Deadpool Returns To His Villainous Roots in X-Force: Killshot

Warning! Spoilers for X-Force: Killshot ahead!

The world-class mercenary of the Marvel Universe Wade Wilson aka Deadpool wasn’t always the smart-mouth antihero fans know him as today. In fact, in his first appearance Deadpool was a villain without any heroic qualities whatsoever. As Wade’s popularity grew overtime, Marvel decided to redeem the character and turn Deadpool into someone fans could root for without perpetuating the popularity of a vicious killer. Even though Deadpool was redeemed, creator Rob Liefeld has found a way to return the antihero to his villainous roots as shown in the latest X-Force adventure. 

In X-Force: Killshot by Rob Liefeld and Chad Bowers, Cable and the rest of the original X-Force members, as well as a handful of variants of a few of the members, join forces across time and space to take down the villainous clone of Cable, Stryfe. When X-Force enters Stryfe’s fortress, they are met with a number of deadly threats, but none quite so deadly as Dreadpool. 

Dreadpool is a Deadpool variant who retains the original’s villainous demeanor while also exhibiting more of a clear head in battle and less of a comical attitude. Dreadpool looks exactly like Deadpool but with added armor around the shoulders. The most important distinction between them is Dreadpool has absolutely no conscious, which is exactly how Deadpool was depicted when he was first introduced. Deadpool’s debut scene was recreated in Dreadpool’s first appearance in another Liefeld ‘90s callback comic, which cemented the idea that Dreadpool is the continuation of Rob Liefeld’s original idea for the character separate from what the character eventually became. 

In Major X #1 by Rob Liefeld, Major X travels to Earth-616 while fleeing the destruction of their dimension and lands right before the events of New Mutants #98, which is the issue Deadpool where was introduced. Major X means Cable no harm, but that doesn’t stop them from having an action packed fight. Once their fight comes to an end, the events of the timestream start to unravel as an explosion occurs out of nowhere caused by the infamous Merc with a Mouth. Only this time, it isn’t Deadpool who comes through the demolished wall, but Dreadpool, in the same manner as the original. 

While Dreadpool is his own character separate from the original Deadpool, it is clear that he is the product of Deadpool’s continued villainy if he stayed on the path originally laid out for him in his first run. Deadpool was an X-Force villain for some time before being redeemed as an antihero, and Dreadpool is simply a Deadpool that did not go through that redemption. Fans assuredly believed that this idea of a permanently villainous Deadpool would be dropped after Dreadpool’s debut in Major X, but the character made a surprise appearance in X-Force: Killshot, proving that Rob Liefeld isn’t finished with the idea of Deadpool as an X-Force villain, just as Deadpool was originally intended to be.

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