Deadpool (Wade Winston Wilson)

Today we take a little break from the tv shows, since we finally have the first official image from a highly anticipated movie: Deadpool! In the pic, we see Ryan Reynolds donning the famous red/black suit in a “sexy” pose, promising the deranged humor we’re used to from the titular character. Deadpool already appeared in the disappointing X-Men Origins: Wolverine in an original version: Reynolds portrayed him as a soldier in William Stryker‘s Weapon X Program, a swordsman with superhuman reflexes fighting for the major; then, he’s used as the primary guinea pig for the experiment that transformed him into Weapon XI (portrayed by Scott Adkins), a super-mutant with the combined powers of Deadpool, Wolverine, Kestrel, Bolt and Cyclops. The new movie will take a distance from the first appearance of the character, task made easier by the change of timeline in X-Men: Days of Future Past: let’s just hope the new Deadpool will be more similar to the original one (surely, he’ll not be some sort of mutant Frankenstein’s monster). Waiting for the movie, let’s see who this fan-favorite mercenary is in the comics.

Little is known about Wade Winston Wilson‘s early life, mostly because he has some problems with his memory, and he cannot always distinguish between reality and folly. He was born in Canada, and he (apparently) was the son of Thomas and Hailey Wilson: what really happened from this point on is still a mystery. Depending on what Wade remembers, he was raised by his alcoholic and abusive mother, while he never knew his father; or, he was raised by his inflexible and grim father, an ex soldier, while his mother died of cancer when he was a boy, and his father was accidentally killed by a drunken friend of Wade’s with a bottle of beer; sometimes his parents appeared to be both alive and well in his adulthood, some others Deadpool remembered he had been manipulated by the Butler, one of his enemies, into killing them by burning them alive. Truth lies in the maze of insanity that is Wade’s mind. Being it a way or the other, at a certain point in his life Wade Wilson became a mercenary, and started traveling the world following an assignment or the other: he was active in Morocco, where he stayed for some time being in love with a local, Francie; the, he moved to Japan, with the order of killing the sumo wrestler Oyakata, but he fell in love with his target’s daughter, Sazae, and even befriended Oyakata in the three years he spent undercover in his gym, so he eventually refused to kill him and lost his contract. He moved to the United States, where he accepted any kind of jobs, from assassinations to sabotages; he also fell in love with a prostitute, Vanessa Carlysle, who was probably his first true love. Something unexpected, however, happened: Wade was diagnosed an incurable cancer, a terminal illness that gave him no hope of survival. Wade broke up with Vanessa, wanting to avoid to her being close to a terminally ill man, and he even gave up to the chemo treatments, wanting to shorten times the most he could. Everything he did was coming back to his homeland, Canada, to find some peace before the inevitable end came. What he found was not peace, but hope, in the form of the Canadian Government.

Wilson was contacted by Departmen K, a governmental weapon development agency; the Department proposed to him to become a test subject for the Weapon X Project, a superhuman enhancement project, in exchange of a cure for his cancer. Without anything to lose, Wilson accepted. The “cure” didn’t exactly erased Wilson’s cancer, but it stopped its growth thanks to the artificial implantation of the healing factor of the original Weapon X, the mutant Wolverine. Wilson joined a Weapon X team composed of himself, the invulnerable Sluggo, the cyborgs Kane and Slayback and his ex girlfriend Vanessa Carlysle, whose mutant powers had awakened. During a mission, Wilson killed the deranged Slayback, and this costed him the expulsion from Weapon X: as all “failed” superhuman agents from Weapon X, Wilson was sent to The Hospice, a secret facility in which he was supposed to be “fixed”, but in which he became the test subject of the cruel Doctor Emrys Killebrew and his sadistic assistant Ajax. Killewbrew and Ajax tortured Wilson physically and mentally, leaving on his body gruesome scars that his body would have never been able to heal from (probably because of some psychosomatic block deriving from the trauma). Wilson also went mad due to Killebrew’s “treatment”, and in his delirium he befriended the cosmic entity Death: he even tried to commit suicide to join Death, but his healing factor constantly brought him back. When Ajax, wanting to hurt him, lobotomized Wilson’s only friend in the Hospice, Worm, Wade killed him out of mercy; if a patient killed another, however, he had to be executed, and Ajax ripped Wade’s heart from his chest, leaving him for dead. Wilson’s healing factor and strength of will were enough to allow him to heal even such a wound, and he left the Hospice, now adopting the name “Deadpool”, from the one of Killebrew’s betting round on which patient would have survived the most. Now completely mad, with more than one voice speaking in his head at once, Deadpool suited a brand new costume fitting his new identity and came back to his mercenary life, selling his skills to the best bidder. He worked under the Kingpin as an assassin for a while, but then came back to Canada to look for help for his new mental and physical condition. The help he was seeking seemed nowhere to be found, and Deadpool resolved to live with his new friends: the voices that constantly argued in what remained of his mind.

Wade Wilson is, simply put, completely mad: in his mind, at least three different personalities are constantly arguing over anything, and while one of those appears to be balanced and sound, the others are completely deranged. He’s extremely talkative, and never stops babbling nonsense even in the midst of battles, thus annoying enemies and allies alike (that’s the characteristic that gave him the nickname Merc with a Mouth), and tends to be pretty moody, going from cheerful happy to sadistic cold in a matter of seconds. As Deadpool, he’s an extremely proficient hand-to-hand and armed combatant, deploying an amazing mastery over several martial arts and with the use of both blades and firearms. Weapon X’s experiments gave him Wolverine’s healing factor, that allows him to heal from any wound, poison or disease, but that regenerates his cells just fast enough to replace the ones destroyed by his cancer, so he’s never fully healed (same goes for his skin scars); his mental condition makes him immune to possession and telepathy, and also grants him a curious cosmic awareness: he knows he lives in a comicbook (or a film, or a videogame etc.), and acts in consequence, often disorienting the people he’s speaking to (reader/viewer included). Thanks to Thanos‘ jealousy, Deadpool has also been cursed to immortality, thus he’s unable to be with Death before the Mad Titan himself. Despite all his skills, Deadpool is totally and utterly mad, one of the most unpredictable (and annoying!) beings in the universe.