These colors don't run. Unless they have to!
[PLAYER INFO]
NAME: Crissy
AGE: 23
JOURNAL: nerditude
IM: ffffudgesicles
E-MAIL: ensigncris@gmail.com
RETURNING: kingofatlantis (Marvel 616)
phobiapathic (Marvel 616/Avengers: Initiative)
mightymortal (DCU/Shazam!)
midnighting (Wildstorm/The Authority)
[CHARACTER INFO]
CHARACTER NAME: Wade Wilson
FANDOM: Marvel 616/Deadpool
CHRONOLOGY: The "Institutionalized" arc (so, up with current events in his own title.)
CLASS: Anti-Hero; he'll stick with the dogtags for awhile, at least until he gets tired of the crappy pay and falls back on either Merc work or shacks up with a PC hero team, probably against their collective wills.
SUPERHERO NAME: Deadpool
ALTER EGO: Wade Wilson, a well-compensated establishment provocateur.
BACKGROUND:
Because of the nature of Deadpool's character, one runs into a unique problem when it comes to the many retcons that any given comic character is subject to. Namely, when one straddles the fourth wall like he does, nothing is ever truly retconned. Wade has two distinctly different histories that have been written for him, and he has referenced both of them in the same issue before, citing that whichever one is true depends entirely on his current writers. As such, I'm choosing the ones that make the most sense to me as, well, I'm the current writer.
Wade was born in Canada, where his Career Military father was stationed at the time, but spent most of his childhood in Ohio after that particular tour was over; as a result, he has dual citizenship. His mother passed away when he was only five from terminal cancer. His Father retired from the military and turned to drinking; it's implied that he was abusive as well, but either way, he and his son did not get along. Wade grew up into a loud, dumb, rebellious kid constantly at odds with the authorities in the schooling system, and he dropped out of high school only a year or two in. When he was in his late teens, he watched his Father die in a barfight.
Inheriting nothing after his Father's drinking habit drained the family's meager savings, Wade turned to petty crime to feed himself, and often hired himself out to work as a henchman for local villains; this is more or less where his Mercenary career began. He met and began dating a prostitute named Vanessa in Boston, who would later develop mutant powers and become Copycat, and for a time they were happy together. He was even looking for more legitimate ways to make money so that they could put her through school and make a real life for themselves, when he was diagnosed with inoperable super duper cancer.
He didn't want to saddle the girl he loved with the burden of a terminally ill man, so he broke up with her and left the country, heading back up into Canada for the first time since he was a baby to take advantage of the healthcare.
It didn't last long, though. He gave up on the Chemo quickly, because didn't see the point of buying just a little more time when he was going to die horribly and prematurely anyway. He went from largely more harmless Henchman work to straight up killing for money, until he was approached by a man from the Department K (Special Weapons Development) branch of the military. They wanted him to take part in Weapon X, a government program created to give operatives superhuman abilities for government use. He was lured by the promise that they would be able to cure his cancer and make him a hero, but ultimately the program proved unsuccessful as most of its participants (including Wade) suffered either physical or mental breakdowns and were discarded at a special hospice run by Doctor Killbrew. Unbeknownst to the Canadian government, Killbrew used the failed test subjects to conduct heinous and inhumane experiments, torturing them physically and mentally in the name of science for weeks or months before they would eventually die. This cultivated a practice amongst the patients, who gambled on the length of time it would take fellow patients to die; they called it the "dead pool."
Wade, specifically, washed out because the healing factor they'd given him didn't perform adequately; it accelerated his cancer rather than eliminated it, leaving his countenance pockmarked with tumors, and was mostly occupied with keeping his body running despite the disease, causing it to perform sluggishly otherwise. Weapon X's disinterest was Dr. Killbrew's fascination, however, and Wade quickly became his favorite patient due to how difficult it was to kill him in the "workshop" (the place he preformed his surgeries.) Dr. Killbrew used his assistant, "the Attending" (another Weapon X graduate, who gained super strength, speed and durability, but ultimately washed out due to a sick and twisted sadistic nature that his commanding officers didn't want any part of) to keep the patients from killing themselves, especially Wade, who after being visited by the personification of Death while lying in his room recovering from the day's torments fell in love with her. She, in turn, was fascinated by his ability to see her while still alive, and surmised that it was because he was meant to be dead, but outside forces kept conspiring to keep it from happening.
The promise of being able to escape his prison and spend and eternity with her drives him to become notorious among the other prisoners for attempting suicide and being intercepted by the Attending. Eventually he began to play pranks on the Attending, and attempt to enrage him into killing Wade himself, but it backfired. Instead of taking it out on Wade, he took it out on the closest thing Wade had to a friend there, a man named Worm. When he lobotomized Worm in front of Wade, forcing Wade to kill him with his own hands as an act of mercy, Dr. Killbrew finally gave his permission to kill Wade for breaking the cardinal rule of patients not being allowed to kill one another.
However, Wade was so blinded by his need to take vengeance on the Attending for Worm's death that while they were violently executing him, his healing factor finally kicked into some serious overdrive. Despite Death standing before him and begging him not to fight, to give up on the idea of revenge and finally die, he couldn't and immediately reformed most his internal organs and ribcage. Being so close to having the only thing he had wanted at all in those months of torture and then losing it, along with the shock of being killed and brought back to life made him snap.
He killed the mortician, then the guards and stole their guns, before finding the Attending and filling him full of holes, adopting the name "Deadpool" in the process. Despite the fact that he was ready to lay down and die after (finding, to his horror, that he was now entirely incapable even without someone there to stop him), the rest of the patients rallied behind him and escaped in a riot.
After that, Deadpool falls back into Merc work. He is hired by Tolliver, where he meets up with Vanessa again, and he's first introduced into Marvel continuity when he attacks Cable's X-force. He continues to make appearances around as a hired gun before landing his solo title in the late 90's.
There, he was approached by Zoe Culloden, an agent for the company Landau, Luckman & Lake, who told him their precognitive employee had predicted that he would be the "Mithras," (basically, the one who would help bring an alien entity that would usher in a "golden age for Earth"), and while Deadpool resisted them at first, he eventually agreed to try his hand at being a hero and did his level best to adhere to a 'kill only as a last resort' work ethic.
It's for that reason that the news that he's only going to be some great hero of prophecy because he needs to kill someone devastates him so much. All the time he spent worried about whether or not he was good enough to be a hero, and in the end it was all for just another hit job, dressed up in pretty words. Despite his misgivings, he goes through with their plan anyway, but it turns out that the alien entity he was protecting by killing that other guy only brings a golden age by eradicating the free will of all the inhabitants of the planets it visits and making them perpetually blissful at the cost of all other emotions. The creature he was to kill was in fact only trying to stop the entity and save them.
He realized this all too late, of course, and was left to decide whether free will was worth the cost of misery all on his own; Deadpool panicked and did the thing he does best, namely he commenced with the violence. After killing the entity and realizing he - an under-qualified, perpetually miserable headcase with more issues than a yearly subscription - had robbed the entire world of happiness, he crawled back home to Blind Al. It's the first and last time he ever really breaks down and cries on panel. Maybe even in his life.
Eventually he represses his feelings on the whole situation and moves on, clashing with T-Ray a few times and encountering Ajax (formerly the Attendant, having been revived and rebuilt by Killbrew), and engaged in a whole bunch of other shenanigans (including, but not limited to being magically made to look like Tom Cruise for a few months by Loki for mouthing off a bit too much.) After his series he went around as a Merc again, falling off that whole no-killing wagon, before getting a team-up title with Cable.
The series' first half centers around Providence, a floating island nation paradise built by Cable. When Cable demands that all the world's militaries disarm or he will throw their nukes into the sun, the X-Men employ Deadpool to move against him. After Cable's powers are burned out from fighting with the Silver Surfer, Deadpool uses a teleportation device that the X-Men supplied him with to essentially lobotomize Cable. After being left to take the entire blame for killing the man the whole world had come to see as a savior and peacemaker, Deadpool found that every last Merc gig had completely dried up and no one would hire him. He set out to find a way to heal Cable, employing Agent X and the Fixer along the way. They succeed, and Deadpool joins Cable on Providence, ultimately because (despite his actions) he did believe in what Cable had been doing.
After some time there, he committed the first and only murder on Providence, namely of a world-renowned terrorist that Cable had invited to stay there in hopes of reforming him. Despite suffering from amnesia over the whole event, Deadpool realized that he had been the one to do it, and was forcibly kicked off the island. Well, tossed, really.
Despite his exile, Cable began to covertly hire Deadpool for Merc work (since no one else in the world would), and Deadpool even returned to go searching through alternate universes to save Cable after he had been lost. In return, Cable repaired some of the brain damage that had been causing Deadpool frequent bouts of amnesia. After Cable died, Deadpool joined up with Agency X after saving Agent X from Hydra, and he once again fell into the pattern of doing Mercenary work and occasionally trying to be a hero.
Most recently he's been simultaneously running around with the X-Force, the Deadpool Corps and in his own new solo title; I'd ask how the heck that works but at least he's not Wolverine.
PERSONALITY:
"...None of this is actually happening. There is a man. At a typewriter. This is all his twisted imagination."
Deadpool is a complex character. That's one way to put it.
The other is that he's crazy with a side of more crazy, and slathered in crazy sauce.
Both are true. Wade has more personality disorders than the DSM-V, and is rather notorious for it. Even if one doesn't consider the two distinctive voices/narration boxes he sees/hears or his frequent breaking of the fourth wall to be symptomatic of schizophrenia, but rather a sort of hyper-awareness... well, he has more than enough otherwise to fall back on. He has incredibly violent mood swings, frequent and vivid visual hallucinations (which he occasionally refers to as "pool-o-vision"), and a complete lack of ability to function in polite society for prolonged periods of time. Generally these things are attributed to both his healing factor, which replenishes his decaying brain cells too fast (causing a myriad of chemical imbalances), and to the complete psychotic break he experienced as his ability was first manifesting that he never quite recovered from.
It was once observed that the only thing Deadpool hates more than himself is his friends, and by all accounts his actions make that seem true. Arguably his two oldest, closest friends are Blind Al and Weasel, both of whom he has kidnapped, shot up, tortured and turned against himself over and over again. Indeed, Wade is very rarely less violent with his allies than he is with his enemies, and has a collection of people he would call his buddies that he spends just as much time knock-down, drag-out fighting with as cooperating with (Taskmaster, Bullseye and Cable, to name a few). However, this isn't entirely true; in his occasional moments of lucidity, he shows regret for driving the people he cares about away, and after crossing the line with Al even begs her to forgive him, promising to change (and going so far as to follow through with it afterward).
Deadpool is also generally "friendly" with his enemies, as though the fact that they are attempting to kill him or he is attempting to kill them gives them some kind of clandestine connection. There's even a part of him that honestly believes that it does. Despite his want for some kind of meaningful relationship with every person he comes into contact with, only very few people (read: Cable) actually know how to get under his skin, or what buttons to push to genuinely piss him off. Sure, he may occasionally go into irrational rages at the drop of a hat with complete strangers, but it's not often that he allows himself to experience any emotion deeply enough that his inane chatter turns into anything more serious. Despite violently losing almost everyone he cares about as soon as he begins to care about them a little too much, Wade doesn't really understand how to mourn. Revenge is usually his first and only outlet, but barring the ability to find and exact that, he falls into extremely brief episodes of depression followed by burying the emotion and forgetting about it rather than dealing with it in any kind of productive way.
Boredom is probably his worst enemy. When Wade has no purpose or general mission at any given time, he has a tendency to lapse into an extremely suicidal state. Because he is in love with Marvel's anthropomorphized version of Death, and is often visited by her after being killed (in the brief interim that his body remains dead before his healing factor revives him), a lack of direction will invariably lead him to search for any way to circumvent his healing ability and die permanently so he can finally be with her. Most recently this was seen in his pursuit of a good old fashioned Hulk Smash, but even Big Green didn't put him out of commission for keeps.
"I was specifically created by humans... to kill humans. Which kinda says a lot about the human condition, don't you think?"
If there's one thing Deadpool is good at, it's violence and mayhem. Actually, "good at" might be understating it a bit. On and off over the years (depending on the writer), Deadpool has instigated self-imposed bans on killing as anything other than a last resort, but he's never given up good old method of heinously (but non-fatally) maiming anybody and everybody. (In current continuity, he happens to be off the wagon, but that could always change while he's in the City.)
Despite his zeal for running into situations with no plans, Deadpool is disturbingly creative and is especially skilled at flying by the seat of his pants. There are times when he plans things out, to a shocking degree of complication; when he went up against Osborn's Thunderbolts and came out laughing, as an example, but his general rule of thumb is to make things up as he goes along. He's known for his unpredictability, and he is more than willing do things that seem incredibly stupid or detrimental to his own health, but (on account of his healing factor) have them work out perfectly well. He's crazy like a fox, if you will.
He's ridiculously physically fit, and unflinching when it comes to inflicting damage on himself (IE: cutting off his own hands or feet to escape binds) to give himself an advantage in a fight (though he will scream about it after.) He's a master of melee combat, unarmed and armed, as well as being skilled with all manner of firearms. He has an acrobatic style of fighting, which takes advantage of the fact that he won't ever grow tired on account of his rapid regeneration, and his particular brand of talking people to distraction has always been a great way to throw opponents off and undermine them.
Even in comparison to other mercenaries, Wade is unfortunately (or fortunately, depending) not particularly loyal, especially when his odd sense of morality rears its head. One of his favorite tactics is taking jobs that conflict with one another and collecting from both before screwing them over and laughing all the way to the bank. Occasionally he'll drop a paying job to work for the would-be targets pro-bono because they've somehow managed to appeal to his slippery and not often lucid "better half"; occasionally he'll do it because his employers have (usually unknowingly) demanded he cross a "line" that he has. These lines usually aren't in any way clear until you've already tripped over them. The easiest one to pin down is his lack of willingness to kill children, though. Men, women, the sick and the elderly: sure. But children, that's taking it too far. Apparently.
Despite all protests to the contrary, Deadpool is seemingly happy to be paid in attention (especially adoration), and has a terrible track record of getting totally screwed out of a good deal of his promised paychecks because of it. In fact, when he does earn money, he almost seems to have no idea what to do with it, and will always find some harebrained way to squander it all so he has a reason to go out and interact with the world and earn it back again.
He is a supremely, sincerely lonely man.
"Sorry, I use humor to deflect my insecurities. Plus, I'm hilarious, so don't hate."
After all that shit, the psychosis and the face (woo doggy, that face) and the constant relapses when he goes right off the deep end, what makes him a fan favorite? Why would anyone like this barely functioning mess of a man?
Well, frankly, because he is hilarious. He exhibits both an extreme self-awareness and self-delusion depending on his mood, which coupled with his need blurt out any old thing that pops into his head makes for an amusing ride. Other characters may not find his constant inane babble charming, but he's never let that stop him even once. Nothing gets by Wade without him feeling the need to make a quip or a zany comment about it. The man never has been, and never could be described as "stoic." Everything he does/says is just to varying degrees of manic, and one of his biggest fears is being so totally alone that there will be no one around to see him do super badass things or hear his jokes.
That being said, he also generally tries to do good when he can just because it is good. Ever since his first solo series, he's had it in his head that he wants to be a hero, and while sometimes he succeeds at it better than others... and while he's done so much wrong (and screwed up the hero gig so many times) that the general public and most of the super-community will never really buy that he's a "hero", he keeps trying anyway.
Wade's favorite thing to do in the entire world is talk. He does it so well it was once described by fellow Merc and long-suffering acquaintance Domino as his most dangerous weapon. He has a flair for talking people out of information that they don't mean to give up, and for talking people into rages that tip things into his favor. To be entirely honest, though, even if talking did neither of those things, the Merc with a Mouth would still happily chatter through every battle.
Deadpool likes talking so much, in fact, that he made time to learn how to do it in quite a few different languages: namely English, Spanish, French, German and Arabic - and those are just the ones that have been confirmed on-panel! It's probably a safe bet to assume he has at least passable grasp of the languages of most of the countries he has traveled to for work; I mean, how can he be expected to deprive his targets of his immeasurable wit, simply because the poor slobs don't speak English?
Honestly.
"Did the distinctive costume give me away? I hate when that happens!"
And now for the cancer-riddled elephant in the room: Deadpool's fugly face (wait, what do you mean, his ridiculously weird sexuality? Yeah, we'll get to that, too.)
Once upon a 90s, Wade was known to react violently to anyone seeing his skin, to the point where he would murder in cold blood anyone who laid eyes upon him without his mask, whether or not they had any intention of doing so. He has mellowed out considerably since then, but it is still a touchy subject: true, he will strip down and run around downtown in booty shorts for a gag, but that's different. It's on his own terms. Having his mask forcibly removed, or being seen when he wasn't expecting it and hasn't mentally prepared himself for the inevitable reaction is definitely not his favorite thing, and depending on whether he's up or down that day, it may make him just as violent as it used to.
Now, one would think that such a thing would make him more sensitive to the plight of others. But it hasn't. He's extremely mouthy about the appearances of others, often picking out a negative physical trait and working it into the majority of his conversations with a person. Ilaney was the most obvious example of this, as she was mildly (and only mildly) overweight, and at least 90% of their conversations involved him taunting her about being so fat. It should be noted that he was extremely fond of her - protective, even... he just can't seem to stop himself. To balance it out somewhat (I hope), he is at least fine with getting just as well as he ever gives, and doesn't hold his own hideous appearance (or anything, for that matter) as somehow off-limits to comment on.
Now onto his sexuality: Wade is very, very easily distracted by women, any women, in the heat of battle or otherwise. He will profess his love for anyone, at the drop of a hat, and spend entire issues completely ignoring rejection and walk away with the delusion that they were flirting back. That's not to say he's completely incapable of Getting the Girl, of course. Over the years he's had way too many trysts to mention, but there were a few major romantic relationships that defined his character. The first was Vanessa (AKA Copycat), who he met long before his descent into madness at the hands of the Weapon X program, while she was a prostitute working in Boston. He really was in love with her, willing to give up his small-time crime career and go legit to make a better life for themselves, until he got diagnosed with inoperable brain cancer. Rather than drag her down with him, he broke up with her. Over the years they had an on-again, off-again relationship, but it was mostly off. When she, too, found herself on a downward spiral into god knows how many personality disorders, she would occasionally appear out of the woodwork to stake her claim on him possessively, but due to his long-standing, unrequited crush on Siryn, it never quite worked between them. She was murdered by Sabretooth after they'd both been drawn back into the Weapon X program in one of those on-again times.
Wade's thing with Typhoid Mary was less of a crazy whirlwind of two psychos in love, and more of a nightmare. Where Wade's relationship with Siryn was one-sided and hopeless, but ultimately nurturing as he strove to be a better man for her, his relationship with Typhoid Mary was nothing but highly toxic, and not one of their encounters over the years left him in anything but a thoroughly destroyed emotional state. It's not easy to find a gal that's even crazier than the Merc with a Mouth, but by golly if she didn't give him a good run for his money. She even raped him in a park once, so there's that.
In the end, the one single relationship that, matters most to Wade is his ongoing affair with Death herself. Occasionally he gets distracted away from his desire to die, but never for too terribly long, and he never gets quite as devoted to the others as he is to her. That being said, Deadpool does want to be genuinely loved by all the different women he pursues, but he will purposefully set himself up for failure as a way to sabotage his own relationships (either with cheating or neglect) before the world can get around to doing it for him. He also has the attention span of a gnat, so that obviously doesn't help him much.
Don't let his skirt chasing ways fool you, though. Deadpool is at the very least bi-curious. Though quite a few remarks of the more or less homosexual persuasion can be easily chalked up to the fact that he loves to make other people incredibly uncomfortable with his mindless chatter, Wade has made too many accidental/candid confessions about finding male companions attractive for the notion to be entirely dismissed. In fact, he even seems to have a "type," being of course the giant, buff superhero manly man that he is always getting into fights with. (Certain furry midgets that shall not be named notwithstanding.) One of the more notorious examples of this was his unbidden fantasy of lounging on a quiet beach, rubbing a speedo-clad Cable down with sunscreen and WD-40. Yes, really.
Of course, bisexuality isn't particularly strange. No, what's strange is that time he fell in lust with a mannequin. Or his Bea Arthur fetish. Or the fact that Death, an honest to goodness skeleton with boobs, is the very definition of sexy to him. Then there's this whole affair.
Yeah. I'm just going to leave you fine folks with that pretty picture.
"You know, sometimes it feels like I'm the only one who can see the truth: that life is just an absurdist comedy, and the only appropriate response is to laugh."
POWER:
Rapid Cellular Regeneration: Taken from Wolverine by the Weapon X program and genetically modified specifically to counteract his cancer, Wade can seemingly heal back from any injury and is effectively immortal. This was proven in a recent issue when Hulk literally smashed him into mostly liquid (a foot survived), and after an unspecified amount of time (probably months, as a legal trial concerning the crimes that got him Hulk Smashed in the first place had come and gone) his body had reconstituted itself. A side effect of his particular brand of healing is his limited immunity to telepathy.
[CHARACTER SAMPLES]
COMMUNITY POST (FIRST PERSON) SAMPLE:
YES. SWEET VALIDATION!
I'm a hero. Hear that, world? Deadpool is here to help! And someone is actually asking him to do it! On purpose!
[koff] I mean, not that I need it, as I'm already a card-carrying member of both the X-Men and the Avengers (or I would be, if they'd give me my freaking cards already), but it's nice to hear from a sexy lady computer. Anyone else see the mouth on her? She looks like she can bite a man's tackle off and keep on smilin', and you know what? I like that in a woman.
Computer. Thing.
Look, the important part is, does anyone know if she's single? I'd ask her myself, but I'm shy, and I've already got a couple boxes full of restraining orders so I'm going to try not to #@$* this one up.
Hello? Anyone?
Is this thing on?
LOGS POST (THIRD PERSON) SAMPLE:
This is it. A brand spankin' new clean slate.
Sure, the whole Deadpool Corps, save-the-galaxy thing had been a clean slate, too, but he'd screwed the pooch a bit on that one (and really, with five Deadpools on the job how could it not have gone all to hell) so now it's a cleaner clean slate. He's even under new management, and there's nothing to stop him from succeeding!
Nothing except himself, of course.
Wade props his feet up on the seats across the walkway of the subway train he's riding in and ignores the indignant stare from the hipster 20-something whose space he just invaded. Instead, he turns to the poor young woman sitting just to his left, clearly trying to plaster herself as far against the wall and away from him as she can get.
"Hey, buckteeth. Are you schmucks getting any bars down here?" He's been fiddling with his shiny new network device for the past couple minutes after posting (aloud and unabashedly, which might explain why suddenly no one is sitting any closer to him than they have to be), "No? Didn't think so. Man, these things are cool."
He hasn't found a spot where he can't make a call from yet, and now - for no reason he can explain to himself - he's trying to find one. Just in case he ever needs to drop someone outside of communicator range, or something. Of course, he hasn't gotten too creative yet, but that's the reason he's down on the subway in the first place. It's really too bad the teleporter in his belt is all busted (he really needs to stop pissing Weasel off so he can get it fixed); he'll have to see if he can't find some tech dweeb around here make it work again. That would sure make this whole process much easier...
Suddenly, a thought pops into his head, and even manages to make itself heard above the bickering voices. THE SEWERS! Surely there won't be any cell phone signal down there, right? He hops up out of his seat and draws his gun, gesturing with it wildly. "Hold the bus, I need to get off!" A bit of muss, fuss and panic later, he's back out on the street, searching for the elusive entrances to the sewer.
When he finds one he hauls the manhole cover up out of the way (and it is way heavier than it looks, by the way), before screaming "FOR SCIENCE!" to no one in particular as he drops down into the hole.
It's only when he hits the concrete bottom and has to swing his shin bones back into place that he realizes this probably wasn't the brightest plan he's ever had.
FINAL NOTES ABOUT YOUR CHARACTER:
ahhhhhhhhh
NAME: Crissy
AGE: 23
JOURNAL: nerditude
IM: ffffudgesicles
E-MAIL: ensigncris@gmail.com
RETURNING: kingofatlantis (Marvel 616)
phobiapathic (Marvel 616/Avengers: Initiative)
mightymortal (DCU/Shazam!)
midnighting (Wildstorm/The Authority)
[CHARACTER INFO]
CHARACTER NAME: Wade Wilson
FANDOM: Marvel 616/Deadpool
CHRONOLOGY: The "Institutionalized" arc (so, up with current events in his own title.)
CLASS: Anti-Hero; he'll stick with the dogtags for awhile, at least until he gets tired of the crappy pay and falls back on either Merc work or shacks up with a PC hero team, probably against their collective wills.
SUPERHERO NAME: Deadpool
ALTER EGO: Wade Wilson, a well-compensated establishment provocateur.
BACKGROUND:
Because of the nature of Deadpool's character, one runs into a unique problem when it comes to the many retcons that any given comic character is subject to. Namely, when one straddles the fourth wall like he does, nothing is ever truly retconned. Wade has two distinctly different histories that have been written for him, and he has referenced both of them in the same issue before, citing that whichever one is true depends entirely on his current writers. As such, I'm choosing the ones that make the most sense to me as, well, I'm the current writer.
Wade was born in Canada, where his Career Military father was stationed at the time, but spent most of his childhood in Ohio after that particular tour was over; as a result, he has dual citizenship. His mother passed away when he was only five from terminal cancer. His Father retired from the military and turned to drinking; it's implied that he was abusive as well, but either way, he and his son did not get along. Wade grew up into a loud, dumb, rebellious kid constantly at odds with the authorities in the schooling system, and he dropped out of high school only a year or two in. When he was in his late teens, he watched his Father die in a barfight.
Inheriting nothing after his Father's drinking habit drained the family's meager savings, Wade turned to petty crime to feed himself, and often hired himself out to work as a henchman for local villains; this is more or less where his Mercenary career began. He met and began dating a prostitute named Vanessa in Boston, who would later develop mutant powers and become Copycat, and for a time they were happy together. He was even looking for more legitimate ways to make money so that they could put her through school and make a real life for themselves, when he was diagnosed with inoperable super duper cancer.
He didn't want to saddle the girl he loved with the burden of a terminally ill man, so he broke up with her and left the country, heading back up into Canada for the first time since he was a baby to take advantage of the healthcare.
It didn't last long, though. He gave up on the Chemo quickly, because didn't see the point of buying just a little more time when he was going to die horribly and prematurely anyway. He went from largely more harmless Henchman work to straight up killing for money, until he was approached by a man from the Department K (Special Weapons Development) branch of the military. They wanted him to take part in Weapon X, a government program created to give operatives superhuman abilities for government use. He was lured by the promise that they would be able to cure his cancer and make him a hero, but ultimately the program proved unsuccessful as most of its participants (including Wade) suffered either physical or mental breakdowns and were discarded at a special hospice run by Doctor Killbrew. Unbeknownst to the Canadian government, Killbrew used the failed test subjects to conduct heinous and inhumane experiments, torturing them physically and mentally in the name of science for weeks or months before they would eventually die. This cultivated a practice amongst the patients, who gambled on the length of time it would take fellow patients to die; they called it the "dead pool."
Wade, specifically, washed out because the healing factor they'd given him didn't perform adequately; it accelerated his cancer rather than eliminated it, leaving his countenance pockmarked with tumors, and was mostly occupied with keeping his body running despite the disease, causing it to perform sluggishly otherwise. Weapon X's disinterest was Dr. Killbrew's fascination, however, and Wade quickly became his favorite patient due to how difficult it was to kill him in the "workshop" (the place he preformed his surgeries.) Dr. Killbrew used his assistant, "the Attending" (another Weapon X graduate, who gained super strength, speed and durability, but ultimately washed out due to a sick and twisted sadistic nature that his commanding officers didn't want any part of) to keep the patients from killing themselves, especially Wade, who after being visited by the personification of Death while lying in his room recovering from the day's torments fell in love with her. She, in turn, was fascinated by his ability to see her while still alive, and surmised that it was because he was meant to be dead, but outside forces kept conspiring to keep it from happening.
The promise of being able to escape his prison and spend and eternity with her drives him to become notorious among the other prisoners for attempting suicide and being intercepted by the Attending. Eventually he began to play pranks on the Attending, and attempt to enrage him into killing Wade himself, but it backfired. Instead of taking it out on Wade, he took it out on the closest thing Wade had to a friend there, a man named Worm. When he lobotomized Worm in front of Wade, forcing Wade to kill him with his own hands as an act of mercy, Dr. Killbrew finally gave his permission to kill Wade for breaking the cardinal rule of patients not being allowed to kill one another.
However, Wade was so blinded by his need to take vengeance on the Attending for Worm's death that while they were violently executing him, his healing factor finally kicked into some serious overdrive. Despite Death standing before him and begging him not to fight, to give up on the idea of revenge and finally die, he couldn't and immediately reformed most his internal organs and ribcage. Being so close to having the only thing he had wanted at all in those months of torture and then losing it, along with the shock of being killed and brought back to life made him snap.
He killed the mortician, then the guards and stole their guns, before finding the Attending and filling him full of holes, adopting the name "Deadpool" in the process. Despite the fact that he was ready to lay down and die after (finding, to his horror, that he was now entirely incapable even without someone there to stop him), the rest of the patients rallied behind him and escaped in a riot.
After that, Deadpool falls back into Merc work. He is hired by Tolliver, where he meets up with Vanessa again, and he's first introduced into Marvel continuity when he attacks Cable's X-force. He continues to make appearances around as a hired gun before landing his solo title in the late 90's.
There, he was approached by Zoe Culloden, an agent for the company Landau, Luckman & Lake, who told him their precognitive employee had predicted that he would be the "Mithras," (basically, the one who would help bring an alien entity that would usher in a "golden age for Earth"), and while Deadpool resisted them at first, he eventually agreed to try his hand at being a hero and did his level best to adhere to a 'kill only as a last resort' work ethic.
It's for that reason that the news that he's only going to be some great hero of prophecy because he needs to kill someone devastates him so much. All the time he spent worried about whether or not he was good enough to be a hero, and in the end it was all for just another hit job, dressed up in pretty words. Despite his misgivings, he goes through with their plan anyway, but it turns out that the alien entity he was protecting by killing that other guy only brings a golden age by eradicating the free will of all the inhabitants of the planets it visits and making them perpetually blissful at the cost of all other emotions. The creature he was to kill was in fact only trying to stop the entity and save them.
He realized this all too late, of course, and was left to decide whether free will was worth the cost of misery all on his own; Deadpool panicked and did the thing he does best, namely he commenced with the violence. After killing the entity and realizing he - an under-qualified, perpetually miserable headcase with more issues than a yearly subscription - had robbed the entire world of happiness, he crawled back home to Blind Al. It's the first and last time he ever really breaks down and cries on panel. Maybe even in his life.
Eventually he represses his feelings on the whole situation and moves on, clashing with T-Ray a few times and encountering Ajax (formerly the Attendant, having been revived and rebuilt by Killbrew), and engaged in a whole bunch of other shenanigans (including, but not limited to being magically made to look like Tom Cruise for a few months by Loki for mouthing off a bit too much.) After his series he went around as a Merc again, falling off that whole no-killing wagon, before getting a team-up title with Cable.
The series' first half centers around Providence, a floating island nation paradise built by Cable. When Cable demands that all the world's militaries disarm or he will throw their nukes into the sun, the X-Men employ Deadpool to move against him. After Cable's powers are burned out from fighting with the Silver Surfer, Deadpool uses a teleportation device that the X-Men supplied him with to essentially lobotomize Cable. After being left to take the entire blame for killing the man the whole world had come to see as a savior and peacemaker, Deadpool found that every last Merc gig had completely dried up and no one would hire him. He set out to find a way to heal Cable, employing Agent X and the Fixer along the way. They succeed, and Deadpool joins Cable on Providence, ultimately because (despite his actions) he did believe in what Cable had been doing.
After some time there, he committed the first and only murder on Providence, namely of a world-renowned terrorist that Cable had invited to stay there in hopes of reforming him. Despite suffering from amnesia over the whole event, Deadpool realized that he had been the one to do it, and was forcibly kicked off the island. Well, tossed, really.
Despite his exile, Cable began to covertly hire Deadpool for Merc work (since no one else in the world would), and Deadpool even returned to go searching through alternate universes to save Cable after he had been lost. In return, Cable repaired some of the brain damage that had been causing Deadpool frequent bouts of amnesia. After Cable died, Deadpool joined up with Agency X after saving Agent X from Hydra, and he once again fell into the pattern of doing Mercenary work and occasionally trying to be a hero.
Most recently he's been simultaneously running around with the X-Force, the Deadpool Corps and in his own new solo title; I'd ask how the heck that works but at least he's not Wolverine.
PERSONALITY:
"...None of this is actually happening. There is a man. At a typewriter. This is all his twisted imagination."
Deadpool is a complex character. That's one way to put it.
The other is that he's crazy with a side of more crazy, and slathered in crazy sauce.
Both are true. Wade has more personality disorders than the DSM-V, and is rather notorious for it. Even if one doesn't consider the two distinctive voices/narration boxes he sees/hears or his frequent breaking of the fourth wall to be symptomatic of schizophrenia, but rather a sort of hyper-awareness... well, he has more than enough otherwise to fall back on. He has incredibly violent mood swings, frequent and vivid visual hallucinations (which he occasionally refers to as "pool-o-vision"), and a complete lack of ability to function in polite society for prolonged periods of time. Generally these things are attributed to both his healing factor, which replenishes his decaying brain cells too fast (causing a myriad of chemical imbalances), and to the complete psychotic break he experienced as his ability was first manifesting that he never quite recovered from.
It was once observed that the only thing Deadpool hates more than himself is his friends, and by all accounts his actions make that seem true. Arguably his two oldest, closest friends are Blind Al and Weasel, both of whom he has kidnapped, shot up, tortured and turned against himself over and over again. Indeed, Wade is very rarely less violent with his allies than he is with his enemies, and has a collection of people he would call his buddies that he spends just as much time knock-down, drag-out fighting with as cooperating with (Taskmaster, Bullseye and Cable, to name a few). However, this isn't entirely true; in his occasional moments of lucidity, he shows regret for driving the people he cares about away, and after crossing the line with Al even begs her to forgive him, promising to change (and going so far as to follow through with it afterward).
Deadpool is also generally "friendly" with his enemies, as though the fact that they are attempting to kill him or he is attempting to kill them gives them some kind of clandestine connection. There's even a part of him that honestly believes that it does. Despite his want for some kind of meaningful relationship with every person he comes into contact with, only very few people (read: Cable) actually know how to get under his skin, or what buttons to push to genuinely piss him off. Sure, he may occasionally go into irrational rages at the drop of a hat with complete strangers, but it's not often that he allows himself to experience any emotion deeply enough that his inane chatter turns into anything more serious. Despite violently losing almost everyone he cares about as soon as he begins to care about them a little too much, Wade doesn't really understand how to mourn. Revenge is usually his first and only outlet, but barring the ability to find and exact that, he falls into extremely brief episodes of depression followed by burying the emotion and forgetting about it rather than dealing with it in any kind of productive way.
Boredom is probably his worst enemy. When Wade has no purpose or general mission at any given time, he has a tendency to lapse into an extremely suicidal state. Because he is in love with Marvel's anthropomorphized version of Death, and is often visited by her after being killed (in the brief interim that his body remains dead before his healing factor revives him), a lack of direction will invariably lead him to search for any way to circumvent his healing ability and die permanently so he can finally be with her. Most recently this was seen in his pursuit of a good old fashioned Hulk Smash, but even Big Green didn't put him out of commission for keeps.
"I was specifically created by humans... to kill humans. Which kinda says a lot about the human condition, don't you think?"
If there's one thing Deadpool is good at, it's violence and mayhem. Actually, "good at" might be understating it a bit. On and off over the years (depending on the writer), Deadpool has instigated self-imposed bans on killing as anything other than a last resort, but he's never given up good old method of heinously (but non-fatally) maiming anybody and everybody. (In current continuity, he happens to be off the wagon, but that could always change while he's in the City.)
Despite his zeal for running into situations with no plans, Deadpool is disturbingly creative and is especially skilled at flying by the seat of his pants. There are times when he plans things out, to a shocking degree of complication; when he went up against Osborn's Thunderbolts and came out laughing, as an example, but his general rule of thumb is to make things up as he goes along. He's known for his unpredictability, and he is more than willing do things that seem incredibly stupid or detrimental to his own health, but (on account of his healing factor) have them work out perfectly well. He's crazy like a fox, if you will.
He's ridiculously physically fit, and unflinching when it comes to inflicting damage on himself (IE: cutting off his own hands or feet to escape binds) to give himself an advantage in a fight (though he will scream about it after.) He's a master of melee combat, unarmed and armed, as well as being skilled with all manner of firearms. He has an acrobatic style of fighting, which takes advantage of the fact that he won't ever grow tired on account of his rapid regeneration, and his particular brand of talking people to distraction has always been a great way to throw opponents off and undermine them.
Even in comparison to other mercenaries, Wade is unfortunately (or fortunately, depending) not particularly loyal, especially when his odd sense of morality rears its head. One of his favorite tactics is taking jobs that conflict with one another and collecting from both before screwing them over and laughing all the way to the bank. Occasionally he'll drop a paying job to work for the would-be targets pro-bono because they've somehow managed to appeal to his slippery and not often lucid "better half"; occasionally he'll do it because his employers have (usually unknowingly) demanded he cross a "line" that he has. These lines usually aren't in any way clear until you've already tripped over them. The easiest one to pin down is his lack of willingness to kill children, though. Men, women, the sick and the elderly: sure. But children, that's taking it too far. Apparently.
Despite all protests to the contrary, Deadpool is seemingly happy to be paid in attention (especially adoration), and has a terrible track record of getting totally screwed out of a good deal of his promised paychecks because of it. In fact, when he does earn money, he almost seems to have no idea what to do with it, and will always find some harebrained way to squander it all so he has a reason to go out and interact with the world and earn it back again.
He is a supremely, sincerely lonely man.
"Sorry, I use humor to deflect my insecurities. Plus, I'm hilarious, so don't hate."
After all that shit, the psychosis and the face (woo doggy, that face) and the constant relapses when he goes right off the deep end, what makes him a fan favorite? Why would anyone like this barely functioning mess of a man?
Well, frankly, because he is hilarious. He exhibits both an extreme self-awareness and self-delusion depending on his mood, which coupled with his need blurt out any old thing that pops into his head makes for an amusing ride. Other characters may not find his constant inane babble charming, but he's never let that stop him even once. Nothing gets by Wade without him feeling the need to make a quip or a zany comment about it. The man never has been, and never could be described as "stoic." Everything he does/says is just to varying degrees of manic, and one of his biggest fears is being so totally alone that there will be no one around to see him do super badass things or hear his jokes.
That being said, he also generally tries to do good when he can just because it is good. Ever since his first solo series, he's had it in his head that he wants to be a hero, and while sometimes he succeeds at it better than others... and while he's done so much wrong (and screwed up the hero gig so many times) that the general public and most of the super-community will never really buy that he's a "hero", he keeps trying anyway.
Wade's favorite thing to do in the entire world is talk. He does it so well it was once described by fellow Merc and long-suffering acquaintance Domino as his most dangerous weapon. He has a flair for talking people out of information that they don't mean to give up, and for talking people into rages that tip things into his favor. To be entirely honest, though, even if talking did neither of those things, the Merc with a Mouth would still happily chatter through every battle.
Deadpool likes talking so much, in fact, that he made time to learn how to do it in quite a few different languages: namely English, Spanish, French, German and Arabic - and those are just the ones that have been confirmed on-panel! It's probably a safe bet to assume he has at least passable grasp of the languages of most of the countries he has traveled to for work; I mean, how can he be expected to deprive his targets of his immeasurable wit, simply because the poor slobs don't speak English?
Honestly.
"Did the distinctive costume give me away? I hate when that happens!"
And now for the cancer-riddled elephant in the room: Deadpool's fugly face (wait, what do you mean, his ridiculously weird sexuality? Yeah, we'll get to that, too.)
Once upon a 90s, Wade was known to react violently to anyone seeing his skin, to the point where he would murder in cold blood anyone who laid eyes upon him without his mask, whether or not they had any intention of doing so. He has mellowed out considerably since then, but it is still a touchy subject: true, he will strip down and run around downtown in booty shorts for a gag, but that's different. It's on his own terms. Having his mask forcibly removed, or being seen when he wasn't expecting it and hasn't mentally prepared himself for the inevitable reaction is definitely not his favorite thing, and depending on whether he's up or down that day, it may make him just as violent as it used to.
Now, one would think that such a thing would make him more sensitive to the plight of others. But it hasn't. He's extremely mouthy about the appearances of others, often picking out a negative physical trait and working it into the majority of his conversations with a person. Ilaney was the most obvious example of this, as she was mildly (and only mildly) overweight, and at least 90% of their conversations involved him taunting her about being so fat. It should be noted that he was extremely fond of her - protective, even... he just can't seem to stop himself. To balance it out somewhat (I hope), he is at least fine with getting just as well as he ever gives, and doesn't hold his own hideous appearance (or anything, for that matter) as somehow off-limits to comment on.
Now onto his sexuality: Wade is very, very easily distracted by women, any women, in the heat of battle or otherwise. He will profess his love for anyone, at the drop of a hat, and spend entire issues completely ignoring rejection and walk away with the delusion that they were flirting back. That's not to say he's completely incapable of Getting the Girl, of course. Over the years he's had way too many trysts to mention, but there were a few major romantic relationships that defined his character. The first was Vanessa (AKA Copycat), who he met long before his descent into madness at the hands of the Weapon X program, while she was a prostitute working in Boston. He really was in love with her, willing to give up his small-time crime career and go legit to make a better life for themselves, until he got diagnosed with inoperable brain cancer. Rather than drag her down with him, he broke up with her. Over the years they had an on-again, off-again relationship, but it was mostly off. When she, too, found herself on a downward spiral into god knows how many personality disorders, she would occasionally appear out of the woodwork to stake her claim on him possessively, but due to his long-standing, unrequited crush on Siryn, it never quite worked between them. She was murdered by Sabretooth after they'd both been drawn back into the Weapon X program in one of those on-again times.
Wade's thing with Typhoid Mary was less of a crazy whirlwind of two psychos in love, and more of a nightmare. Where Wade's relationship with Siryn was one-sided and hopeless, but ultimately nurturing as he strove to be a better man for her, his relationship with Typhoid Mary was nothing but highly toxic, and not one of their encounters over the years left him in anything but a thoroughly destroyed emotional state. It's not easy to find a gal that's even crazier than the Merc with a Mouth, but by golly if she didn't give him a good run for his money. She even raped him in a park once, so there's that.
In the end, the one single relationship that, matters most to Wade is his ongoing affair with Death herself. Occasionally he gets distracted away from his desire to die, but never for too terribly long, and he never gets quite as devoted to the others as he is to her. That being said, Deadpool does want to be genuinely loved by all the different women he pursues, but he will purposefully set himself up for failure as a way to sabotage his own relationships (either with cheating or neglect) before the world can get around to doing it for him. He also has the attention span of a gnat, so that obviously doesn't help him much.
Don't let his skirt chasing ways fool you, though. Deadpool is at the very least bi-curious. Though quite a few remarks of the more or less homosexual persuasion can be easily chalked up to the fact that he loves to make other people incredibly uncomfortable with his mindless chatter, Wade has made too many accidental/candid confessions about finding male companions attractive for the notion to be entirely dismissed. In fact, he even seems to have a "type," being of course the giant, buff superhero manly man that he is always getting into fights with. (Certain furry midgets that shall not be named notwithstanding.) One of the more notorious examples of this was his unbidden fantasy of lounging on a quiet beach, rubbing a speedo-clad Cable down with sunscreen and WD-40. Yes, really.
Of course, bisexuality isn't particularly strange. No, what's strange is that time he fell in lust with a mannequin. Or his Bea Arthur fetish. Or the fact that Death, an honest to goodness skeleton with boobs, is the very definition of sexy to him. Then there's this whole affair.
Yeah. I'm just going to leave you fine folks with that pretty picture.
"You know, sometimes it feels like I'm the only one who can see the truth: that life is just an absurdist comedy, and the only appropriate response is to laugh."
POWER:
Rapid Cellular Regeneration: Taken from Wolverine by the Weapon X program and genetically modified specifically to counteract his cancer, Wade can seemingly heal back from any injury and is effectively immortal. This was proven in a recent issue when Hulk literally smashed him into mostly liquid (a foot survived), and after an unspecified amount of time (probably months, as a legal trial concerning the crimes that got him Hulk Smashed in the first place had come and gone) his body had reconstituted itself. A side effect of his particular brand of healing is his limited immunity to telepathy.
[CHARACTER SAMPLES]
COMMUNITY POST (FIRST PERSON) SAMPLE:
YES. SWEET VALIDATION!
I'm a hero. Hear that, world? Deadpool is here to help! And someone is actually asking him to do it! On purpose!
[koff] I mean, not that I need it, as I'm already a card-carrying member of both the X-Men and the Avengers (or I would be, if they'd give me my freaking cards already), but it's nice to hear from a sexy lady computer. Anyone else see the mouth on her? She looks like she can bite a man's tackle off and keep on smilin', and you know what? I like that in a woman.
Computer. Thing.
Look, the important part is, does anyone know if she's single? I'd ask her myself, but I'm shy, and I've already got a couple boxes full of restraining orders so I'm going to try not to #@$* this one up.
Hello? Anyone?
Is this thing on?
LOGS POST (THIRD PERSON) SAMPLE:
This is it. A brand spankin' new clean slate.
Sure, the whole Deadpool Corps, save-the-galaxy thing had been a clean slate, too, but he'd screwed the pooch a bit on that one (and really, with five Deadpools on the job how could it not have gone all to hell) so now it's a cleaner clean slate. He's even under new management, and there's nothing to stop him from succeeding!
Nothing except himself, of course.
Wade props his feet up on the seats across the walkway of the subway train he's riding in and ignores the indignant stare from the hipster 20-something whose space he just invaded. Instead, he turns to the poor young woman sitting just to his left, clearly trying to plaster herself as far against the wall and away from him as she can get.
"Hey, buckteeth. Are you schmucks getting any bars down here?" He's been fiddling with his shiny new network device for the past couple minutes after posting (aloud and unabashedly, which might explain why suddenly no one is sitting any closer to him than they have to be), "No? Didn't think so. Man, these things are cool."
He hasn't found a spot where he can't make a call from yet, and now - for no reason he can explain to himself - he's trying to find one. Just in case he ever needs to drop someone outside of communicator range, or something. Of course, he hasn't gotten too creative yet, but that's the reason he's down on the subway in the first place. It's really too bad the teleporter in his belt is all busted (he really needs to stop pissing Weasel off so he can get it fixed); he'll have to see if he can't find some tech dweeb around here make it work again. That would sure make this whole process much easier...
Suddenly, a thought pops into his head, and even manages to make itself heard above the bickering voices. THE SEWERS! Surely there won't be any cell phone signal down there, right? He hops up out of his seat and draws his gun, gesturing with it wildly. "Hold the bus, I need to get off!" A bit of muss, fuss and panic later, he's back out on the street, searching for the elusive entrances to the sewer.
When he finds one he hauls the manhole cover up out of the way (and it is way heavier than it looks, by the way), before screaming "FOR SCIENCE!" to no one in particular as he drops down into the hole.
It's only when he hits the concrete bottom and has to swing his shin bones back into place that he realizes this probably wasn't the brightest plan he's ever had.
FINAL NOTES ABOUT YOUR CHARACTER:
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