An Explanation

My brief foray into the Marvel universe has taught me a lot. It's taught me about Marvel, about myself, and what I find intriguing about the Marvel universe. The answer is not a whole lot.

I've never really found much to like about Marvel's heroes. Most of them I find incredibly dull, condescending, or just downright annoying. Which is why I was so shocked to find that there were Marvel characters that I actually do like. But after I worked my way through Deadpool, Taskmaster, and Agent X and started looking at Cable/Deadpool, it started to become abundantly clear.

All of the aforementioned title characters (with the exception of one) are largely villains (or "antiheroes" or a sort). They don't play by the "rules" of the Marvel universe and they act or function in the way a normal Marvel hero does. And when I hit Cable/Deadpool (which has a lot more of those "standard" Marvel heroes) I started to get back my annoyance with the Marvel universe.

I think what I'm trying to say is that I like Deadpool. He's a jerk and a maniac and not necessarily a nice person. But (at least in the early Joe Kelly stuff and the later Gail Simone stuff) he was genuinely trying to be a good person. But he didn't whine about it in the process. He didn't bemoan his disfigurement. He pushed past the pain he felt and genuinely did some good things (hell, he saved the world a couple of times).

To me, this made him very different from the other heroes. And now I'm seeing that dichotomy again, because in the Cable/Deadpool stuff I read there were a lot of guest appearances by the other heroes of the Marvel universe. And every time they showed up I wanted to slap them. Until Deadpool did something to make them look stupid -- then I smiled.

That was another thing I found appealing about the Deadpool comic. Whenever there was an appearance by another Marvel character it almost always had a heavy component of Deadpool mocking them. Which obviously was appealing to me.

So yeah. I don't imagine I'm going to start buying any Marvel monthlies anytime soon. And I won't be touching their big events. And I'll gouge out my eyes before I go near anything with an "X" in the title (the aforementioned Gail Simone created Agent X excepted).

Whether I like it or not (and I do), I'm a DC boy. And I probably will be for life.