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What would you do, dear reader, if you found yourself in the Marvel comics universe all of a sudden? You have all your knowledge of the comics still with you. What do you do? Do you try to find a way back? Or do you give costumed vigilantism a try? Gwen Poole went for the latter. So who is Gwenpool or wait, Gwen Poole? Let’s find out!

Gwendolyn Poole was a high school drop out struggling to find her place in the world. She wanted to write fanfic but found herself putting it off. She worked one day a week for a sleep study. Her parents were tired of her slacking off, her brother was her only friend left since all her other friends had moved away after graduation. Gwen would find her refuge in comic books, wishing she could live in their world instead. Real life was boring, but comics, Gwen understood them and there was always something going on. Gwen got her wish, whether it was by accessing what her sleep study was really studying or something else, she found herself on the other side of the page.

Once she realized where she was and what was going on, Gwen took to taking advantage of storytelling tropes. Finding the nearest costume maker for heroes, Big Ronnie’s Custom Battle Spandex, she gave her name and Ronnie mistook it as her hero name of Gwenpool, and made a costume derivative of Deadpool’s. Knowing that regular, nameless people in the Marvel reality have a high chance of death and never coming back, Gwen now had a costume and hero name to give her plot armor. What she didn’t have was money or any form of identification that worked in the Marvel Universe. Taking on mercenary work from Big Ronnie’s other business dealings, Gwen found taking life easy since none of these comic book characters were real anyway and the big deals would come back with time anyway.

Her first encounter with a Marvel character was Howard the Duck, who was hired to find and kill Gwen for having stolen a deadly virus from Black Cat so she could sell it for a huge stack of cash to Hydra. Gwen figured that Hydra would be easily stopped by the Avengers before they could use the virus to kill anyone. Howard would have to point out that the Avengers were currently away in space so the two of them would have to retrieve the virus and Gwen would need to give her money to Black Cat to make sure that no one involved got their hands on the virus. Gwen would try to take some of her money to a bank but without any formal ID, she couldn’t open an account, she was able to stop a robbery, gaining the robbers’ hacker, Cecil, in the process of losing her money to a crooked cop.

Still having an apathetic view of life for comic book characters but enthusiastic about getting money, Gwen would get her own series where she would take credit for another mercenary’s work dealing with alien arms dealers. This got Gwen huge acclaim in the public and superhero communities, along with lots of cash. It also got the attention of the other mercenary’s boss, M.O.D.O.K. (Mental Organism Designed Only for Killing) and demanded that Gwen join his team if she could best his greatest soldier. When Gwen refused,  M.O.D.O.K. kills Cecil, leaving only his skull behind, Gwen is stunned and realizes it’s in her best interest to work for M.O.D.O.K. Joining his team, she would find herself working with Batroc the Leaper, master thief, Mega Tony, medical chemist, and the Terrible Eye, a masked magic user.

Gwen would spend her days working for M.O.D.O.K. trying to find a way out of her situation but is able to make contact with Doctor Strange who helps her form a new legitimate identity in the Marvel Universe by taking her information from the real world and bringing it into the comics. This is a double-edged sword as it alerts M.O.D.O.K. to the fact that Gwen actually has now impressive training or powers to speak of to be a part of the team. Gwen had been being trained by Batroc the Leaper, who had figured out she had no training but was intrigued by her knowledge of everything about him and the world since other dimensional entities wasn’t that weird to him. This helped Gwen take on M.O.D.O.K. and her time with Doctor Strange, he was able to bring Cecil back as a ghost, which gave him ghost hacking abilities, enabling him to rocket M.O.D.O.K. into space.

Gwen was now in charge of the mercenary team, as voted on by her teammates. She would discover that their mysterious benefactor wanted a normal world and hired Gwen and company to take out those who were too weird. This relationship wouldn’t last long as he realized that Gwen was just as abhorrent as the very people he wanted her to hunt down. In the end, Gwen would stop him from killing her team but the devastation left the team without a base and they dispersed. Gwen was running into more and more heroes and villains, often coming off as very unnerving due to her knowledge of their lives and secret identities. Gwen would try to make right by her old team by getting them better lives than the ones she messed up, this would include helping Cecil get a body again which ends with him possessing a monster body designed by dwarves. Once he is able to hack regularly again he supplies Gwen and himself with enough money to live their lives without mercenary work.

Unfettered by merc work, Gwen would try to see what her Marvel Universe equivalent of her family was like but would end up discovering she didn’t travel to the Marvel Universe alone, her brother had crossed over with her. He couldn’t find her and didn’t have the same idea about taking on a costumed identity like she did. Gwen found herself back in her own world, reliving her old life up to before she left for the Marvel Universe but when she was about to make her crossover once again, her brother convinced her to stay but she was now able to see the text of comic book storytelling like thought boxes and titles. She would then realize she was in a comic book and her memories would return of her time in the Marvel Universe, Gwen would begin to learn she could manipulate her comic book trappings and jump from panels to an outside mid-reality allowing her to gain massive control over her reality, jumping back and forth in time and using storytelling conventions to her advantage. This joyful rush was stunted when she learned that these powers and her understanding of how reality works with certainty in her comic, becomes a villain in the future to prolong her books life, ruining heroes lives with her knowledge by exposing their weaknesses and secrets to the world. Gwen would come face to face with fighting herself and having to commit to the idea of never becoming this awful version of herself to stop her. This drastically cut Gwen’s pages, that she could see when in between panels.

Unlike most characters covered here, Gwen realized her series was coming to an end and began trying to do whatever she could, minus becoming the villain she saw. This would include trying to defeat Doctor Doom so she would gain enough acclaim to exist onward. This didn’t work out but she did get some perspective from Doctor Doom, who was doing good work as Iron Man at the time, instead of being a villain. Gwen would try to do her best at saying goodbye to all the friends she’d made in her series, knowing that many of them wouldn’t go further than her own series while others, like Batroc, would be different from her series’ interaction with him. It would take a different future Gwen to come, the Gwen from the end of her book, to talk some sense into her. Gwen would explain that stories, even though they must end in plot, never truly end. They last forever in the readers’ imaginations and thus, so will Gwen and her friends. They might even inspire future generations to bring her back. She would be able to put right many things before her series ended, like finding her brother, meeting her Marvel Universe parents, and getting Cecil his body back. Gwen would realize that through team ups and more, she could survive and thrive in comics. She was more than just a joke idea used for a theme of comic covers now, she was a whole character.

Gwen would next appear in Los Angeles, joining up with the new West Coast Avengers, lead by Kate Bishop, Hawkeye, or as Gwen calls her “The Better Hawkeye” and Clint Barton, Hawkeye aiding her. She would discover that now that she was in a team book, she seems to be lacking her panel crossing abilities and is back to being a somewhat skilled individual. She would begin a tumultuous romance with teammate Quentin Quire, Kid Omega, which she would claim was because of she knew a love interest would give her more fan appeal, though it may be more complicated than she is letting on.

There you have it! Gwen Poole is one of comics fun, meta-narrative characters who can talk to the audience knowing this world she’s in is ridiculous because it’s a comic book. She may have begun as just a Gwen Stacy variant cover for a Deadpool comic but became so much more. She even seems to share the mantle of the meta-narrative goofball with Deadpool now. What will Gwen do next? Not even she knows but she’ll do what she can! See you next time!

Suggested Reading
Deadpool’s Secret Secret Wars #2
Howard the Duck #1
The Unbelievable Gwenpool
West Coast Avengers

Dr. Bustos
drbustos@comicattack.net