Deadpool: Secret Agent Deadpool Vol 1 (2018–2019)

Type: Limited Series (Solo)

Status: Finished

Publication Date: November, 2018—January, 2019

Deadpool: Secret Agent Deadpool is a six-issue miniseries published by Marvel in 2018. The series follows the mercenary-for-hire Deadpool after he kills a secret spy agent named Jace Burns and has to impersonate him after being mistaken for Burns by the rest of the spy organization. The comic series leans heavily into parodying tropes found in traditional spy films, specifically James Bond and Jason Bourne.^[1]

When the series was written, the author Christopher Hastings took inspiration from Skottie Young's then-recent run of Deadpool, making the character slightly more likable and giving him a smaller-scale adventure instead of wading into the complex Celestials continuity happening within Avengers and other Marvel Universe titles at the time.^[2] Hastings also mentioned in interviews that his previous writing of the character (like Fear Itself: Deadpool and Deadpool Annual (Vol. 3) #2) had given him the opportunity to "do everything with Deadpool that [Hastings] wanted", so that when creating a continuous six-issue miniseries for the character Hastings had to reexamine how he viewed Deadpool and found that the Deadpool movie helped clarify the character and how Deadpool was a commentary on the genre and medium he was inhabiting. Hastings commented that in creating a Deadpool that was a commentary on the "secret agent" genre of media, the challenge was to not make Deadpool too much like the spoof character Austin Powers.^[3]