I love comics. I have been reading comics on and off since I picked up my first one in Jr. High. One of my oldest favorites is Deadpool. He is a mentally unstable mercenary. His origins had him as a mercenary and all around bad guy who was dying of cancer. As opposed to nearly everyone else in the Marvel universe, he wasn't a mutant. Weapon X, the same people who gave Wolverine his adamantite, genetically altered him, giving him a variant of Wolverines spiffy healing factor in an attempt to cure his cancer. It was successful in keeping him alive and letting his normal cells survive, but it did the same for the cancer cells as well. The whole process left him disfigured, so he wears a mask. It also messed up his brain, something improbable like the neural pathways keep trying to fix themselves.
One of the fun things about Deadpool, his mental problems let him occasionally see that he is in a comic book even though no one else in the comic does. For example, in a recent one of his minis he shot a guy, the Punisher asked him why he did it, and he responded "Because you were going to do it and this is my book." In older books, he tended to narrate himself as he was going along as if he was talking just to the audience, but he was just talking out loud so that everyone around him could hear it. Now, they tend to have three different dialogue boxes for him: the yellow bubbles, which are him talking to the world, the yellow boxes, which is his inner voice, and white boxes, where is his other inner voice. He typically holds conversations between these three 'voices', but the characters around him only hear the yellow bubble ones.
Anyways, Deadpool has his own running comic, just finished a mini series called Suicide Kings, is starting a new running series Deadpool: Merc with a Mouth (where he is partnered with his head from the Marvel Zombies universe...yes, just his head), he is getting a another book before the end of the year where he teams up with other random loner characters (Suicide Kings had him teaming with Daredevil, the Punisher, and Spider-Man), and is rumored to be both joining the X-Men and X-Force, along with any special appearances in other books he would normally do. He was in the X-Men Origins: Wolverine movie, and is slated to have his own coming up. Deadpool's character has never gotten this much love, and he has been around for almost 20 years. It is nice. I am really looking forward to the insanity.
