The Unbelievable Gwenpool by author Christopher Hastings, Illustrations various
For the longest time I was uninterested in reading Gwenpool. I was under the mistaken impression that she was just a diversity grab knock-off of Deadpool. Although the name may be slightly that, her character is actually unique and interesting.
She does share the fourth wall breaking meta quality of Deadpool but it’s approached in a different way. Ms Gwen Poole is a young woman who comes from our own universe and the Earth that we are familiar with, as in no Iron Man or other heroes, just the comic books. She has spent her whole life reading Marvel Comics, watching the Marvel movies, and just generally being a huge nerd and fan girl.
So when she gets mysteriously transported to Marvel 616 her superpower is just that she knows everything about all of it. Including, but not limited to, everyone’s secret identities.
She is able to leverage this power into becoming a mercenary. However, she has zero weapons or combat training so she’s not very good at it. It’s possible that she has some unexplained luck powers that just manage to keep her alive the whole time that she’s running around aimlessly shooting people.
Since she also believes that she’s actually in a comic book she doesn’t fully understand that her actions have consequences. She sees everyone as a character that can be killed and will somehow eventually be brought back to life in a later issue. So she racks up a bit of a body count.
The central plot is a bit lacking and requires Gwen Poole to jump around to different books and cameos. Regardless, the whole run is very funny and very self aware.
