Deadpool is a character appearing in American comic books published by Marvel Comics. Co-created by artist Rob Liefeld and writer Fabian Nicieza, the character first appeared as a supervillain in The New Mutants #98 (cover dated February 1991) before recurring throughout X-Force and receiving his first miniseries, The Circle Chase, in 1993. Deadpool received his first ongoing solo title in 1997 and has since starred in numerous series, including Cable & Deadpool (2004–2008), in which he is frequently paired with his former enemy Cable.
Deadpool is the persona of Wade Wilson, a disfigured Canadian mercenary who underwent an experimental procedure that grafted an artificial healing factor onto his cancer-ridden cells, granting him superhuman regenerative abilities at the cost of severe physical scarring and chronic mental instability. Originally conceived as a parody of the DC Comics villain Deathstroke, Deadpool was further shaped by Liefeld's admiration for Spider-Man and Wolverine, characters he sought to evoke with his own creations. In addition to his healing factor, Deadpool is a master assassin, an expert swordsman and marksman, and is fluent in multiple languages.
The character's popularity has seen him featured in numerous other media outlets. In the 2004 series Cable & Deadpool, he refers to his own scarred appearance as "Ryan Renolds crossed with a Shar Pei".Cable & Deadpool #2, p. 13. Marvel Comics. Reynolds developed an interest in portraying the character after reading the comic, which was ultimately realized in the X-Men film series, including X-Men Origins: Wolverine (2009), Deadpool (2016), and its sequels Deadpool 2 (2018) and the Marvel Cinematic Universe's Deadpool & Wolverine (2024).September 18, 2014, Deadpool Movie Officially Set for 2016 Release, IGN.
Publication history
Creation
Deadpool was created by artist Rob Liefeld and writer Fabian Nicieza, making his first appearance in The New Mutants #98, published December 11, 1990 with a cover date of February 1991. Liefeld had joined The New Mutants in 1989, tasked with reviving a title that had fallen to approximately 100,000 monthly copies at a time when the core X-Men books were selling in the 500,000 range. Within months of his arrival, sales began climbing by roughly 50,000 copies per month, nearing the sales of the flagship X-Men series. In response, Marvel gave Liefeld with full creative control over plots and new characters, beginning with The New Mutants #98.
The character's name was derived from the dead pool, an expression Liefeld heard from his parents that involves guessing when a celebrity will die. Liefeld was drawn to the sound of the combined term. Deadpool's red and black costume design and personality were inspired by Spider-Man. Liefeld described the Spider-Man design as easy to draw and instantly recognizable. He stated that Deadpool would be "Spider-Man, except with guns and swords—a jackass". The character was further integrated into existing Marvel mythology through his connection to Weapon X, the government program which gave Wolverine his powers. Liefeld conceived of Deadpool as an earlier, flawed product of the same program.
Nicieza was hired to script the series from Liefeld's layouts and plot notes and was given wide latitude in shaping the character's dialogue. He recalled in a 2018 interview that Liefeld described the new character broadly as "Spider-Man meets Punisher" and left the specifics of the voice to Nicieza's discretion. Wanting a change of register after scripting several heavily serious characters, Nicieza made Deadpool an "annoying loudmouth". He initially differentiated the character's speech with hollow-bordered word balloons to signal something unusual about the voice; as lettering technology advanced these became yellow-filled caption boxes rendered in the rough-edged font Spookytooth. The vocal quality Nicieza had in mind was that of comedian Denis Leary.
The character's civilian name, Wade Wilson, originated as an inside joke stemming from Nicieza's comparisons of Deadpool to DC Comics character Deathstroke (Slade Wilson), a fellow masked mercenary. Nicieza has contested characterizations of Deadpool as a parody or copy of Deathstroke, arguing that the name was solely an affectionate nod, and that the two characters differ substantially in personality, backstory, and design.
Early appearances and miniseries (1991–1996) The New Mutants #98 sold approximately 650,000 copies, and reader response was substantially above the norm for the title: Nicieza recalled that the issue received roughly three to four hundred letters compared to the title's usual fifty, with approximately 75% requesting the character's return. Marvel acted on this quickly: Deadpool was selected as one of five characters to receive a trading card inserted into X-Force #1 (August 1991), the rebranded successor to The New Mutants with largely the same cast and creative team. Liefeld noted that with five million copies of X-Force #1 sold, each containing one of five different cards, approximately one million copies of the Deadpool card made it into readers' hands. Deadpool's profile was further elevated in X-Force #2, where he featured on the cover and occupied the first twelve pages of the issue. Liefeld attributed this prominent placement directly to fan demand following New Mutants #98. X-Force #1 and #2 were the best-selling comics in the United States in June and July 1991, respectively. Within months of Deadpool's creation, the toy company Toy Biz fast-tracked the character for his own action figure. The character began guest-starring in other Marvel titles. His first appearance outside the X-Men line was in Nomad #4 (August 1992), also written by Nicieza. The first Deadpool story not written by Nicieza appeared in The Avengers #366 (December 1993), scripted by Marvel staff editor and freelance writer Glenn Herdling.
In 1993, Deadpool received his first solo series, the four-issue miniseries Deadpool: The Circle Chase, written by Nicieza and pencilled by Joe Madureira. The series was the first sustained opportunity to develop the character's backstory: Wade Wilson was established as an ordinary mercenary who, on receiving a terminal cancer diagnosis, enrolled in the Weapon X program, which granted him a powerful healing factor but left him disfigured and mentally unstable. Nicieza has cited his mother-in-law's battle with cancer as a personal influence on this aspect of the character, describing the hook as a blend of Bugs Bunny and Frankenstein: the thing that saved Wade's life also made him a pariah. A second miniseries, Deadpool: Sins of the Past (1994), was written by Mark Waid and pencilled by Ian Churchill after editorial rejected Nicieza's proposed follow-up, in which Wade's cancer recurred and he pursued the scientists responsible for his condition, on the grounds that it was too grim. Nicieza later described this rejection as one of the greatest frustrations of a thirty-year career. Waid approached the character primarily as a comedy vehicle, describing his mental model as Bugs Bunny.
Following the second miniseries, commercial interest in Deadpool declined sharply. Marvel Comics simultaneously experienced severe financial difficulties, filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in the mid-1990s, which disrupted editorial leadership across the company. Deadpool made approximately a dozen appearances across all Marvel titles in the following three years.
First ongoing series (1997–2002) In 1997, Marvel editor Matt Idelson, a fan of the character who secured approval to give it a renewed opportunity, commissioned an ongoing Deadpool series from writer Joe Kelly, who had no prior experience on a monthly title. Wizard Magazine noted that Kelly's appointment prompted internal skepticism, with colleagues questioning how the series could launch with an unestablished writer. Kelly recalled that editorial expected the series might last only six issues. Rather than following the action-centered direction of earlier development pitches, Kelly made comedy and character depth the defining quality of his run. His central conception was of a character who "would like to do the right thing but is constitutionally incapable of pulling that off"; someone for whom doing good was a perpetual aspiration and a perpetual failure, with the universe reliably undermining any success. This interpretation proved influential and has remained a consistent element of the character across subsequent creative teams. Kelly's run also introduced several supporting figures that would recur through later decades of the character's publication history, including Blind Al, an elderly woman who lives with Wade Wilson, and Ajax, the antagonist responsible for Wade's disfigurement at Weapon X. The series' regular artist for much of the run was Ed McGuinness, who had begun his career at Marvel with the Wolverine '96 Annual before joining Deadpool. McGuinness departed the title due to difficulties meeting deadlines.Wizard Magazine #79
Earlier portrayals had established Deadpool as a darkly humorous combatant in the mode of a wisecracking action hero. Kelly developed the character into something more unhinged: manic, free-associative, and given to extended comedic monologues that drew on contemporary pop culture and showed no regard for narrative propriety. A frequently cited example of the run is Deadpool #11, in which Kelly and artist Pete Woods reworked a 1967 issue of The Amazing Spider-Man by replacing its original protagonists with Deadpool and Blind Al panel by panel, using the juxtaposition to comment satirically on the conventions of superhero storytelling. The run also introduced a contested-identity subplot in which the supervillain T-Ray claimed to be the real Wade Wilson, asserting that Deadpool was an impostor who had stolen his identity, which complicated the character's backstory and was periodically revisited by later writers. Kelly pitched a storyline tying the series into the "Heroes Return" event, in which Deadpool would have retrieved heroes trapped inside a dimensional construct and temporarily carried them under his arm, but the concept was rejected by editorial as too ambitious for a new series written by an unestablished author.
Despite the creative energy Kelly brought to the title, sales were sluggish throughout his tenure. Wizard reported in late 1998 that the series had been "under the cancellation gun" until a coordinated marketing initiative, branded "Deadpool Month", reversed its trajectory.Wizard Magazine #90Wizard Magazine #85 Staged in October 1998 to coincide with the series' second-year milestone, Deadpool Month included a double-sized anniversary issue (Deadpool #23), a three-issue storyline building to a double-sized Deadpool #25, a promotional Deadpool #0 distributed through Wizard magazine, an Encyclopedia Deadpoolica reference publication, and a one-shot tie-in.Wizard Magazine #85 The success of the Daredevil/Deadpool Annual '97, a team-up issue that Marvel described as a benchmark, prompted the publisher to plan similar annual crossovers in subsequent years.Wizard Magazine #77
Writer Christopher Priest succeeded Kelly in 1999. From his opening issue, Priest extended the metafictional dimension of the character, which Kelly had introduced more obliquely, with Deadpool being aware that he is a fictional character. Priest departed the series in 2000. By mid-2001, monthly sales had fallen to approximately 24,000 copies, against roughly 100,000 for the top-selling X-Men title of the same period.