Wade Wilson, aka Deadpool, started out as a cheap pastiche - a parody of grim and gritty comic characters like DC's Deathstroke - and yet the dash of self-awareness that creators Rob Liefeld and Fabian Nicieza injected into the core of the character has led to him becoming one of Marvel's most successful heroes, famous for his motormouth quips and his ability to turn his fictional nature to his advantage, whether that's cutting through a comics page to give himself a hand in the past or using his own videogame health bar to pummel his opponents.

But how did Deadpool actually find out he's fictional? The answer is surprising, revealing Deadpool as someone who actually earned his metatextual abilities, even as they put him under constant psychological torment.

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Weapon X

Deadpool gets his name

Deadpool's awareness that he's in a comic began at the Weapon X facility. Pursuing a cure for his cancer, Wade Wilson allowed Weapon X to experiment on him, gaining a warped healing factor which went to war with his cancerous cells, scarring his body and leaving him in a constant state of cellular instability. Though Deadpool's healing factor would stabilize over time, Weapon X branded him a failure, housing him with other rejects for further experimentation under the watchful eye of super-powered enforcer Ajax, as depicted in Deadpool & Death Annual #1, by Joe Kelly and Steve Harris.

While Wade eventually escaped, using his skills and new powers to become the Merc with a Mouth, he didn't yet know he was in a comic. Driven to the edge of sanity by his experiences in a plot reminiscent of horror movie Martyrs, he now suspected the world around him wasn't real, but he began his career clashing with Cable and the New Mutants in The New Mutants #98 as someone who still took life, and his work, relatively seriously. In the adventures that followed, Wade cared both about his reputation and his life, showing real terror of villain Slayback in Deadpool: The Circle Chase that would be out of character in his modern incarnation. Though Wade was a renegade with almost nothing to lose, he hadn't yet fully discounted reality. In fact, it took divine intervention to push him that far.

Related: Deadpool Stole One of Shaun of the Dead's Funniest Moments

What's Wrong with Wade?

Deadpool at marvel offices

Deadpool's trademark irreverence grew as he continued to appear in Marvel comics, keeping pace with his increasingly impressive healing powers. In fact, several writers have implied that the constant battle between Wade's cancer and his healing factor is a big part of his mental instability, even affecting his memory. In the Cable & Deadpool storyline "A Murder in Paradise," Deadpool investigates a murder which it turns out he committed and then forgot, with Cable exiling him from the island nation of Providence until he can be trusted to at least understand his own motivations.

This reading of Deadpool's powers was thrown into question by Brian Posehn, Gerry Duggan, and Declan Shalvey's "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly," in which it emerged that a former Weapon X scientist known as Butler had been periodically kidnapping Deadpool since his escape for continued study, using drugs to wipe his memory which had contributed to his unpredictability up to that point.

Related: Deadpool's Most SHOCKING Secret Revealed By Marvel?

Whatever the cause, Deadpool's disconnect from linear time, and the unlikely situations he found himself involved in, slowly built on his initial revelation that the world around him wasn't real. Wade became more obsessed with his unseen audience, showing less investment in his own wellbeing and personal relationships. The fact that he intuited he was in a comic may seem unusual, but the Marvel Universe does actually have it own semi-fictionalized graphic novels - charting the adventures of its real-life heroes - so in a pre-MCU media landscape, it makes sense that Deadpool would look at a world of superheroes and, realizing it was fictional, be able to discern the medium he was trapped in.

Enter Loki

Deadpool Loki

Despite realizing he was in a comic, Deadpool still seemed mostly grounded in the world around him, but a single event planted the seed of his eventual descent into absolute meta-textual chaos (for example, breaking out of Marvel continuity to menace his creators or assassinate characters from classic literature.) In Deadpool #37, Loki tries to convince Deadpool that the two are related as part of a convoluted plan. Deadpool doesn't buy it, but agrees to play along, since Loki's offer comes with some intriguing benefits. While the scheme would ultimately fail, the interaction between the characters produced a singularly important moment, in which Loki confirmed to Deadpool that he was trapped in a work of fiction.

Acknowledging that other characters thought Deadpool's medium-awareness was a form of insanity, Loki said it was instead "divine revelation," saying that the truth of all matters is that "none of this is really happening. There is a man... with a typewriter..." While Deadpool doesn't react strongly in the moment, his future adventures would see him adopt a far less stable persona, seemingly fearing and valuing nothing in a world he didn't believe to be meaningfully real. He even eventually developed "powers" based on this knowledge, able to do things like escape into the white space between comic panels and deliberately enter montages to save time.

Related: Every Marvel Character Who Knows They're in a Comic

Perhaps the most extreme example of his new powers of awareness was when Deadpool got ahold of the Infinity Gauntlet in "Deadpool Roasts the Marvel Universe," by Gerry Duggan, Brian Posehn and Scott Koblish. Using the power of the Infinity Gems, Deadpool assembles Marvel's heroes for a roast before addressing his writers and readers, who he seems able to see in that moment, complaining that his suffering and heartbreak has all been for their entertainment.

Deadpool Recovers

Deadpool Roasts

Originally driven to suspect the world around him was fake by the extremes of constant torture, Deadpool had his preconceptions confirmed by a literal God, testing his hypothesis in extreme circumstances before ultimately seizing control of reality and using it to look beyond and confirm his worldview for good. Thankfully, Deadpool has actually been able to find some peace after these events. Meeting his daughter, Eleanor Camacho, in the events of "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly" prompted Deadpool to confront the suffering he had visited on those around him and gave him roots in his actual native reality.

While Wade has been through many changes since then, Duggan's run both allowed Deadpool to fully confront his fictional nature and helped him accept that while he didn't live in the "real" world, his life still had value and could be real to him in many of the ways that matter. Since then, Deadpool hasn't stopped referencing the fact that he knows he's in a comic, but a lot of his zanier stunts have been passed off to Gwenpool, another medium-aware character who - as an expat from the "real" world - takes a lot more joy in being able to fudge the rules of a comic-book reality.

Deadpool is a character who belongs in flux, and his medium-awareness has long been a big part of what makes him unique. Despite this, it's a quality which slowly took him from one of Marvel's most intriguing characters to more of a cartoonish mascot. Duggan's exploration of what knowing you aren't "real" would actually do to your outlook helped bring Wade back down to Earth, with Ryan Reynold's unexpectedly successful rendition of the character in the movie adaptation Deadpool cementing the happy medium between a character who can address the audience without discounting the people around him. After Wade's long, weird Odyssey to this place of acceptance, hopefully future writers can keep walking the thin line that gives Deadpool such immense potential as comics' greatest sad clown.

Next: Marvel Shows Why Deadpool Was Born To Be King of Monsters