With the recent addition of Deadpool to Marvel Rivals, my various queer comic subreddits have raised the question “is Deadpool ACTUALLY pansexual?” meaning is it “canonical.” Is it “in the comics?” And this raises the question of how do we do character analysis within an expansive, multi-contributor lore?
The first two obvious and interconnected hurdles is that we’re looking at characters with a long real-world lifetime, so far, and is being tackled by different writers through the years. Even working from the same lore Bible, that’s going to come with natural drift.
The Wong and Ziglar mini-runs from the last few years present a vastly different version of Wade than his first tenure on X-Force in the early 90s. One part of this is just how much stuff has happened to the character in the intervening thirty-five years. Multiple marriages and long-term relationship, joining and being kicked out of the Avengers, saving the world multiple times, and becoming a dad twice over. It would be weird if he didn’t have some kind of arc. The writing ethos also changes from decade to decade, so certain personality traits will get different focus in different eras.
Even between back to back writers though, you’ll see subtle adjustments that snowball into greater changes down the line. In Deadpool’s first solo run, the writing hands over from Kelly to Priest at issue thirty-four, and you can tell there’s been a change in creative team. Kelly wrapped up a lot of his plot threads before he left and Priest carried some of the references over, but he also obliquely shifted focus. Which is fine. He admits to wanting to take the character down a different path. All those little changes iterate and iterate ever onward. The themes usually retain their structure, but the details give way.
Then you have the broader problem of “what is canon?” And every big IP handles that differently. Star Wars, for example, had a big “canon reset” when it was bought by Disney to officially make the old extended universe comics and novels “decanonized.” James Gunn has had to actively declare what parts of The Suicide Squad and Peacemaker are coming over as canon from the old DC movie/TV universe into the new one.
So you have three angles that we’re building canon from: what’s on page in the narrative, official handbook information if it exists, and informal “word of God” from a primary creator. And these things frequently contradict. The usual practice is to just take the last thing that makes sense as canon. What was the most recent thing to be declared and run with it.
Marvel and DC as comic publishers, bring in the additional complexity of multiversality.
So what does Marvel canon actually look like with that additional caveat? From a sort of broad, cataloging perspective, Marvel Database — the preeminent Marvel fan wiki — takes an “if it’s on the page, it’s canon” approach. And it plays into the multiversality with the justification “well it just happens in a different universe, not 616.” It makes that very important distinction of “happens in some version of reality” and “happens in the specific 616, mainline universe.”
And this bears out in the narrative of the comics because Marvel does play a pretty heavy hand into the multiverse as a concept. The original Ultimate universe left remnants in 616 that carried over into the new Ultimate universe. The X-Men and Spider-Man offices, in particular, are chock full of stories that hinge on multiversal travel. It’s the hook of the current arc of Spider-Man & Wolverine at this very moment. Stories set in the Cancerverse cross ten different books over the course of eight someodd years.
So if the narrative itself is going to pull in from the mulitverse, you as a reader can do the same when analyzing a character as a holistic narrative entity. You can take all elements together to build an analysis with textual evidence.
The ongoing complaint about both Civil War events is how “out of character” some characters are written. And I don’t necessarily disagree. But their actions did happen. They are canonical. Just because you don’t like something doesn’t mean it’s not canonical. These are the licks you have to take.
So is Deadpool pansexual?
We have a words of God from Nicieza, Duggan, and Simone that he’s, in short terms, of a vast an undefined sexuality that encompasses everything.
In the 616 “main” universe, we’ve seen him in relationships with women, a femme-presenting personification of death, a non-binary person, and smooching a few different men in a very non-serious manner. He makes a lot of gay jokes, but he also has moments where he seems to earnestly carry something quasi-romantic for Spider-Man and Cable in particular. In a five-page alt storylette as part of Deadpool: The End, he’s in a romantic relationship with Bobby Drake. It’s played for laughs as a direct mirror of an early bit with Carol Danvers, but it still happened, canonically, by metatextual canon rules.
So yeah, all the pieces are there to comfortably say Deadpool is “canonically” pansexual.
Now someone who’s not a coward needs to make him kiss a dude earnestly in 616, so we stop having this conversation.
Because, my god, if one of the cash-cows was officially “out” and everyone was cool with it, imagine what kind of rep you could swing a greenlight for going forward.
Pixels and Pins Studio 