2011's Deadpool Kills the Marvel Universe certainly lives up to its name. It's a book that reveals what happens when Wade Wilson finally goes completely off the deep end and begins slaughtering the heroes and villains of the Marvel Universe. That series proved popular enough that writer Cullen Bunn and artist Dalibor Talajić reunited for a sequel, 2017’s Deadpool Kills the Marvel Universe Again. Now, Bunn and Talajić are getting the band together one last time to chronicle Deadpool’s latest and greatest campaign of bloodshed in Deadpool Kills the Marvel Universe One Last Time. The twist this time is that it’s not just one universe facing Wade’s wrath, but the entire Marvel multiverse.
IGN recently had the opportunity to speak to Bunn via email to learn more about the final act in the Deadpool Kills the Marvel Universe trilogy. First, check out an exclusive preview of the first issue below, and then read on to learn more about the fourth wall-breaking carnage that awaits.
Bunn is certainly one of Marvel’s more prolific Deadpool creators, having penned everything from Deadpool: Killustrated to Night of the Living Deadpool to Deadpool & the Mercs for Money over the years. Amid all those Deadpool stories, we were curious if Bunn always had the ideas for his sequels in mind. Did he envision this growing into a full-fledged trilogy back when he was first writing Deadpool Kills the Marvel Universe?
“I never knew that series would go anywhere or be anything more than me having a good time writing a comic,” Bunn tells IGN. “I can't help myself, though. I love thinking about where stories could go. I ask myself constantly... what's next? When I was first working on Deadpool Kills the Marvel Universe, my first pitch after I completed that series was Deadpool Kills the Marvel Multiverse. At least, that was one of three initial pitches, including Deadpool Kills the Marvel Cosmic Universe, Deadpool Kills the Marvel Zombies, Deadpool's Secret Wars, and Deadpool Killustrated. Two of those happened, but the Multiverse book was the closest to what we've got coming up. And, frankly, now is a much better time to do that story!”
Naturally, the challenge with a trilogy like this is finding ways of continually escalating and growing the conflict. When you start off with a series where Deadpool murders the entire rosters of the X-Men, Avengers, and Fantastic Four, it’s no easy task to keep expanding the scope. For Bunn, the solution was opening up the multiverse. This time, we’ll see Wade battle everything from Cap-Wolves to Worldbreaker Hulks to entirely new and completely distorted versions of Marvel’s heroes and villains.
“The multiverse most certainly opens up a lot of new avenues of exploration,” Bunn says. “We wanted this to be different from what you've seen before in the series. We wanted to show Deadpool battling different versions of Marvel heroes (many readers will have seen before, many who are new). I spent a lot of time researching the "worst" (meaning "the best") variants of Marvel heroes and villains. What I didn’t realize when I set out is that we were creating the most epic Deadpool story of all time. How's that for an escalation? How's that for throwing the gauntlet down?”
Bunn is excited for readers to witness the carnage in the book, though he’s keeping mum as to what match-ups fans can expect beyond what Marvel already revealed in the solicitation for issue #1.
“I'm not going to spoil anything in the book. If I had my druthers, I wouldn't have even mentioned Cap-Wolf and Worldbreaker Hulk,” Bunn says. “There are some cool, cool characters showing up in this series. Dozens and dozens of them. And Deadpool is battling some of the most powerful heroes and villains in the multiverse. How's he gonna manage to bring them down? There are some characters showing up in this book that from the ‘I've been reading comics a long time and love some obscure characters’ perspective that haven't been seen in over 30 years. Will those be the most epic of the battles? You'll have to see.”
Coming back to the idea of escalation, Talajić kicked things up a notch in Deadpool Kills the Marvel Universe Again by bringing a new level of visual flourish to the series. There, Talajić frequently switches artistic styles, contrasting the bloody carnage with the saccharine, sanitized vision of events that exists inside the brainwashed Deadpool’s mind. Bunn promises that Talajić will continue to shake things up from a visual perspective with the grand finale of the trilogy.
“With Deadpool Kills the Marvel Universe Again, we wanted to play with different eras and styles of comics,” Bunn says. “With this new book, we're not changing the overall visual style for each kill. Where Dalibor really gets to shine, though, is in his interpretations of different worlds... different versions of our heroes... and a different version of [REDACTED] than you have ever seen before. Dalibor is a master of his craft always, but he's bringing some real insanity to the page in this!”
While we refer to this as being part of a trilogy, it’s important to note that the first two Deadpool Kills the Marvel Universe books aren’t directly connected. They instead offer two different scenarios for why Deadpool would suddenly start killing Marvel’s heroes. In the first, Deadpool becomes a nihilistic murder machine after discovering the full truth about his status as a comic book character. In the second, a different Wade is brainwashed by a group of villains into doing their dirty work and slaughtering heroes.
The question is how, if at all, the third book connects back to the previous two volumes. Is this another completely standalone story, or does it connect the dots back to the previous Deadpool Kills the Marvel Universe books?
“It's a fresh start... sort of,” Bunn teases. “The story stands completely on its own. You need not read any of the other series. At the beginning of the story, though, observant readers might pick up on a few interesting tidbits that may connect to what has come before. Most importantly, though--this is its own story.”
The previous two books weren’t simply about mindless superhero carnage. In both cases, Deadpool was painted as a fairly sympathetic figure despite his actions. One version was totally disillusioned by his discovery that he’s a pawn subject to the whims of the Marvel Comics Bullpen, while the other was actively fighting against being mind-controlled. But even by those standards, Bunn teases that the Deadpool at the center of this sequel is an especially sympathetic protagonist.
“I think the Deadpool we see in this book is much more sympathetic than the killer Deadpool in the other series,” Bunn says. “With this, we thought ‘What if Deadpool killed the Marvel Universe... and we were rooting for him to succeed?’ It is definitely challenging to set the stories apart. With this one, Deadpool's mission... and his headspace... make this book completely different. His headspace. I can't wait for readers to get that joke.”
Deadpool Kills the Marvel Universe One Last Time #1 will be released on April 2, 2025.
For more on what's coming up from Marvel, check out what to expect from Marvel in 2025 and see IGN's most anticipated comics of 2025.
Jesse is a mild-mannered staff writer for IGN. Allow him to lend a machete to your intellectual thicket by following @jschedeen on BlueSky.
