Which character comes to mind when you hear the following:
– A masked assassin
-Has healing abilities-
-Possesses incredible agility
-Usually shows up all over the place
-Escapes death time and time again
-Adores superfluous pouches
Marvel’s Deadpool? Or wait… is it DC’s Deathstroke?
Having debuted in The New Teen Titans #2 in 1980, Deathstroke the Terminator (Slade Wilson) had come first into the superhero and villain world. He was a former military test subject and made an antagonism with the superheroes after his son had died trying to kill them. The Titans rivaled the X-Men in the ’80s, and Deathstroke.
10 Years later, 1991, writer Rob Liefeld and Fabian Nicieza had introduced Deadpool in New Mutants #98. This was a series that was to the X-Men what the Teen Titans are to the Justice League. When Liefeld had revealed the design for his character, he remarked, “This is Deathstroke from Teen Titans.”
These similarities had not stopped at the design and the uncanny resemblance to the name. Deadpool was a generic assassin who can analyze his opponents’ weaknesses and can then take them out quickly.
Wade then returned in X-Force, a follow-up to New Mutants and took the team down a militant road under the leadership of Cable. This series was a hit and sold 5 million copies. Deadpool has proven to be popular, and then something different began taking place started to happen to his ‘Deathstroke’ quality.
The more this character got from the first appearance, the more his personality picked up and this character passed through many creators’ hands and showed up as a guest in many comics and finally got his first miniseries by 1993, Deadpool: The Circle Chase.
Deathstroke has been and still is the serious character, and Marvel counterpart has become a wise-cracking vein. This character then grew wacky and unhinged.
“Huge love to Fabian and Rob for the inception, but I’ve always considered Deadpool to be a creation that had many parents,” Gerry Duggan said.
“Like a less-horrible Freddy Krueger origin. Gail Simone, Rick Remender, Joe Kelly, Mark Waid, Jimmy Palmiotti, Dan Way, and so many more creators left Deadpool better than when they found him. I inherited a character that was already on the way to being a moonshot.”
Rob Liefeld has calimed:
“Wilson’s a pretty common name after all, right?”
Writer Joe Kelly has been credited with introducing a significant part of Deadpool’s personality like his awareness and ‘ability’ to speak to his audience. This anti-hero’s first ongoing series, was launched in 1997.
Kelly had said: “With Deadpool, we could do anything we wanted because everybody just expected the book to be canceled every five seconds, so nobody was paying attention. And we could get away with it.”
When Ryan Reynolds had brought Wade Wilson to life on the silver screen in 2016’s Deadpool, this character was different from Deathstroke. The latter is now coming to movies too, and Joe Manganiello had shown up for a Justice League cameo.
Deadpool 2 will release on May 18.