The Unbelievable Gwenpool #5-19

The Unbelievable Gwenpool #5-19

Originally released in 2016

Written by Christopher Hastings

Art by Irene Strychalski (#5-6), Gurihiru (#7-10, 12-13, 16-19), Myisha Haynes (#11, 14-15), Alti Firmansyah (#13)

After reading Animal Man, it made me want to go back to Gwenpool for comparison, since both of them play with the medium of comic books itself. (Though I'm not sure when Gwenpool reaches that point) Issue 5 starts with a classic Marvel stand-by: a Spider-Man team-up! Which gets a little awkward when Gwenpool knows Spider-Man's secret identity.

After Miles's school is bombed, Gwen uses her knowledge of Marvel comics to figure out who was responsible (Miles doesn't really get her talk of "the Ultimate Universe", but he does remember the incident that she's talking about where Miles bumped into a suspicious student who also turned out to be transferred from Miles's old universe to the main one), so they track the student down.  Things sour between them (though Gwen was already on thin ice as far as Miles was concerned) when Gwen tries to shoot the student in the head, figuring that it's justified because he's a bad guy in a minor subplot.

It's a rough arc for Gwenpool, showing the downsides of the "trapped in a fictional world" scenario - you know things that nobody should possibly know, and you can't talk about them (or express excitement at meeting these characters that you've read or seen so much about) or else people will think you're crazy at best or a threat at worst. (Though Gwenpool's tendency to use murder as a problem solver, treating minor characters like NPCs in a video game, doesn't help her case)

As upset as she is that Spider-Man thinks she's crazy, Gwen is helping to run a mercenary organization after launching MODOK into space, and mercenaries don't work for free. She has to meet with one of the clients she inherited from MODOK, who keeps his face hidden when he is in video calls and lives in a normal-looking suburban home.

Despite Gwen's justified belief that she's working for Dracula, her client turns out to be a man named Vince.  He's obsessed with normalcy to the point where it ironically comes across as weird.  He's grown tired of superheroes fighting supervillains, and alien invasions, and he's willing to pay massive amounts of money to keep them out of the area that he lives in.

Unfortunately for Vince, Gwenpool became the target of Teuthidans, squid-like alien arms dealers, when she took credit for killing some of them earlier. Now they're threatening an NYPD captain, meaning that Gwen has squid aliens and the police on her trail.  She has a plan to deal with them, though as she's aware that stating your plan out loud basically guarantees that it's not going to work out, she has several back-up plans that she doesn't tell her team.

Those back-up plans come in handy when it turns out that Vince betrayed them.  Gwen's plan would involve a shoot-out in Times Square while her co-workers distract emergency services; the Teuthidans just want to kill Gwenpool and her team and then leave, which is much less chaotic.  Gwen responds to this betrayal by shooting Vince in the face.

As it turns out, Vince is a rogue Doombot, so that doesn't do much, but points for effort. Issue 9 goes into Vince's backstory, which involves an older alternate future version of Squirrel Girl. (Comics!)

Vince was the first Doombot to have an actual artificial intelligence rather than only being good for menial tasks, but a fight between Doctor Doom and the aforementioned future Squirrel Girl (who, due to being stuck in the past, can dedicate the rest of her life to annoying Doom) causes him to flee before Doom could flip on the "give the Doombots my personality" switch.  He's found by a man named Phineas Mason (the Tinkerer, before his first encounter with Spider-Man), where the Doombot comes to see superheroes and supervillains as being inherently destructive and longs for a world without them.  As a result, he's very interested by Gwenpool's description of her world. (Which is more or less our world)

Using a group of lesser mercenaries in MODOK's organization who had been mentioned before but went unseen, Gwen is able to fight off the squid aliens, though her base is destroyed in the process.  With no base, no jobs, and all of them wanted by the police, the group is forced to dissolve, causing Gwen to spiral into some self-destructive tendencies like taking on insanely difficult jobs.

A vampire is allegedly threatening a town in New York, though without a top secret mobile base, Gwen has to take public transportation to get there.  She's not exactly inconspicuous.

The mayor of the town wants her to kill a vampire, and nothing else that she sees in this town. (As it turns out, he's a necromancer, so the town is full of zombies and skeletons) To make matters worse, it turns out that he was slightly incorrect about the terminology.  It's not a vampire after them - it's a dhampir, and there's only one of those.

It quickly turns out to be a misunderstanding, as the skeletons and zombies just want to live the normal lives that they had when they were alive, and Blade appreciates Gwenpool's willingness to fight vampires (and he's willing to train her), so her interactions with established Marvel heroes aren't always bad ones.

Gwen wakes up in issue 12 in a dungeon with no weapons and no memory of how she got there. She quickly runs into her former co-workers, who were also looking for mercenary jobs, and is warned about the unkillable beast that stalks the dungeon.

The issue's cover spoils who's behind this; it's Arcade, an X-Men foe and assassin who specializes in killing people with elaborate deathtraps. (Allegedly - I'm not sure if he's successfully killed anyone) He's put them into a live action version of an Elder Scrolls dungeon, and various frog creatures are guarding a door that contains the unkillable beast.  It shrugs off the most grievous of stab wounds, and letting it talk will drive you mad.

Ironically, Gwenpool never really followed Deadpool's comics, considering them too memey for her tastes. Her fourth wall awareness is no use against Deadpool, who turns it against her by pointing out that not many people have heard of her (and most of them would think she's a version of Gwen Stacy) while he's got hundreds of issues, cameo appearances, video game adaptations, and the highest-grossing R-rated movie of all time. (And that was in 2017 or so - as of now, three of the top five highest-grossing R-rated movies are Deadpool movies)

Also, he ignored the medieval fantasy nature of the setting and snuck in guns. However, it doesn't take long for them to talk things out and realize that they should just go and beat up Arcade. Once they've escaped, Gwenpool helps Mega Tony (who's feeling down on himself since he feels like he's only really useful as a support role in mercenary work) find legitimate employment.

Gwen's trying to help her friends out however she can to make up for costing them their jobs earlier.  Most of them are fine, but her ghostly friend Cecil still has a plot point that's left unresolved, so Gwen aims to resurrect him. (A task that she doesn't seem like she'd know how to do, but she presumably has enough comic book awareness to know someone who could clone Cecil a new body or something)

The Terrible Eye can't get Cecil a body, or the ability to physically touch anything, but there is a way to do it.  However, it involves a source of mystic energy that has ties to Satan.  The Eye creates a portal in her bathtub, and Gwen leaps into it without thinking, winding up in the trunk of a car.

Kate assumes that Ghost Rider kidnapped Gwen, Cecil gets sucked into a mystical diamond that dwarves were going to use for a ritual, and the dwarves get away while Robbie takes the diamond to keep it out the hands of any wrongdoers, unaware that Cecil's inside it. For her part, Kate takes Gwenpool's fourth wall awareness better than most.

The dwarves are stopped from trying to take over Los Angeles, and Cecil uses the diamond to possess a large purple bipedal dog-like creature that one of the dwarves was planning to possess. With all of her friends helped one way or another, Gwen starts thinking about how some real world figures are represented in the Marvel universe, and she's curious about if her family is included in that.  She goes to where her home would be, and is met at the door by her brother.

Notably, her parents (who appeared in the Marvel universe earlier in an end-of-issue cliffhanger) speak in normal black and white speech bubbles, while her brother speaks with pink speech bubbles, which seems like a sign that something's up. (as it turns out, versions of her parents existed in the Marvel universe, though they never had kids and are very confused by all of this; they were convinced to go on a vacation for a few days) Her brother, Teddy, apparently came to the Marvel universe the same way that Gwen did in order to bring her back.

At this point, it goes into Gwen's life before being brought into the Marvel universe, and she wasn't really happy with it, drifting aimlessly after dropping out of or failing high school.  It seemed like Teddy travelled back in time somehow to try and undo what caused her to enter the Marvel universe, and he's surprised/annoyed that things seem to be going the same way. When Gwen storms out in frustration to go to a quasi-mystical sleep study that brought her to the Marvel universe originally, Teddy follows her, and him nearly getting killed causes her to abandon her plan and shut down the experiment.

Seems a little odd to end the series with an anti-escapism message, but in a real world setting, it seems like it's the healthier option for Gwen in the long run, even if it will likely lead to loads of frustration and poorly-paying minimum wage jobs.

Except she can still see things like titles and captions, and if she tries hard enough, she can reach out and touch the borders of panels. It quickly becomes clear that Teddy's trying to hide something from her, and while experimenting with what she can see and do, Gwen winds up passing a pencil to herself from one panel to another and using it to erase part of the border.

At this point, Gwenpool's medium awareness goes full throttle, and she slips into the space between panels. The next issue, we get a look into what happened when Teddy got into the Marvel universe; the version of his parents that he found had no idea who he was, and with no ID, his job options were limited.  He saw his sister in action during her first issue... and he was horrified.

Teddy made a deal with future versions of Miles Morales, Vince, and the Terrible Eye to bring Gwenpool back to her own world, since in the future, Gwenpool used her knowledge of secret identities to ruin Miles's life.  However, there's a problem with that plan.

The trio of future heroes are still convinced that Gwen is going to turn evil further down the road, since if she wasn't, then they wouldn't exist. I'm not sure how consistently that works when it comes to time travel in the Marvel universe, but their immediate concern is stopping Gwen by any means necessary, though she escapes thanks to the reality manipulation powers that she's still getting used to. (She's not quite sure where the borders of panels are)

Gwen is caught, and there's talk of erasing her memories, but Miles betrays his teammates.  Not because he has problems with the memory wipe - because he wants to kill Gwen himself. In the future, she grows bored with her life in the Marvel universe and decides to spice things up by revealing secret identities and other long-hidden details, which kicks off a massive superhero civil war and gets Miles's parents, wife, and kids killed when Gwen reveals Miles's identity to the world.  There's a major problem with Miles explaining this - by flashing back to the events that led to the trio traveling through time, it meant that the Evil Future Gwenpool appeared in this comic, giving her a foothold into the present.

While I could keep going (the series only has 25 issues), this seems like as good of a cut-off point as any. This series is definitely more light-hearted than Animal Man, with Gwen (and Deadpool) treating the audience as friends rather than something that's horrifying to behold. I had a blast reading these, and the issues flew by faster than I expected. I thought I had read these issues before, but as it turned out, most of them were new to me - I'd only read the introductory arc and the conclusion.  Gwen's a great character, and the backstory did a good job with fleshing her out and making her relatable.  This was a lot of fun, and I'd highly recommend this series.