Comic Books, Deadpool, and the 4th Wall

First things first this is not a book review about a prequel to popular book the 5^th wave, but the 4^th wall does actually have to do a lot with literature. For those who don’t know the 4^th is the layer between you and the thing that you are viewing. This can be seen in many forms of literature from plays, to movies, to books, or my favorite comic books. Yes the 4^th wall is a very much needed thing because it separates the viewer from the actually story. But what happens when the 4^th wall breaks? What happens when the character in a story starts interacting with the reader? To answer this question I am going to have to go back into the world of comic books and dive right into my favorite character. Deadpool.

If you don’t know anything about comic book characters stop right now and go look up the character Deadpool. For those of you who are too lazy to actually go and look Deadpool also known as the mercenary with a mouth, is one of the most known comic book characters. Deadpool has extreme military training, a healing factor so strong that he can grow back all of his body parts from just having a head left. He can also keep talking while his head is decapitated. But Deadpool is also known for another reason, he is the only know character in comic history to be able to break the 4^th wall.

You see Deadpool actually knows that he is in a comic book, so he can do things that most other comic book characters can’t. Like being able to communicate with the audience of the comic book, know things before there are going to happen because he has read ahead, or my favorite kill literally every single character in the comic book universe, the jump out of the comic book and kill the creators of your comic. Yes this is an actual story that the creators of Deadpool wrote. But besides being one of the most powerful comic book characters, he mostly uses his powers to be a narcissistic, sarcastic, and not allowed to say the rest of this sentence because this is a blog for a high school class.

But Deadpool being able to break the 4^th wall is just a small, small percent of what breaking the 4^th wall is used for. There are a lot of other media that use this technique. And that is what the next blog is going to be about.