Marvel once took Deadpool out of his own series, and fans didn’t realize it until almost a year later. The Merc with the Mouth may be a huge star now, but there was a time when he was perceived as little more than a cult character. Wade Wilson was just a B-lister whose waning popularity meant that his solo title was constantly on the verge of cancellation, before it was revamped entirely.
Coming in 2002 during a time of heavy change at Marvel, the Deadpool reboot was one of many attempts to streamline the comics division. Under the new leadership of President Bill Jemas and Editor-in-Chief Joe Quesada, a number of fresh takes were applied to old properties, such as Peter Milligan and Mike Allred’s bold revamp of X-Force. It was eventually decided that many of the second-tier X-books would each be relaunched with new titles: X-Force became X-Statix, Cable became Soldier X and Deadpool became Agent X.
Rising star Gail Simone was brought on to finish off the Deadpool ongoing series in a storyline that sees Wade Wilson running afoul of telepathic assassin Black Swan, who infects the antihero with a mental virus. In Deadpool #69 written by Simone with art by Arnold Tsang, Andrew Hou, Eric Vedder, Omar Dogan and TheRealT!, Deadpool stages an assault on Swan’s castle in Germany in retaliation, where he is then confronted by Nijo, a mercenary in Swan’s employ. During the fight, a bomb erroneously goes off, and the three are seemingly killed in the explosion. The story picks up again in Agent X #1 by the same creative team, where a man calling himself “Alex Hayden” arrives in New York City. There he finds Taskmaster's partner Sandi Brandenberg, and the three of them proceed to set up a new mercenary company, Agency X. Given his healing factor and smart-ass personality, readers were led to believe that “Agent X” was in fact Wade Wilson in a new guise, but—in perfect Deadpool fashion—the joke ultimately wound up being on them.
It’s certainly understandable why Marvel would want to hit the “reset” button on a character like Deadpool at the time. The company was focused on their characters occupying the “real world,” with recent successes like Brian Michael Bendis’ Ultimate Spider-man and Daredevil taking a more grounded approach to superheroics. Such an approach was a far cry from the “extreme” comics of the early '90s that birthed Deadpool, and also at odds with the zany, fourth-wall breaking antics the character had become synonymous with in subsequent years. Agent X attempted to bring the character into the new millennium, trading in his red-and-black tights for a stealth-suit not too different from what one might find in contemporaneous video games like Metal Gear Solid and Splinter Cell. And while the character retained his offbeat sense of humor, his adventures were toned down considerably. Instead of taking on over-the-top super-villains like Dr. Bong, Agent X fought against a cabal of high-tech gangsters and assassins.
In spite of the attempts to stay current, Agent X never caught on with the fans. Gail Simone stayed on for the first seven issues, but editorial interference eventually led to her leaving the book. Sales never improved, and the title was cancelled after fifteen issues. Eventually, it was revealed that Alex was in fact Nijo, who had gained Deadpool’s healing factor during the explosion at Black Swan’s castle. Swan had used his telepathic powers to steal Wilson’s healing factor to survive the blast, but everything got switched up in the confusion. The real Wade Wilson returned shortly thereafter, and Agent X continued operating as a mercenary, making infrequent appearances in various Marvel Comics throughout the years. Meanwhile, Wilson returned to being the Merc with a Mouth full-time, and has since gone on to become one of Marvel’s most popular characters. Yet in spite of the failed editorial edict to update the character, it’s only fitting that Deadpool would disappear from his own series as the ultimate prank on his fans.