DEADPOOL

Wade Wilson’s healing factor gets the credit for most of his survival, but it cannot explain all of it. Across his worst injuries, Deadpool kept slipping into near-death trances — and kept meeting Death herself, Marvel’s cloaked embodiment of the end of all things. Against every law of the cosmos, the skeleton lady liked him. The feeling was mutual. Unfortunately, Thanos had been courting Death for eons, and the Mad Titan does not do rivals.

So Thanos cheated. In Deadpool #64 (2002), the finale of the “Funeral for a Freak” storyline, the Titan laid a curse on the competition: Deadpool would never die. Not a blessing — a barricade. Death’s door is death itself, and a man who cannot die can never walk through it to her. Immortality, deployed as romantic sabotage, by the universe’s most sore loser.

The curse stacked with insulting efficiency onto Weapon X’s handiwork — a healing factor borrowed from Wolverine’s DNA, forever battling the super-cancer it was installed to hold back. Wade Wilson became a three-way stalemate that cannot end. Which made it almost poetic when Thanos, in Deadpool vs. Thanos (2015), spitefully revoked the curse the moment it suited him. Even eternity ships with a jealous-ex clause.