When Polygon asked Cody Ziglar for his favorite Deadpool story, he mentioned writer Fabian Nicieza’s foundational series Cable & Deadpool, naturally. But where he really waxed eloquent was when he talked about one single Deadpool scene in one single issue of Uncanny X-Force.
“There’s some funny Wade stuff in [Uncanny X-Force], but also there’s some really, really great emotional weight stuff,” Ziglar said. “That [scene] stuck with me for 10, 15 years now. I think about that interaction all the time when I’m thinking of who Wade Wilson is and who Deadpool is.”
A veteran of Rick and Morty and Marvel Comics’ own Miles Morales: Spider-Man and Spider-Punk, Ziglar has been thinking about Wade Wilson a lot lately, for his new Deadpool solo series with artist Roge Antonio (Carnage, She-Hulk) at Marvel Comics. “Funny Wade stuff” combined with “emotional weight stuff” sounds very much like his plans for Deadpool, which at the top level are about forcing Wade Wilson to stop ignoring his daughter.
How did 2011’s Uncanny X-Force #5 earn such a spot in Ziglar’s heart? In the series’ first arc, the mutant black-ops team spends four issues attempting to assassinate a child-aged clone of the villain Apocalypse. In issue 5, Deadpool commands the group’s attention.
“Wade has a big blowup where he’s like, Hey, yo, I didn’t get into this to kill kids. That’s not my thing. And we realize that all the missions that we’ve seen, all the issues that Wade has been in, he’s never cashed the checks. He’s been doing it, essentially, from the goodness of his heart, because he thinks he’s doing something [good]. […] You think he’s comedy, comedy, comedy, but you also learn a little something about him just normally as a character.”
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Image: Rick Remender, Esad Ribić/Marvel Comics
Ziglar has his sights on that overlap between comedy and character, and the weapon he’s chosen is family. When Marvel Comics announced the series in December, it was with the news that the book would feature Deadpool’s biological daughter Ellie in a major role. And — judging by the Marvel Comics preview pages you can see exclusively on Polygon — Deadpool’s other “biological daughter,” Princess the talking symbiote dog, is along for the ride as well.
“I’ve been reading Deadpool for such a long time,” Ziglar told Polygon, “and something that I really enjoyed over the past couple of runs is the introduction of family. For the longest time [Wade has been like], I’m this solo, unkillable guy; I only care about myself. […] I really resonated with Alyssa Wong’s run, I loved the inclusion of Valentine and Princess. And we had this floating thing with Ellie out there — she hasn’t really been picked up in a couple of runs.”
“And also,” he quipped, “it’s fun having Take Your Daughter to Work Day when your job is being a mercenary.”
In Wong’s Deadpool, concluded in August of last year, Princess was born xenomorph-style from Deadpool’s guts after a mad scientist grafted a symbiote to his organs. But Ellie’s origins are quite a bit more mundane: Wade wasn’t aware she existed until her mother (an old flame of his) tracked him down. Since then, Deadpool stories with Ellie have tended to be about Wade keeping Ellie safe from his enemies, and Ellie living with her loving foster parents far away from him.
Ziglar wants to break that streak of Ellie getting threatened, rescued, and put back in safety because Wade thinks she’s better off without him.
“If Deadpool is like, ‘I can’t father you because I have to protect you,’” he told Polygon, “what if her answer is ‘Fuck that, I’m not going to be a damsel in distress to my own dad. […] I’m going to track you down and I’m going to make you be a parent to me.’”
One certainly wonders how Princess, a rather cheerful character, all things considered, will react to having a sister. Fans of the big red murder dog will be glad to see her reappear beyond Wong’s Deadpool, but may be wondering about the absence of another character. Wong’s series, in between all the carnage and assassinations and symbiote birth via eating Deadpool’s flesh from the inside out, was a genuine rom-com, introducing the nonbinary mutant scientist/assassin Valentine Vuong as Deadpool’s new sweetie.
In these preview pages from Deadpool #1, however, Wade and Valentine appear to have parted ways. But Ziglar brought up Wong’s run and Valentine even before we could, and while he didn’t want to get into spoiler territory, reiterated that he was a big fan of the character. “I’m also a big fan of having people of color in books, and not having them disappear or be killed off screen.” So fans of Valentine can rest assured that there is more to their story coming.
“A lot of this book is Wade processing,” Ziglar said of Wade and Valentine. “You get something — you’re in love or you get the job — but there’s acquiring things and there’s actually maintaining it. […] ‘Maintenance’ is the word that I’ll use without spoiling anything. What can Wade do to maintain something after he has acquired something?”
If this all sounds weighty for the fourth-wall-breaking, gross-out gagging Merc with a Mouth, Ziglar is well aware. If nothing else, comic book comedy’s better left on the page (which you can read below!) than rehashed in an interview. But he told Polygon that he thinks of writing a Deadpool solo series as a different kind of balancing act than writing him in a buddy book, like Cable & Deadpool, or a team book, like Uncanny X-Force.
“If Deadpool is only going to show up for X amount of pages in a team book, yeah, he can be your joke factory, or he can say funny, funny things. When he’s the center of a book, from my perspective, anyway, you’ve got to find that balance, or else I know I’m, as a reader, going to be like, I don’t want to hear another joke, I want to hear a little bit about the drama of it all! That’s inspiration that I took from my TV work, specifically Rick and Morty. Rick can be very funny, but also, I think you can strike this really beautiful balance, where it’s 70% goofy and then 30% really grounded and wholesome. That’s what I’m trying to bring to this book.”
Deadpool #1 hits shelves on April 3, and you can read the first five pages of it below.
