Deadpool 2: Who is Shatterstar?

As Into the Badlands’ Lewis Tan gets set to bring him to the big screen in Deadpool 2, we wanted to answer the burning question in all of your minds: Who the hell is Shatterstar? This founding member of X-Force’s backstory has more twists than an arthritic pretzel factory, and we’re here to bring you some clarity.

FIRST APPEARANCE

Shatterstar, or Gaveedra Seven, was created by Fabian Nicieza and Rob Liefeld in New Mutants #99, but he was really just a cameoing unconscious body next to a really stupid sword. He first got real play in the following issue, New Mutants #100, the final issue of the series before it became X-Force. He had travelled back 100 years to convince the X-Men to help him defeat Mojo and Spiral on his world.

He missed, and instead joined Cable’s paramilitary force.

FAMILY LINEAGE

Shatterstar is his own grandfather.

SHUT THE FUCK UP

I’m being serious, aggressively vulgar sub-header.

Shatterstar is the child of Longshot, the bird-boned Mojoverse revolutionary who’s extremely lucky, and Dazzler, the disco queen who turns sound into light. Adult Shatterstar, sent on a time-traveling adventure by the lord of Hell, X-Factor’s Strong Guy, becomes the genetic template that Arize, a genetic engineer working on ways to create members of Mojo’s race only with spines, uses to make a new slave for the Spineless Ones. That slave turned out to be Longshot.

Later, Longshot, a clone of Shatterstar, would partner with Dazzler and have a child, who would become Shatterstar and then go back in time to provide the genetic material to create a clone who would become Longshot, who would

I GET IT

Do you? Because he also might be a mentally unstable Bostonian runaway named Benjamin Russell.

POWERS AND ABILITIES

He’s got the standard ‘90s badass power set of super speed, strength and agility as well as a healing factor. He’s trained in many different violent disciplines including the carrying of completely impractical parallel-bladed swords and slightly more practical parallel-bladed arm thingies (where instead of a fist’s width apart, the two blades are on either side of his forearm).

And he has the capacity to pick up new things very quickly – he can learn a fighting style or a language faster than normal people. He’s also got hollow bones like his father/son, and he can channel sound waves through his bladed weaponry kind of like his mother/daughter-in-law.

TEAMS

Technically he was a part of the New Mutants, even if he was only on that team for like, 23 pages. Most of Shatterstar’s history (and likely the reason he was picked for Deadpool 2) was spent on X-Force, the paramilitary outgrowth of the New Mutants. He ran with them for several years before leaving the team with his friend (who he’d eventually end up dating), Rictor, to help Rictor break up a gun smuggling ring in his family.

He resurfaced years later and joined Jamie Madrox’s X-Factor Investigations, a detective agency run by Multiple Man and a few members of the former government-sponsored mutant team. That was where the whole family complication happened.

WHY SHATTERSTAR?

Deadpool wasn’t afraid to pick at the silliness inherent in the X-Men mythos, and as you can see, Shattybuns – his actual nickname from early X-Force – is overflowing with silly X-Men bullshit. Deadpool’s X-Force team is pieced together from every era – Shatterstar from the original team; Bedlam from late period original X-Force; Anarchist from the X-Statix; Domino from the Mutants with Knives and Blades era; and Peter from our collective all-star team of X-Forcers. This movie is diving balls first into X-history, and we should have a great time doing it.

Deadpool 2 opens on May 18. The complete schedule of upcoming X-Men movies can be found here.