The Marvel Universe Kills Deadpool

In my last post about Deadpool, I talked about how after the most recent series became successful, Marvel started saturating the market with Deadpool side-stories, mini-series, alternate universes, etc. and how most of it sucks simply because the majority of the writers don't understand Deadpool. They think he's just a funny, schizophrenic Punisher.

One series I neglected to mention is one that is slated to come out later this year, "Deadpool Kills the Marvel Universe".

This is a miniseries taking place in an alternate timeline where Deadpool goes crazy and kills everyone in the Marvel Universe. Heroes, villains, the works.

Marvel had done something identical with (you guessed it) the Punisher a few years back, so you can imagine I was more than a little skeptical.

Then I read this description:


• What if everthing you thought was funny about Deadpool…was actually just disturbing? 
• What if he decided to kill everyone and everything that makes up the Marvel Universe? 
• What if he actually pulled it off? Would that be FUN for you? 
• The Merc with a Mouth takes a turn for the twisted in a weekly horror comic like no other...




Yeah. REALLY skeptical.

But a part of me wasn't ready to call bullshit on this yet. I thought there was a direction this could go in that could conceivably work. If the writer REALLY understood Deadpool and went in some very dark recesses of Deadpool's past, then yeah, it could work. Deadpool DOES have a disturbing and scary side to him. No one has captured this quite as well as Joe Kelly did back when he first introduced us to "The Box"...

THIS is how you make Deadpool scary. It can be done. And so I wasn't ready to write off this story yet.

I mean, this is just me spit-balling here, but if I were asked to think of a reason why Deadpool would decide to kill the entire Marvel Universe, it would be because he thinks it's the only way out. He realizes that the only reason the universe keeps torturing him and forcing him to stay alive is because they keep making more comic books about the Marvel Universe, so in order to stop it, he has to kill everyone. Then they can't make any more comic books without characters, so he'll finally be free. No, it's not the best reasoning in the world, but my point is that one can give a valid reason for Deadpool to think that killing the entire Marvel Universe was a good idea without completely writing off his character. I was willing to give the writer the benefit of the doubt. After all, he gets paid to do this. Surely he can think of a reason that's at least as good as that.

Today I read the lettered preview of the first few pages of the first issue, and as it turns out, I was wasting my time.

Deadpool goes nuts and kills everyone because Psycho Man breaks his mind.

The reason Deadpool kills everyone has NOTHING to do with him as a character beyond his mental instability.

OK, where do I begin?

First of all, Deadpool is immune to mind reading and mind control. Partially because he's insane and partially because his brain cells are in a constant state of destruction and regeneration due to his cancer/healing factor. Psycho Man couldn't do shit to Deadpool. If it were this easy to make Deadpool a ruthless killer, someone would have done it ages ago.

Second of all, if this is all they had planned, they literally could have done this with ANY superhero or supervillain. The only reason they made it Deadpool is because they think people want to see him go nuts and kill everyone.

Finally, by making the thing that pushes Deadpool over the edge MIND CONTROL, you're basically backing away from doing any real examination of his character. If the idea of the comic is to make us see Deadpool in a different light, it fails because this doesn't show us a darker side of the character, this shows us a mentally-warped version of the character that simply couldn't exist in the main universe.

This tells me that the entire comic is going to be Deadpool killing everyone simply because his mind has been warped, and while he does unspeakably brutal things, he'll be cracking jokes the whole time. Because, you know, THAT'S WHAT DEADPOOL DOES. HOW DARK. HOW EDGY.

In other words, the entire point of this comic appears to be to make Deadpool a funny, schizophrenic Punisher.

While I haven't read the comic yet, judging from the premise and the preview art I've seen, this looks like it will be a great guide on exactly how to NOT write Deadpool. This could easily be the worst version of Deadpool since "X-Men Origins: Wolverine".

On the more POSITIVE side of things, it was revealed a while ago that Daniel Way is writing that Deadpool video game I talked about before. Yay!