Diving Into Madness

Daniel Way grabbed the reigns to everyone’s favorite mentally ill mercenary in 2008 when Axel Alonso charged him with developing a new take on the merc with the mouth, Deadpool. Since then, Way has been full steam ahead, but was kind enough to take some time out to talk to me about the process it takes to develop one of Marvel’s most popular anti-heroes.

Like any good project, Daniel Way’s run at Deadpool started out with research. While Way read many of the Deadpool comics that came before him, it was Joe Kelly’s Deadpool that hit home. While previously quiet and down and dirty, Kelly “introduced the mania and psychosis, with Deadpool balancing it and doubting his own reality.” With Kelly’s version, it came to be that for Deadpool, in Way’s opinion, “nothing was impossible to do. Deadpool has this expansive perception not limited by reality, fear or logic.”

With the variety of situations that Deadpool finds himself in, one has to wonder how he ges there. One month we’re in space and the next we’re following a fatal attraction love story from inside the walls of a crazy house, but it all fits perfectly inside the world of Deadpool.

“A lot of times it’s a process of eliminating all the ideas that aren’t good. And sometimes it takes a frustratingly long time before you realize ‘oh sh*t, this is a terrible idea,’ or you find out you could’ve gotten point A to point D in three days, but you spent thirteen because you missed a bit of connective tissue,” Way explains. “My approach is usually to hit the parts that I’m not clear on first. It’s like the first day in prison – you just go pick a fight with the biggest guy. A lot of the times I’ll develop these things backwards. Especially with the Deadpool stories which are so structured.”

It’s like the first day in prison – you just go pick a fight with the biggest guy.

With a character where nothing is off-limits, the endless possibilities for stories are both daunting and exciting. “It’s tough now a days – there are so many books out there. It’s not like everybody’s featuring the same 20 characters anymore. The Marvel handbook is getting a workout. There are characters out there in story lines, big and little, that haven’t been seen in a long time. A lot of it is out of necessity, because it’s like you need a certain kind of character because you need this function performed in your story.

You have someone picked out and their like ‘well that character isn’t going to be available because they’re doing this – what about this character?’ To be completely honest that’s why a lot of characters have come out of the drawer and back on the table.” When I asked Way which character he’d like to bring in to Deadpool’s world that we haven’t experienced yet, he replied that he’d always thought that it might be fun to bring in Mojo and the whole Mojo-verse, which would no doubt bring the potential for insanity to an all-time high.

But, like Deadpool depends on the reasoning of his tiny yellow boxes, a writer cannot create a world of lunacy alone. Way spoke to me about the importance of working with talented editors. “I’d hate to be quoted as saying anything good about editors, but the best thing about working with editors is that they’ll take a story away from me. Otherwise I’ll just have the tendency to polish the bumper until the chrome comes off. A concern lately is that we seem to be running out of professional editors. You want to be able to have somebody look at this and inject their view and their goal to be to make it the best story possible and not for the goal to be let’s get this out of the door because I’ve got 45 other books.”

Teaming up with gifted artists is an equally important part of the process. “When it comes to choreography or the layout of the page and the stage direction, I’ll just touch base with whoever the artist is. Why would you leave it up to the guy who writes for a living? I’m not an artist. I write words – why don’t we ask the guy that’s the illustrator?” Cover development also requires teamwork for the best results. “In most cases it’s writers that come up with cover concepts. The ones that are linked to the story are usually dictated by the writers. For Deadpool, I was really lucky that I was able to get Dave Johnson on covers. And essentially I just gave him notes on the next ten issues he did the covers for.

I had a couple of ideas. The idea of Deadpool in the suit walking out with the bomb – that was my idea. That was the one I threw out there. But the rest – that was all Dave. And they’re f*cking beautiful.”

With the Deadpool series currently changing over to the Evil Deadpool arc, I asked Way to touch on the character development we began to see with Wade after the events of issue #44 and the fate of Dr. Whitby, which was considerably darker and more controversial than what we’re used to seeing from the wise-cracking merc. “The idea from a selfish standpoint is that in order for Deadpool to progress as a character, he has to either go into full on insanity which isn’t attractive to watch, or he has to go back and undo some of the damage that has been done to him and by him. Introspection is not something he does very well.”

While on the topic of the current run, I asked Way to talk about the difference in writing for Deadpool and, newest villain, Evil Deadpool. “Evil Deadpool is not conflicted at all. He doesn’t have a past and he was never a normal human being. There’s nothing for him to reflect upon. He just is what he is, but yet he still has that compulsion to move forward in a really destructive manner. I write him like I write Deapool, but I take away all sense of Deadpool’s shifting moral center.”

Between Evil Deadpool and the upcoming “Dead” arc, there seems to be much to look forward to from the always-amusing merc with the mouth, even if the humor is sometimes lost on Way himself. “There’s been plenty of stuff in there that people are like ‘oh when you said this, it was hilarious’ and I’m like ‘well actually I didn’t think that was funny at all – I didn’t mean that to be funny. When Deadpool’s singing, I think it’s funny. I’m usually the last person to find out that something is funny.”

Even Way himself is sure to be in stitches by the upcoming Deadpool: The Musical, which promises to tie in previous issues in one glorious one-shot, complete with costume changes, before the much-anticipated “Dead” arc, where Deadpool will finally find his Kryptonite. If you haven’t had a chance to check out Daniel Way’s Deadpool, here is your perfect chance to join the madness.