Deadpool

The character's first screen version appeared in X-Men Origins: Wolverine (2009), also played by Ryan Reynolds. There, Wade is a mercenary in Stryker's team who ends up turned into Weapon XI, with his mouth sewn shut and other mutants' powers grafted on. The Deadpool movies themselves treat this version as an inside joke, and it's left out of the main story.

In the timeline that matters, Wade is an ex-special forces soldier who picks up work as hired muscle and falls in love with Vanessa. Soon after, he learns he has terminal cancer in several organs. A mysterious recruiter offers a cure, and Wade takes it so Vanessa won't have to watch him die.

The so-called treatment is a lab that forces mutations through torture. It's run by Ajax, whose real name is Francis, a detail Wade never stops bringing up. The mutation finally kicks in: Wade gets a healing factor that regenerates practically any injury, but his whole body is left covered in scars. Ajax lets the building blow up with him inside. Wade survives.

Ashamed of his own face, he doesn't go back to Vanessa. He puts together a red suit, takes the name Deadpool, and hunts down Ajax's goons one by one. Colossus and Negasonic Teenage Warhead try to recruit him for the X-Men and end up dragged into the final showdown. Ajax kidnaps Vanessa, Wade kills him, and the couple reunites.

Deadpool 2 opens with a loss. On the couple's anniversary, a group after Wade breaks into the apartment and Vanessa is shot dead. Devastated, he tries to kill himself and can't. Colossus takes him to the X-Mansion as an X-Men trainee, and the first mission ends with Wade locked up in the Icebox along with Russell, a mutant kid abused at an orphanage.

From the future comes Cable, a soldier determined to kill Russell before he becomes a murderer. Wade hastily assembles X-Force, almost all of whom die on the first parachute jump, leaving Domino. In the end, Wade takes the bullet meant for Russell, and that act changes the kid's fate. Cable uses the last charge on his time-travel device to go back and save Wade.

In the mid-credits scenes, Negasonic and Yukio fix the device, and Wade goes around messing with the past: he saves Vanessa and Peter, takes out the sewn-mouth version from X-Men Origins, and even stops another of Ryan Reynolds's old jobs.

Deadpool & Wolverine picks things up six years later. Wade actually tried to join the Avengers, in an interview with Happy Hogan, and got turned down. He gave up the suit, broke up with Vanessa, and went to sell cars.

On his birthday, the TVA captures him. Agent Paradox explains that Wade's universe is dying because it lost its anchor being: that world's Logan, who died years earlier. Paradox offers Wade a place in the Sacred Timeline and plans to speed up the end of everything else with a machine called the Time Ripper. Wade steals a TemPad and heads out across the multiverse looking for a replacement Wolverine.

After trying out several versions of Logan, Wade ends up with the one nobody wanted: a drunk, bitter Wolverine, considered the worst of them all. Paradox dumps the two of them into the Void, the dumping ground for everything the TVA erases. It's ruled by Cassandra Nova, Charles Xavier's twin sister, with powers that make her brother look modest.

In the Void, the duo runs into Johnny Storm, whom Nova kills, and gets help from Elektra, Blade, Laura (X-23), and Gambit. Wade and Logan spend a good chunk of the time trying to kill each other, until they realize they need each other.

Nova follows them to Wade's universe to use the Time Ripper. Wade decides to throw himself at the machine alone, willing to die to save his own universe. Logan jumps in too, and sharing the load is what lets both of them survive. The machine is destroyed and Nova dies in the process.

Wade's universe is saved, and the new Logan stays there, adopted by Wade's circle of friends. For the first time, Deadpool saves something bigger than his own life.

Created by Fabian Nicieza and Rob Liefeld, Deadpool debuted in 1991 in the pages of The New Mutants #98. He started out as a villain and became an antihero, famous for talking to the reader and knowing he lives inside a comic book.