Almost all of Marvel’s vigilantes follow a certain pattern and formula in their depictions, but Wade Wilson’s Deadpool bucks the trend (a likely reason why he’s so popular in the comics and films.) Typically, solo vigilante heroes such as Spider-Man and Daredevil are depicted with a particular correlation: the brighter or more humorous their personalities, the less violent they are. While this isn’t all that surprising, the Merc with the Mouth does not meet that criteria in the slightest.
While Marvel has teams of heroes such as the Avengers, X-Men, and Fantastic Four who fight all sorts of world-ending and cosmic threats, there are also more grounded heroes on the streets who frequently work alone. Typically classified as vigilantes, a pattern lies in their various dispositions. In an imaginary graph measuring the brightness of their personalities against their baseline levels of brutality, Spider-Man naturally has one of the more positive and humorous temperaments while having the lowest levels of aggression, almost always pulling punches, never resorting to lethal forms of justice, and often not even drawing blood in his own comics. The graph would subsequently scale upwards with a hero like Daredevil who’s more intense but still given to quips while breaking bones. At the end of the scale is Punisher, a grim and gritty character who mows down hundreds without cracking a smile.
While other vigilantes can be positioned on this graph as well, following the same presented pattern, the correlation does not apply to Deadpool at all. One of the funniest Marvel vigilantes, he’s also one of the deadliest men on Earth, operating as a mercenary armed with a variety of things that shoot and stab. Combined with a rapid healing factor that allows him to heal almost instantly from bullet wounds and severed limbs, Deadpool adventures are more often than not Marvel’s bloodiest and most brutal. While he can go toe-to-toe with Spider-Man in the joke department, Deadpool could match the Punisher shot for shot at the same time. And yet despite flouting Marvel’s unofficial formula of jokes scaling down as violence increases, Deadpool is a huge success.
Deadpool’s skewing of the imagined graph and the subversion of expectations is massively entertaining as the general Marvel formula doesn’t apply to him. While the pattern of vigilante depictions is logical and isn’t inherently boring by any means, Deadpool is a refreshing character who runs counter to the correlation. He’s just as violent as he is bright and hilarious, a status that is certainly a rarity in the Marvel Universe, and combines with his meta awareness to offer fans something that’s not just individually unique, but which breaks the paradigm that defines other characters.
While Spider-Man is just as popular as Deadpool, Wade Wilson not fitting into the traditional formula is what makes him so unique and beloved by Marvel fans. The freedom he has to say and do whatever he’s thinking is extremely entertaining, and his hyper-violent behavior combined with his insane fourth-wall-breaking humor is a potent mix. While Deadpool may mess up the imagined vigilante graph as an outlying point of data, it’s for good reason in Marvel Comics.
