Deadpool: April Pool’s Day #1: Bet You’ve Never Heard of This Guy

Deadpool: April Pool’s Day (#1 of 1) blends genres in a mostly goofy tale about Deadpool doing a nice thing. For that story, Gail Simone brings out a ridiculous backlog of mostly forgotten characters, like Starr the Slayer or Wally the Wizard, published by or owned by publishers acquired by Marvel over the years.

Superheroes are all the rage nowadays in comics, while fantasy stories and the more philosophical sci-fi tales are often relegated to imprints and smaller publishers. However, that wasn’t always the case. Time was once that the best-selling comics were pulpy sword & sorcery sagas and science fiction mysteries.

It’s a funny thing how “legacies” work out in comic books. Old, mostly out-of-print characters inform the writing behind some of the most popular superheroes at Marvel and other publishers. Characters like Moon Knight or even Human Torch were built using the pieces of early 1930s-1950s pulp tropes of crime, science fiction, mysticism, and so on. Most of which stemmed from misunderstandings of the world and trying to make sense of that world during one of the largest stages of creative experimentation in Western culture.

Deadpool: April Pool’s Day may be a goofy superhero one-shot comic, but Gail Simone weaves a genuine homage to the characters and genres that came before by having one of Marvel’s most recognizable (anti)heroes bridge superhero popularity and the legacy that popularity stands on the shoulders of.

The artwork is pure chaos. It’s fitting for a Deadpool story and for one that’s filled with callbacks to older titles. C.F. Villa, Robert Gill, and Ig Guara all work together to fill the pages of the issue with motion and density. Rachelle Rosenberg builds on that artwork with colors and shades that easily progress from one aesthetic into the next as the issue’s story leaps from genre to genre.