It is no secret that Deadpool is in an entire league of his own as far as his character goes (with his absurd shenanigans and refusal to take even the most serious of battles, well, seriously), but in one X-Men storyline, there is a character who exhibits all of Deadpool’s quirks while taking his outlandish bits to the next level–making this forgotten mutant hero more like Deadpool than even the original Deadpool himself, Wade Wilson.
Wade Wilson was a mercenary who was diagnosed with terminal cancer, leading him to sign up for experimental treatment that was secretly a Weapon X operation. Unfortunately, when Wade learned the truth, it was too late, and Weapon X had begun the process of turning Wade Wilson into the mutate, Deadpool. A super-soldier, but also driven mad by the procedure, Wade came out the other end totally insane. With a loose grip on reality and a power-set that keeps him from experiencing any real, physical consequences for his actions, Deadpool just sort of floats through life, taking on jobs that interest him and cracking jokes along the way… just like another X-Men-adjacent hero in Marvel continuity.
X-Men’s Morph is More like Deadpool than Deadpool
In Astonishing X-Men #3 by Scott Lobdell, Jeph Loeb, and Joe Madureira, the animalistic X-Man, Wild Child, is being pursued by an army of Infinites (Apocalypse’s half-life mutant hybrids) until he is captured by Apocalypse’s son, Holocaust. When a potential plot hole is pointed out, Holocaust claims he is not to be questioned, promptly manifesting a top hat and starting a song-and-dance for the Infinites surrounding him. Following the Infinites’ obvious bewilderment, the X-Men arrive and wipe them out, only for it to be revealed that Holocaust wasn’t Holocaust at all, he was Morph.
Morph is a mutant with the ability to shapeshift into anyone he chooses. Not only that, but he can become anything he wants as well, even if what he turns into purely relies on ‘toon logic’ to exist. For example, in an earlier issue within the Age of Apocalypse, Morph pretended to be Magneto while talking to Quicksilver, only to then transform his head into a giant pair of lips and give his ‘son’ a big, fat kiss. Both his previous shenanigans and the specific mission in this comic makes it clear that Morph truly is a jokester no matter the situation–and while his humor is on-par with that of Deadpool, his ability to morph into impossible things only heightens his hilariously absurd nature.
The ludicrous situations Morph puts himself through during the Age of Apocalypse is almost to the same standard as Big Head in The Mask franchise. Basically, Deapool and Morph are two halves of the same chaotic character, but Deadpool only wishes he could transform into the whacky, nonsense characters Morph can to make his bits even more outlandishly insane. In other words, meaning this forgotten X-Men hero is more like Deadpool than even Deadpool.
