Who's more tragic of the two Spider-Man or Deadpool

[jimishim12]

Both use the concept of humor to escape pain and despair and succeed, but who has it rougher when it all goes back to his own pain?

[MyriVerse]

Deadpool, no contest. I think most people would love to have it as good as Peter has had it for the last 40 years. You can move on from the death of loved ones, and Peter did do this. There is pretty much zero chance of Wade ever moving past his tragedy.

[Kusanagi]

Deadpool, it's kind of hard for me to see Peter as tragic. Certain tragic things have happened to people around him but that's pretty much par for the course for Superheroes.

Deadpool's brain being swiss cheese thanks to weapon x and butler and his disfigurement + your normal tragedies a hero/anti hero picks up seems to trump Pete.

[RLAAMJR.]

Deadpool easily.

[TakoM]

From my perspective it is Peter he went through hell many times over the years nobody who know what he went through would wonder if he would going suicide.
Feeling tragic about Deadpool is kinda hard when he always leave a mountain of corpses and there is never something like a happy end for Deadpool because he is more crazy then good.

I would say Deadpool had less choice then Peter about his faith but who would attach himself to Deadpool to care about him so much?

[Tiamatty]

Deadpool's definitely the more tragic character.

Peter Parker is a whiny, self-centred dick. He got these great powers, and what convinced him to use those powers for a greater good? Personal loss. And his own sense of guilt over that loss. He's not motivated by a sincere desire to make the world a better place. He's motivated by guilt. He feels like anything bad happening is on his shoulders, because the entire goddamn world revolves around him and all the people in it are either victims to be saved or villains to be punched. Peter Parker sucks.

Deadpool is a monster. He doesn't want to be. He wants to be a better person. But forces both external and internal keep dragging him back down. When written properly, Deadpool suffers from serious mental problems. Shitty writers treat him as crazy, but good writers treat him as disturbed. So he's always having to fight against all his negative impulses. Sometimes he succeeds, for a little while, but it is a constant battle, and eventually, those impulses get the better of him. And when that happens, he blames himself for not being better, for not being stronger.

Deadpool was never a good person. Even before the experiments that turned him into a freak, he wasn't a good person. But he wants to be good. And the tragic part is, he can never succeed for long. No matter how hard he wants it, he'll never be able to stay good. He'll always slide back into old ways.

[Captain Zolalnadia]

I'd say Deadpool, Spidey will lose a loved one every hundred or so issues and moves on, Deadpool got cancer, enrolled in a program that mistreated him to the point they would take bets on how long he would last, doped him up and used him as an oblivious assassin, made him kill his own parents, kidnapped the daughter he didn't know about and killed her mother, after he escaped, weapon X tracked him down and routinely stole organs from him to force a similar fate on other people for years. all the while just about everyone in the Marvel Universe dumps their hate on him.

[MajorHoy]

No option for "the readers of these comic books"?

[jimishim12]

Ok... I'll start it off:

Spider-Man, Emotional Trauma: (not in chronological order)

Both parents dead
Indirectly responsible for his Uncle's death
Indirectly responsible for his girlfriends death (Gwen)
His best friend became his worst enemy... then died (Harry)
He gets cloned and doesn't know whether or not he's a "real" person
He (falsely) finds out he is a clone, which leads him to hit his pregnant wife and goes into a fit of depression
He and Mary Jane have a stillborn child
Aunt May dies (really... Amazing SM #400 ... I think) .... later to be retconned back to life
His parents seemingly come from the dead with the story of being held as prisoners in some other country (apparently his parents were spies)
He gets arrested and jailed for murder (that Kaine committed)
His parents are revealed as being simulacrum (androids of a sort) that are programmed to kill him
The Green Goblin comes back from the "dead" to terrorise Peter Parker for months on end
His clone (Ben Reilly) eventually becomes his best friend/brother... then later is killed by the Green Goblin
Spider-Man loses a fight to the Rhino (major humiliation ... sad )
Aunt May has a heart attack (on about 7 different occasions)
Mary Jane is "killed" in an aeroplane explosion (brought back a year later and revealed as a psycho stalkers plot to kidnap her)
Mary Jane leaves Peter (after the plane thing)
Peter loses his son and Gwen again - from the House of M story line
He is physically controlled by the Jackal to murder his own wife, begs the New Warriors to kill him but is stopped by the Scarlet Spider & Mary Jane herself
Accidentally kills a woman during a fight with Wolverine
Is tormented his entire life by other kids until he receives spider powers
He finds out Gwen had 2 children with Norman Osborn (Green Goblin)
Turns into a "Man-Spider"
Aunt May is kidnapped (supposedly... MK Spider-Man #1)
Constantly harassed by the press and treated as a menace by the public
His friend (Flash Thompson) is crippled by the Green Goblin just to further terrorise Peter


no expression

That's obviously not everything (40 years is a long time)

Be molested as a child. Be bitten by radioactive spider. Be surrounded by death and destruction. Cause needless death and destruction. Steal from an employer. Choose the wrong side of a war not once, but twice somehow. Be raped by deception multiple times. Lose the woman you love. Die on your elderly aunt's front lawn at the hands of the man who raped, then killed the first woman you love, in front of everyone left you've ever cared for. Be powerless to stop it as somehow, one of your worst enemies, a man who's endlessly harmed people you care about somehow takes over your body and uses it to his own selfish ends, while you are trapped in the afterlife watching everything you've somehow managed to do right despite being in over your head, selfish, and frankly kind of stupid comes crashing down.

Saying it sucks to be Spiderman doesn't begin to cover it. Spiderman is pretty much Faust, minus the devil. and no happy ending even implied for anyone but the villians.

[NotSoSuper]

Deadpool by far, especially since he went through hell and almost everyone in the Marvel Universe hates him. I don't see it getting better for a guy who has relatively nobody in his corner...

[Huntsman Spider]

Ok... I'll start it off:

Spider-Man, Emotional Trauma: (not in chronological order)

Both parents dead
Indirectly responsible for his Uncle's death
Indirectly responsible for his girlfriends death (Gwen)
His best friend became his worst enemy... then died (Harry)
He gets cloned and doesn't know whether or not he's a "real" person
He (falsely) finds out he is a clone, which leads him to hit his pregnant wife and goes into a fit of depression
He and Mary Jane have a stillborn child
Aunt May dies (really... Amazing SM #400 ... I think) .... later to be retconned back to life
His parents seemingly come from the dead with the story of being held as prisoners in some other country (apparently his parents were spies)
He gets arrested and jailed for murder (that Kaine committed)
His parents are revealed as being simulacrum (androids of a sort) that are programmed to kill him
The Green Goblin comes back from the "dead" to terrorise Peter Parker for months on end
His clone (Ben Reilly) eventually becomes his best friend/brother... then later is killed by the Green Goblin
Spider-Man loses a fight to the Rhino (major humiliation ... sad )
Aunt May has a heart attack (on about 7 different occasions)
Mary Jane is "killed" in an aeroplane explosion (brought back a year later and revealed as a psycho stalkers plot to kidnap her)
Mary Jane leaves Peter (after the plane thing)
Peter loses his son and Gwen again - from the House of M story line
He is physically controlled by the Jackal to murder his own wife, begs the New Warriors to kill him but is stopped by the Scarlet Spider & Mary Jane herself
Accidentally kills a woman during a fight with Wolverine
Is tormented his entire life by other kids until he receives spider powers
He finds out Gwen had 2 children with Norman Osborn (Green Goblin)
Turns into a "Man-Spider"
Aunt May is kidnapped (supposedly... MK Spider-Man #1)
Constantly harassed by the press and treated as a menace by the public
His friend (Flash Thompson) is crippled by the Green Goblin just to further terrorise Peter


no expression

That's obviously not everything (40 years is a long time)

Be molested as a child. Be bitten by radioactive spider. Be surrounded by death and destruction. Cause needless death and destruction. Steal from an employer. Choose the wrong side of a war not once, but twice somehow. Be raped by deception multiple times. Lose the woman you love. Die on your elderly aunt's front lawn at the hands of the man who raped, then killed the first woman you love, in front of everyone left you've ever cared for. Be powerless to stop it as somehow, one of your worst enemies, a man who's endlessly harmed people you care about somehow takes over your body and uses it to his own selfish ends, while you are trapped in the afterlife watching everything you've somehow managed to do right despite being in over your head, selfish, and frankly kind of stupid comes crashing down.

Saying it sucks to be Spiderman doesn't begin to cover it. Spiderman is pretty much Faust, minus the devil. and no happy ending even implied for anyone but the villians.

I think you've blended 616 and Ultimate for the bolded. While Ultimate Peter Parker did die on his Aunt May's front lawn at the hands of Norman Osborn, while appearing to have killed Osborn as well, Ultimate Osborn never managed to kill, much less rape, any girl or woman that Peter loved, though it wasn't like he didn't try, what with throwing Ultimate Mary Jane off a bridge like his 616 self did to 616 Gwen Stacy.

I would also mention that even the villains in Spider-Man don't get happy endings, as so many of them wind up trapped by their own pathologies and obsessions and psychoses in an unending cycle of violence, revenge, and misery. Hell, Kraven the Hunter's happy ending was blowing his own head off after proving to himself that he could be Spider-Man's superior and even that got taken away from him by his family dragging him back from the dead by sacrificing Spider-prefix heroes in some sick ritual and accidentally making him unkillable because Kaine duped them into using him instead of Peter with a simple costume switch.

As for the question at hand, I'd say it's a tie. Deadpool's losses are far more graphic than Spider-Man's, largely because Spider-Man is supposed to be the family-friendly flagship while Deadpool is free to go into those dark and twisted corners that Spider-Man can't quite touch. In the end, their tragedies are surprisingly similar in certain ways, namely in the sense of alienation and being outcast among their costumed peers. Let's not forget that for years/decades of real time, a lot of superheroes genuinely couldn't stand or were viscerally disturbed by Spider-Man for one reason or another, and that was just largely over things he was merely accused of doing or that they were arachnophobes. In Deadpool's case, his very real history as a hired killer who frequently makes sick, demented jokes out of his lethal excursions is what's alienated him from his costumed peers over the years, and as much as he tries to rise above his past, there are a lot of factors that keep dragging him back down, not least among them his own disturbed condition. He's got as much guilt to struggle over as Spider-Man does, and a lot of dead bodies on his own conscience just as Spidey has.

Finally, to respond to some earlier posters, when at their most terribly written, both Deadpool and Spider-Man are immature, selfish adult children who act like everything's about them and are just as responsible for their own misery as any external factors surrounding them. When at their best written, both of them can exhibit some of the most genuine emotional depth seen in comics, or any form of storytelling media. Both Deadpool and Spider-Man have suffered from bad writing, and both of them have benefited from great writing, or else none of us would feel so strongly about either or both as we do.

[nx01a]

Finally, to respond to some earlier posters, when at their most terribly written, both Deadpool and Spider-Man are immature, selfish adult children who act like everything's about them and are just as responsible for their own misery as any external factors surrounding them. When at their best written, both of them can exhibit some of the most genuine emotional depth seen in comics, or any form of storytelling media. Both Deadpool and Spider-Man have suffered from bad writing, and both of them have benefited from great writing, or else none of us would feel so strongly about either or both as we do.

Nicely summed up. I agree.

[FishyZombie]

Deadpool, at least Peter can have a normal life if he wants to (he's a smart, talented good looking dude), while I don't think Wade wants to be normal, his deformed body and lack of skills other than fighting (at least any that I can think of), he doesn't really have choice but be what he is. If that makes any sense.

[Username taken]

Deadpool easily.

[Detox]

Deadpool, at least Peter can have a normal life if he wants to (he's a smart, talented good looking dude), while I don't think Wade wants to be normal, his deformed body and lack of skills other than fighting (at least any that I can think of), he doesn't really have choice but be what he is. If that makes any sense.

Sure does. I agree.