Wanted Paperback – November 27, 2007

WANTED is the sort of guilty pleasure reading that, if I were still a kid, instead of this disturbing graphic novel, I'd rather my mom found my stack of dirty magazines. I'd rather my friends found a coffee table book of mine full of figure skating imagery. WANTED is so polarizing. While it's hard to question the craftsmanship and execution and sheer ba11s that went into it, the provocative content may turn off waves of readers.

It's a twisted love letter to the losers of the world, them what get sh-- on all the live-long day. Wesley Gibson is a meek, asthmatic cubicle drone, a neighborhood pansy, a whipped boyfriend whose girl regularly cheats on him with his best friend. All his life Wesley Gibson has been a worthless meatsack. But that's about to change.

The death of his estranged father proves to be the pivotal moment. It introduces Wesley to the global criminal underworld of the Fraternity. It opens his eyes to a secret truth, that once upon a time costumed meta-humans had existed, but that, back in 1986, the supervillains banded together to finish off the superheroes. Villains have been running things ever since, on the sly. And, thanks to the Fraternity's access to super-computers and magical seven-dimensional imps, history was rewritten. You and I don't at all remember this reality except on a subconscious level, strained thru the mediums of comic books and old television shows.

Wesley learns that his father was codenamed the Killer, the world's most dangerous assassin. His father had amassed a huge fortune, but in order to inherit it Wesley must take his father's place, must become the new Killer.

WANTED reads like something you scrape off the bottom of your shoe, and I mean that as a compliment. That's the subversive vibe Mark Millar was going for. It's a harsh and uncensored examination of one man's extraordinary heel turn. Wesley's story appeals to the dark side in all of us. Wesley Gibson, under the auspices of the Fraternity, begins to live out his fantasies, some of which are pretty depraved. He finds an instant aptitude for villainy. He unearths latent abilities. He discovers he's an impeccable marksman. He never misses. Sucks for his victims. Where others may regard his evolution from wimp to supervillain as a downspiraling and cautionary thing, Wesley instead sees it as liberating, being unshackled from his inhibitions. The stuff he does won't endear him to you. He crosses the line too often and without remorse. But, damn, he's a fascinating character. I'm sure Millar and awesome artist J.G. Jones intended Wesley to look like a certain controversial white rapper from Detroit.

The Fraternity's five families have carved up the planet into five demesnes. The story conflict surfaces when dissension divides the houses, when the leaders of two of the territories rebel against the status quo. Wesley ends up on the losing side of the uprising and rapidly finds himself on the villains' most wanted list. He's gonna need more guns.

Millar writes with vividness and audacity and originality (I chuckled at the concept of Sh--head, a villain composed of the excrement from 666 of the most evil asshats in history). And yet you won't even have to squint hard to recognize the many allusions to classic comic book characters, some more obvious than others. WANTED is an explosive read. In the end, it's hard to have a rooting interest because it doesn't present one single likable or redeemable character. Strictly by default, I found myself cheering for Emine-- er, Wesley. Dude is the closest to a point-of-view character in this series. WANTED is recommended for the unsqueamish and for those not easily offended. If you like stories that poke fun at superhero tropes, there's something here for you, too. But reading this may stain your soul just a bit. It's okay. The anti-hero can shoot the wings off of flies. Isn't that worth the price of admission?

This trade collects WANTED #1-6 and the supplement WANTED: DOSSIER (which features character profiles). As a bonus, there's also Mark Millar's intro, a cover gallery, character designs, deleted scenes, and the evolution of Millar's story from script to finished page (using pages #19-20 of issue #5).

NO SPOILERS:

Lets get some things out of the way: this is an adult comic. These are /bad men doing bad things/. He becomes what any normal person would call a sociopath, but this comic is really about the 'big picture'.

NO BULLET CURVING! I knew this wouldn't be exactly like the movie, but.. I really thought that the bullet curving was something thought up by a comic book writer. That was the reason I bought this, along with the scene where they shoot each other's fired bullets. But nope, none of that.

They are NOT ASSASSINS. They're slayers.

NO LOOM OF FATE. I mean, really? Even that was thought up just for the movie?

Fox is disgusting ghetto talking trash. Not the sly assassin from the movie.

Wesley... kinda looks like Eminem. Just a note.

I don't mean to sound shallow, but there were relatively few action scenes. It felt talky and slow paced more than a few times.

Once you accept these things, it is a fun ride, and if you enjoyed the movie, you will enjoy the comic. I dont know that it was worth 13 dollars to me, but it was a good read.

And lastly, as a product of a single mother, I really enjoyed this book's message. That's all I'm going to say. You'll have to read it to understand. :)

Who'd have thought Millar's Super Crooks could be mild by comparison? (I read that before this.) Wanted is defiling to read, as Wayne Booth warns in The Company We Keep. Nonetheless, the graphic novel is a masterpiece. It is the story of what happened in another dimension when the villains won the "Villain War" in the Crisis on Infinite Earths (if you left the Anti-Monitor out of it). That the bad guys won is not unthinkable, given how close they had always come to defeating the good guys individually in issue after issue. But then there's the incursion into yet another universe once Killer Junior joins up. He muses on how he was effortlessly blowing away "Men of Steel and Dark Night Detectives." The very notion of friggin' Eminem killing off the likes of Batman and Superman is equally laughable and nauseating.

I don't mind a comic focused on villains, but the writing still seemed juvenile and a tad sociopathic. Yes, villains do bad things, but villains who are bad "just because" and engage in horrific behavior without cause aren't interesting. The only two villains of interest get snubbed in favor of a loud-mouthed sociopath of a "protagonist." One might say that the state of disarray and wanton violence in super villainy is a reflection of what happens once the villains have permanently won, but there's not really enough evidence in the writing to suggest that's what Millar was going for.

Great comic book

If this were a movie I'd compare it to a typical summer blockbuster. Entertaining action that doesn't make much sense once you start thinking about it.

The most interesting parts to me are the training montages and intrigue that takes place between the various villainous factions before all heck breaks loose.

The fight scenes are entertaining enough as set pieces, but a lot of characters had to check their intelligence at the door once the battles start so it can conclude as Millar wanted.

My biggest complaint with Wanted is that something is shown that doesn't take place. Replace one panel with a black one and the word "bang" and you have a much improved comic in my estimation. Storytelling can mislead the audience so the make the wrong inference, but when in the 3rd person perspective it can't openly lie without devaluing the story.

If you don't mind comic gore and profanity, then Wanted can be an entertaining read, but don't think to deeply about it or you'll will lesson your enjoyment after the fact.