewarded him with full creative control over plots and new characters. The issue that introduced Deadpool was the first one he made under that authority.

  The name came from Liefeld's parents. When a celebrity died, they expected two more deaths to follow quickly, and they placed informal bets on it, calling the game a "dead pool." Liefeld liked the sound of the phrase. The look followed: a red-and-black costume, ammunition pouches, and a full-face mask with large oval eye openings. Liefeld said the mask came straight from his admiration for Spider-Man's design, which was easy to draw and instantly recognizable.

  Liefeld was candid about the borrowing. He said Wolverine and Spider-Man were the properties he competed with, and he could not use either. "I had to make my own Spider-Man and my own Wolverine," he said, and Cable and Deadpool were those answers. By 1990, he felt Spider-Man had turned into "a depressed married guy." So he told Marvel the new character would be "Spider-Man, except with guns and swords," and "a jackass." He also tied Deadpool to Weapon X, the secret program that gave Wolverine his powers. In his comparison, Deadpool was the flawed earlier product, like Danny DeVito in the 1988 film Twins, with Wolverine as the Schwarzenegger half.

  Writer Fabian Nicieza scripted the series from Liefeld's layouts and notes. In a 2018 interview, he recalled Liefeld describing the character only as "Spider-Man meets Punisher." The voice was left to Nicieza. After writing several heavily serious characters, he wanted a change, and he made Deadpool an "annoying loudmouth." To mark the voice as strange, he first used hollow-bordered word balloons. As lettering technology improved, these became yellow caption boxes in a rough-edged font called Spookytooth. Nicieza heard the comedian Denis Leary in his head while writing the lines.

  The civilian name began as an inside joke. Seeing Liefeld's armed, harnessed figure, Nicieza thought of Deathstroke, the DC Comics villain whose civilian name is Slade Wilson. He proposed Wade Wilson as a near match. Ever since, Nicieza has rejected the idea that Deadpool is a parody or copy of Deathstroke. He calls the name an affectionate nod, and he says the two characters differ in personality, backstory and design. Readers would deliver their own verdict within months of the debut.

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• 3. Instant Hit

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  The issue that introduced Deadpool sold approximately 650,000 copies. Nicieza recalled that it drew about three to four hundred letters, where the title normally received around fifty. Roughly 75 percent of them asked for the character to come back. Marvel moved fast. In August 1991, Deadpool became one of five characters given a trading card inserted into X-Force #1, the renamed successor to The New Mutants.

  Liefeld pointed out the arithmetic. X-Force #1 sold five million copies, each holding one of five cards, so about a million Deadpool cards reached readers. In X-Force #2, Deadpool was on the cover and filled the first twelve pages. Liefeld credited fan demand for that placement. X-Force #1 and #2 were the best-selling comics in the United States in June and July 1991. The toy company Toy Biz soon fast-tracked an action figure.

  Guest appearances followed. Nomad #4, in August 1992, was his first outing beyond the X-Men line, and Nicieza wrote it. The Avengers #366, in December 1993, carried the first Deadpool story by another writer, staff editor Glenn Herdling.

  In 1993 came his first solo project, the four-issue miniseries Deadpool: The Circle Chase, written by Nicieza and pencilled by Joe Madureira. It set out the backstory. Wade Wilson was an ordinary mercenary who received a terminal cancer diagnosis and joined Weapon X. The program gave him a powerful healing factor, but it left him disfigured and mentally unstable. Nicieza drew on his mother-in-law's fight with cancer. He described the hook as part Bugs Bunny and part Frankenstein: the thing that saved Wade's life also made him an outcast.

  A second miniseries, Deadpool: Sins of the Past, arrived in 1994, written by Mark Waid and pencilled by Ian Churchill. It existed because editors had turned down Nicieza's follow-up, in which Wade's cancer returned and he hunted the scientists who made him. They judged it too grim. Nicieza later called the rejection one of the great frustrations of a thirty-year career. Waid treated the character mainly as comedy and thought of Bugs Bunny too.

  After that, interest fell sharply. Marvel itself filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in the mid-1990s, which upset editorial leadership across the company. Over the next three years, Deadpool made about a dozen appearances in all of Marvel's titles. A fan inside the editorial office was about to change that.

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• 4. The Kelly Years

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  In 1997, editor Matt Idelson, a fan of the character, won approval to try again with an ongoing series. He gave it to writer Joe Kelly, who had never written a monthly title. Wizard Magazine reported internal doubt about the choice. Kelly remembered that editors expected the book might last only six issues.

  Kelly skipped the action-heavy approach of earlier pitches. His idea was a character who "would like to do the right thing but is constitutionally incapable of pulling that off." Doing good was a constant hope and a constant failure, with the universe undercutting every success. That conception stuck with later creative teams. Kelly also added lasting supporting figures: Blind Al, an elderly woman who lives with Wade, and Ajax, the antagonist behind Wade's disfigurement. Artist Ed McGuinness drew much of the run before leaving over trouble meeting deadlines.

  Kelly turned the wisecracking fighter of earlier years into something manic and free-associative, prone to long comic monologues full of pop culture. The run's most cited example is Deadpool #11. Kelly and artist Pete Woods took a 1967 issue of The Amazing Spider-Man and replaced its heroes with Deadpool and Blind Al, panel by panel. The joke poked at superhero habits, including how easily heroes get fooled and how implausible superhero romance can be. Despite the praise, the series sold poorly throughout and was always close to cancellation.

  Writer Christopher Priest took over in 1999. Kelly had hinted at the meta-fictional side only obliquely. Priest made it an open, running fact that Deadpool knew he was in a comic book and acted on it. Priest left in 2000, and by mid-2001 monthly sales were about 24,000 copies. The top X-Men title of the time sold roughly 100,000.

  In 2002, writer Gail Simone arrived to strong early attention. Marvel cancelled the series anyway, in a reorganisation of its X-Men titles and a dispute involving one of Deadpool's co-creators that was never made public. Simone moved to the replacement, Agent X, which followed a scarred, sardonic mercenary who was not Wade Wilson. She left after its seventh issue over disagreements with the new editor, and the series ended after fifteen issues.

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• 5. Flatline and Revival

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  Nicieza came back in 2004 with Cable & Deadpool, which ran fifty issues and paired Deadpool with his former enemy Cable. He had deliberately avoided other writers' Deadpool stories for about a decade, so that his own take would stay his own. The series worked as a story but ranked near the bottom of the monthly top 100 in sales. It ended with its fiftieth issue in 2008. Nicieza had filled it with fourth-wall humor, including recap pages written in Deadpool's voice.

  Editor Axel Alonso and writer Daniel Way had separately noticed that the character was underperforming. They launched a new ongoing Deadpool in September 2008, tied to the publisher's Secret Invasion event. Alonso wanted the "sophomoric, anarchic humor" at the center. Way put the brief more simply: the character had "flatlined," and the job was to get readers interested.

  The debut issue placed seventeenth on the monthly sales charts and sold out, and several later issues needed extra printings. Average sales over the first year reached about 55,000 copies, far more than the character had managed in years. Nobody involved, Way included, fully understood why. Industry observers guessed that his quick, referential humor suited online fan culture.

  Way's best-known addition was a second voice in Deadpool's head, shown in differently formatted caption boxes. Instead of an angel and a devil, both voices were morally compromised, which captured his unstable mind. Way summed up his approach as "Madness is his method." In Deadpool vol. 3 Annual #1, in 2014, the extra voice was retroactively revealed to belong to the villain Madcap.

  Marvel answered the sales with a flood of titles. From 2009 to 2012, eleven different Deadpool series ran together or in quick succession, a first for any single character at the publisher. They included Deadpool: Merc with a Mouth by Victor Gischler, Deadpool Team-Up by Fred Van Lente, and Deadpool Corps. Two ran under adult-oriented imprints: Wade Wilson's War by Duane Swierczynski and Deadpool MAX by David Lapham. Merchandise sold strongly, and at comics conventions Deadpool became among the most common cosplay costumes.

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• 6. Marriages and Endings

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  In Daniel Way's second volume, drawn by Alé Garza, the arc "DEAD" took away Wade's healing factor. He became mortal and got his unscarred face back. Though he spent much of the arc hoping to die, he held back that urge to protect his friend Hydra Bob. A beating from the Intelligencia taught him he had let healing replace skill, so he sought training from Taskmaster. The arc ended with his face burned again, and the series closed with issue 63.

  Under Marvel NOW!, a new ongoing series began. In its 27th issue, Deadpool married for the third time. The bride, revealed in the webcomic Deadpool: The Gauntlet, was Shiklah, Queen of the Undead. He also learned he had a daughter, Eleanor, from a former flame named Carmelita. In a clash with Carnage, he bonded with four symbiotes named Riot, Phage, Lasher and Agony, then handed them to a war dog to deliver to the government.

  Deadpool #250 brought what looked like a final chapter. He defeated ULTIMATUM and Flag-Smasher, gave up the Deadpool identity, and died along with his family and friends when Earth collided with another universe's Earth. He complained that Secret Wars should have stayed an Avengers event, then died at peace.

  Eight months after Secret Wars, the Earth was restored and he turned up working for Steve Rogers. In the fourth volume, in 2016, his fame soared when the mercenary Solo impersonated him to charge higher rates. A job in Washington, D.C. improved the public's view of him, and Deadpool formed the Mercs for Money. Fame forced him to leave his family behind, fearing his enemies. Shiklah then divorced him and returned to Dracula.

  The Steve Rogers he trusted was an evil counterpart, a Hydra sleeper agent. Convinced to kill Phil Coulson, Wade later joined Hydra's version of the Avengers out of blind loyalty. His mistakes cost two friends their lives, his daughter's love, and the world's respect. In the ninth volume, he adopted Princess, a hyena-like symbiote and clone of Carnage.

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• 7. Many Deadpools

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  In the Age of Apocalypse timeline, Deadpool is Dead Man Wade, a bitter, humorless member of the Pale Riders. Nightcrawler teleports his head from his body and hides it in a crater. Other versions are stranger. In the parody one-shot Captain America: Who Won't Wield the Shield, a World War II soldier named Frederick "Wheezy" Wilson, nephew of President Woodrow Wilson, is experimented on by Nazis to become "Veapon X." He speaks in anachronistic 1990s slang.

  Deadpool Kills the Marvel Universe began in a mental hospital. The doctor treating him is the villain Psycho-Man in disguise, who tries to brainwash him. The attempt fails and leaves Deadpool worse, replacing his usual voices with one that wants only destruction. He then sets out to kill every hero and villain on Earth, starting with the Fantastic Four and including the Watcher.

  Two sequels followed. In Deadpool Killustrated, he learns that infinite alternate versions of his victims exist. A device from the Mad Thinker sends him to the "Ideaverse," where he hunts the literary figures behind Marvel's characters, including Captain Ahab, the Little Mermaid and Count Dracula. Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson gather Beowulf, Hua Mulan and Natty Bumppo to stop him. Cullen Bunn revealed on the 4th of April 1013...

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