Negasonic Teenage Warhead was unknown to me until the first Deadpool movie. She’s a young mutant who has the power to blow up – literally.

So when I saw the debut issue of a Marvel Comic named after her, I picked it up.

Turns out it reprints the story from a previous series she starred in.

Since she first appeared on my radar, I found out, the character has developed more powers. This time out she isn’t just a living explosion, she can potentially snuff out all reality.

Talk about teenage angst!

With writing by Andrew Wheeler and art by Eleonora Carlini and Carola Borelli, the new Negasonic Teenage Warhead No. 1 is a breezy tale of one teen’s search for a date for the end of the world.

The complication is, if she doesn’t find a specific girl to date, all of existence goes kablooey. And NTW would be to blame.

Deadpool appears in a brief prefatory section. He is a one-mutant reference machine, spouting on about Thelma and Louise, Alien and Predator, Frost and Nixon.

Also appearing are agents of the Time Variance Authority, which I remember from the Loki Disney + series. These are the folks who make sure time is unspooling as it should. If they find a fugitive from one timeline in another, as a result of time-travelling, they can erase them permanently.

Since Negasonic Teenage Warhead – or, more accurately, a future evil version of her – threatens everything that ever existed, the TVA wants to put her on trial.

Thus begins a breakneck story co-starring pretty much every female Marvel character. Scarlet Witch makes the scene, as do Sue Storm, Jean Grey, and Emma Frost.

The complaint from some older Marvel fans is that the current comics are just expansions of storylines that in the old days would have been resolved in a single issue. So the X-Men will fight the Avengers, let’s say, but in today’s comics it will be a year-long event that spawns multiple side series.

This comic is the opposite of that. It’s one of those old-fashioned universe-shaking premises – “What if NTW was even more powerful than Galactus? – but it is so compressed. In the world of the comic, it takes place within one hour.

In other words, it won’t dispel comments from readers my age that today’s fans have a limited attention span.

I have read Marvel sporadically in the last few years, but I was able to keep up fine with the story.

Genosha, the site of a mutant massacre, is one setting, and the Krakoa Era of mutantkind is also evoked. From what I understand, the children of the atom have moved on from their island Utopia in the main Marvel continuity.

There’s also a sly reference to the most popular mutie of all, Wolverine.

There’s even a bone thrown to oldsters like me in the form of an in-panel reference to another Marvel comic, the kind the narrative voice used to drop in every Marvel issue. What’s next? Are thought balloons also going to make a comeback?

And there’s some patented Marvel philosophizing, with one character expounding on a central quote from Friedrich Nietzshe.

I will leave it to you to find out if Negasonic — also known as Eloise Olivia Phimister – is able to save the universe from herself.

I’m glad I checked this one out.

Now I know why the Sinead O’Connor circa 1989 lookalike is brooding so deeply every time Deadpool comes calling.

Dan Brown has covered pop culture for more than 32 years as a journalist and also moderates L.A. Mood’s monthly graphic-novel group.