Gwenpool may have begun life as a one-off variant cover, but Marvel’s apparently not content to leave money on the table in this instance. The Gwen Stacy-Deadpool hybrid is getting an ongoing comic book series of her very own in 2016.
As previously mentioned, Gwenpool first appeared as a variant cover to Deadpool’s Secret Secret Wars #2 — drawn by artist Chris Bachalo — during a Gwen Stacy-themed run of Marvel covers. Given that Deadpool is a permanent feature of any event that welcomes cosplay, it is perhaps not shocking that folks would pick up on and immediately create costumes for Gwenpool. After all, the initial cover makes her a pink and white Deadpool with a few changes here and there.
After a cameo appearance in Howard the Duck as well as an eponymous holiday special, the ongoing Gwenpool series is set to see the return of the creative team of Christopher Hastings and Gurihiru, the art duo of Chifuyu Sasaki and Naoko Kawano, that worked on the holiday one-shot. It’s unclear exactly how Gwenpool will fit into the greater Marvel mythos in the book, but it’s certain to be a wild ride.
“When I was called to write her I was not aware of her existence,” Hastings tells Entertainment Weekly in a fairly lengthy Q&A. The cosplay at conventions had struck a chord, but an ongoing storyline wasn’t always on the table. “It was initially going to just be a very short one-shot in that Christmas special and we were like, how do we do this Gwen Stacy-Deadpool character? What was assumed of her based off of those variant covers that she came out of?”
Hastings goes on to describe Gwenpool as a character that is from a “real world” that understands the Marvel universe as a whole to be fictional. So, in a way, she sees everything she’s experiencing as not exactly real — kind of a video game, in a way, where anything goes. “Like, ‘you can’t really get away with everything’ is kind of the struggle there,” Hastings says. “It’s also sort of, she just assumes, ‘I’m obviously a main character so I need to be a superhero’ even though she has no powers.”
While there’s no definitive date, the Gwenpool ongoing story — seemingly titled The Unbelievable Gwenpool — is reportedly scheduled to begin in April 2016.
