Deadpool 2 Characters With More Meaning Than You Realized

Like a dove soaring on the breeze to the dulcet tones of Celine Dion, Deadpool 2 has arrived in theaters, unsheathed its swords, and proceeded to rack up the kind of bloody body count nobody ever expected to come from a dove, let alone a superhero movie.

Well, okay, maybe they expected it from this superhero movie.

True to the original film — and the regenerating degenerate himself — Deadpool 2 doesn't hold back on the violence, profanity, and fourth wall breaks, taking everything great about the first movie and turning it up to 11. In the same vein, Deadpool 2 also introduced a ton of new characters, and then...well, let's just say that there are plenty of spoilers ahead.

Whether or not they came out on top in the movie, some of those characters carry a lot of weight in the comics...and a few have even saved the world once or twice. Let's take a look at all the characters in Deadpool 2 who mean more than you realized.

A lot of hype was given to all the new mutants debuting in Deadpool 2. It was going to be a real, honest-to-gosh team-up movie, and the internet spent countless hours breaking down who each of them were. Shoot, we did it ourselves. Then the movie came out and murdered most of them in horrible ways before they even got to their first mission. In other words, it's pointless to keep talking about them, but really, what use is a dead cat if you can't beat it once or twice?

So let's talk about Zeitgeist, played in the film by Bill Skarsgård. Once upon a time, he actually led one incarnation of the X-Force. And boy, were they weird.

After ten years and 115 issues of X-Force, the series took a bizarre left turn. As issue #116 opens, a drunk 14-year-old vomits acid all over a girl's face when he tries to kiss her. Flash forward in time, and he's Zeitgeist, the leader of a new X-Force. They all seem to be drunk most of the time, when they're not groping each other or popping amyl nitrite. Figuring the team needs a little good press, Zeitgeist hires a group of terrorists to kidnap a pop band called Boyz R Us. X-Force teleports to the scene and obliterates all the bad guys, and then Zeitgeist gets cut to pieces and dies. The end. Zeitgeist literally only existed in one issue of any comic series ever.

Is it a weird chapter in X-Force's history books? Oh, you bet. But somehow, Zeitgeist feels like exactly the right type of person to add to a Deadpool movie — and technically, they followed his story pretty closely, all the way to the woodchipper end of his first appearance.

Ever since his official introduction in the pages of X-Force #82, Jesse Aaronson, a.k.a. Bedlam, has been one of the core members of the crimefighting team. A mutant with the ability to influence electronics through his own bioelectric field, Bedlam played a pivotal role in several missions. And like he says in the movie, he really can directly affect people's brains, which came in handy when the citizens of San Francisco were turned into brainwashed zombies and Bedlam was able to reverse it without killing them all.

But once upon a time, Bedlam also almost destroyed the planet. In X-Force #87, he left the X-Force to join up with his long lost brother Christopher on a team called the New Hellions. Bedlam later found out that, in a series of jerk movies, Christopher had killed their parents 14 years earlier and was planning to revive a mutant named Armageddon Man with the power to sweep the world with natural disasters. In other words, it was a bad family reunion.

Realizing the error of his ways, Bedlam rejoined X-Force to put a stop to Armageddon Man, and they all learned a valuable lesson about friendship. Two crisp high fives, baby.

You don't see a lot of Vanisher in Deadpool 2, which makes Brad Pitt's cameo all the more (ahem) shocking. Like most of the rest of the new mutant team, he auditions, gets the part, and then bids goodbye to life on the way to their first mission. But while an invisible superhero definitely has a lot of potential, the Vanisher of the comics is different from the one we see — or rather, don't see — in the movie.

First gracing the pages of Uncanny X-Men #2, the Vanisher was one of the O.G. X-Men foes, a teleporting mutant who liked to rob banks and steal government secrets. Decades later, Vanisher was still living a life of crime when X-Force tracked him down, gave him a brain tumor, and forced him to teleport them around to battles — essentially turning him into their indentured slave. In a long career filled with dark moments, this was definitely one of the X-Force's darkest, and it proved that they were willing to go to any lengths to get a job done. No wonder Deadpool likes them so much.

Black Tom Cassidy's biggest contribution in Deadpool 2 is giving Deadpool an excuse to remind Cable that indiscriminately shooting people who belong to another race isn't cool. It's a great, layered, ultimately meaningless (Black Tom isn't African-American) message for Deadpool to make, and we'll leave all of that stuff to him. We're just here to talk about Black Tom in the comics.

In those comics, Black Tom Cassidy is a mutant infected with the same techno-organic virus that affects Cable. Just like in the movie, Black Tom was incarcerated at the same prison as Juggernaut, and he was also shot by Cable. Here's where the two paths diverge, however: in the comics, after Cable shoots him, Black Tom gets healed and gains the ability to control plants (because why not?) and also gains Deadpool's healing factor.

That's exactly the kind of villain that could come back to haunt Deadpool, especially if another movie takes up the recent Avengers theme of "everything we do has consequences." But maybe without the plant thing. That might be too weird, even by Deadpool standards.

Young Russell Collins may have been the central MacGuffin in Deadpool 2, but for all the middle fingers actor Julian Dennison tossed around, he didn't get a chance to show off just how important he's been to the team.

Since Deadpool 2 basically served as the origin story for Russell, a.k.a. Firefist, it did manage to hit some of the character's best notes from the comics. Firefist's origin story saw him as a Navy recruit who suddenly discovers his fiery powers, gets locked up, and breaks free. X-Factor shows up to fight him, then lets him join the team.

In the events leading up to X-Force #24, Russell was captured by a mutant-hating group called the Friends of Humanity, leading the X-Force to mount a rescue operation while he was in transit — pretty much what happened in Deadpool 2, but with fewer crotches landing on Cable's face.

But his biggest contributions to X-Force have been, well, giving them something to fight. Not once, but twice has he been brainwashed and turned to the dark side in the comics. We're not sure where his character will go in any upcoming films, but one thing's for sure — they sure picked a hell of a kid to rescue.

Sure, she was around for most of the movie, but Domino also seemed to Dirk Gently her way through all the events of Deadpool 2 on a path of her own, looking for her purpose for being there. When you break it right down, Domino has some of the most useful powers in the whole film, and she used them plenty of times to get both Deadpool and Cable out of tight spots. She also gets one of the coolest sequences in the movie. But she only showed them off a few times. What can her powers do? We mean really do?

The answer is, even she doesn't know. As a basic explanation, Domino can generate fields of good luck around her. That also means that her enemies experience bad luck. She's about to get shot in the head? Uh-oh, the gun jams. Good for her; sucks for the soldier trying to shoot her. She's also afraid of chickens, but that's beside the point.

The point is, when she wants to, she can even get the best of Deadpool with just a few well-timed words and that good ol' luck, which makes her one of the most formidable mutants on the team. Any future Deadpool film is bound to feature a ton of Domino showing off how powerful she really is. And despite what Deadpool may say about it, that's going to take some really good writing.

Gee, leave it to Deadpool to introduce one of the most powerful mutants in the world and then end her brief story so tragically. We're talking about Hope Summers, of course — Cable's daughter and the whole reason he traveled back in time to kill Russell in the first place.

In the comics, Hope is what's known as an Omega-level mutant — basically just unstoppably powerful. After Cyclops becomes Dark Phoenix in X-Men vs. Avengers #11, Hope harnesses the Phoenix Force to become an even more powerful Phoenix and stops him. And in Uncanny X-Men #541, Hope absorbs all of the X-Men's powers to put a stop to an out-of-control Juggernaut. The girl's a powerhouse of powers.

Where does it end? Well, in X-Men Legacy #268, she admits that she's never seen the true limits of her powers. Now that Cable successfully stopped her death in the past, Hope Summers could have a big role to play in whatever onscreen form the X-Force takes next.

For longtime comics readers, the appearance of Juggernaut in Deadpool 2 was a wonderful surprise. Not only because he wasn't featured in any of Deadpool 2's marketing, but because the guy was already in one of Fox's Marvel movies — X-Men: The Last Stand — and Vinnie Jones' portrayal of the villain isn't exactly known for its popularity among fans. So not only was the audience not expecting it, but this much more impressive Juggernaut redeemed that earlier attempt.

Juggernaut isn't a mutant in the comics. Though he's a regular enemy of the various X-teams, Cain Marko got his powers from a magical gem. His strength rivals that of some of the strongest heroes in Marvel, he's physically invulnerable, and no force can stop him once he starts moving.

By the end of Deadpool 2, it looked like Juggernaut was done for. But if his powers mirror those of the comics closely enough, that isn't necessarily the case. The Juggernaut of Marvel Comics doesn't need oxygen to survive. Amazing Spider-Man #229 opens with him stepping slowly and easily across the ocean floor. Then again, the electric attack that fells Juggernaut in Deadpool 2 wouldn't even faze the comic book version (in spite of its creative placement), so who knows how different Cain Marko is in the movie?

At least one thing is similar. In Deadpool 2 we hear Juggernaut telling Rusty that Professor X is his brother. In the comics they are, in fact, stepbrothers. Whether or not Juggsy appears on the big screen again and that relationship gets fleshed out at all remains to be seen.

One of the most potentially promising characters introduced in Deadpool 2 is the Headmaster (Eddie Marsan), who runs the anti-mutant Essex School where Rusty, Domino, and countless other young mutants are subjected to religious-flavored abuse. The Headmaster is the subject of Rusty's wrath at the end of the film, and he's the one Deadpool succeeds in stopping the younger mutant from killing.

He also may be much more, as hinted by the name of the institution the Headmaster runs. Of all the major X-Men villains, one of the few who hasn't gotten a chance at bat yet on the big screen is Nathaniel Essex, a.k.a. Mister Sinister. He was originally supposed to appear in Logan, but didn't make the cut because the villain's more "operatic highly-costumed" nature would have worked against the realism they were working toward in the final Wolverine film.

Could Eddie Marsan's Headmaster be Mister Sinister? Could his introduction in Deadpool 2 be part of a setup for the X-Force movie? A few things point in that direction. First of all, there's the fact that Marsan is credited only as "The Headmaster" in Deadpool 2's credits. Considering how important he is to the plot, you would think he'd have a last name, unless the filmmakers wanted to keep him a mystery. It seems possible, if not likely, that the filmmakers kept the Headmaster's last name hidden because it's "Essex." Sure, it looked like Dopinder wiped him out with his taxi there at the end, but this is a superhero movie — coming back from the dead is par for the course, right?

Just like Bedlam and Zeitgeist, the new characters of Yukio and Shatterstar were all over the trailers, only to barely see any screen time in the movie. So why are we adding them here, let alone putting them in the same section? Well, in the film, Shatterstar is a sword-wielding mutant from Mojoworld. In the comics, he's also a sword-wielding mutant from Mojoworld, along with some extra weirdness that also made him his own dad's father, but that's not where we're going here. After a long history in comics, X-Factor #45 had Shatterstar come out as gay and featured a panel of him locking lips with fellow male mutant Rictor.

In true internet form, the decent half of the internet applauded the writers of Deadpool 2 for featuring a gay mutant. But now that the movie is out and the only social stigmas Shatterstar shattered were some helicopter blades (well, they shattered him, to be exact), all the attention in that arena falls on Yukio, who's now in an onscreen relationship with Negasonic Teenage Warhead.

Let's unpack that a little — Deadpool 2 featured a gay mutant, decided not to make him noticeably gay, and then stuck a different mutant into the mix and made her gay. In a way, there's some serious subversive Deadpool-esque beauty to that scenario. Marvel movies have technically featured LGBTQ characters before — Korg in Thor: Ragnarok and Ayo in Black Panther have been portrayed as gay in the comics, but neither movies made those preferences explicit. Deadpool 2 put that representation right in the forefront, but only after making everyone think it was going to come from somewhere else. You sly bastard, you.