Wanted: The Comic
When Wanted started in 2003 it was met with universal acclaim. I don’t trust universal acclaim. It’s very difficult, as far as I can see, to do anything really well without pissing a significant number of people off. The Beatles, for example, pissed a great many people off. The Monkees, by contrast, pissed off very few people, at least not to the extent that those people would burn their records or assassinate them. Pissing people off, especially cultural conservatives, whilst blowing the minds of everyone else, is the benchmark for true cultural significance, to my mind. As such I feared that Wanted would be entertaining, yet broadly mundane, and so never read it. When it was optioned as a film, however, I became very excited. I generally back attempts to adapt comics for the big screen, and a non-comics audience, as it’s a way of making people aware of the material, and the practise occasionally produces worthwhile cinema.
Shortly after the movie was released, however, my friend Lee rang me to tell me how shit it was. Not only that, but he told me what it was about. The film is about assassins who work to keep order, and some stupid religion (find me one that isn’t) about fate. This has exactly nothing to do with the plot, or even the basic premise, of the comic. My inner nerd began to roar with anguish, and very quickly my strong views on the sanctity of source material took precedence over my peculiar suspicion of acclaim, and I rushed out to buy the comic. If something pure was being violated by fickle, barely literate Hollywood elites, I wanted to stake a hasty claim to the poor misrepresented comic, even if that desire only stemmed from my tendency toward pop-cultural snobbery. I am very glad I bought the comic. It blew my fucking mind.
Minor spoilers ahead! I’m not going to ruin the book for you. Man up and keep reading!
Basically Wanted is the story of Wesley Gibson, spineless everyman, cubicle slave, and general walking cum-rag for anyone who wants to fuck with him. Then one day a mysterious and beautiful woman turns up to tell him his Dad was the greatest assassin the world has ever known, a super-villain known only as The Killer, and Wesley is being invited to take his place. Wesley is offered the chance to become the new Killer, and join his father’s friends in their world of unrepentant evil and secret global domination. He’s a super-villain, if he wants to be, and all the superheroes are either dead or mind-wiped. Guess which spit-curl sporting man of steel thinks he’s an actor who had a horse riding accident that put him in a wheel chair!
J. G. Jones’ artwork is clean, perfectly composed, and expertly arranged. He has a recognisable style but his work is not stylised, and he comes off as a stripped down Bryan Hitch. His work has that cinematic quality that Hitch has without being too busy or so detailed that it proves distracting. Like Hitch, Jones bases some characters on celebrities, which I sometimes find distracting. This is my only real quibble with his work here. Jones is one of the few artists at work today who seem to truly understand the mechanics of the medium, controlling pace and directing the eye effortlessly. Paul Mount’s colour work is also of a very high calibre. Bright and bouncy this is not, and Mount uses a restrained palette to reflect that. The superheroes are gone, and with them the primary colours. Sludgy browns and muted shades are very much the order of the day.
The best thing about Wanted is how it panders to fan-boy’s expectations while undermining the core tenet of the superhero genre, that the good guys always win. In Wanted the bad guys won. They won a long time ago, and nobody even remembers them, or the good guys, existing. Everyone knows what happens when the good guys win. The bad guys get locked up or disappear, then escape or reappear and the whole process starts again. It’s old, and it’s really bloody boring. Nothing about Wanted is boring. All the main characters are basically reworked versions of classic super-villains, with a little twist here and there to keep the lawyers at bay. This allows Millar to get right to the heart of time-honoured characters in a way that would not be possible without proxies. It also allows him to write the best Joker story of the decade, for my money, without even using the Joker.
Wesley, being the main protagonist, also acts as our representative in this world gone bad. Wesley begins as an allegory for us as we are, fearful, wary little creatures, frustrated by our failure to achieve the life we feel we deserve, but unable or unwilling to do anything about it. Once he is told the old rules no longer apply, and discovers his natural talent for death, he becomes a representation of the lizard brain, the id, the caged animal inside the most morally upright citizen. He functions as a dark mirror for the desires we won’t even admit to ourselves, and this is where Wanted works beyond being just a great story.
The book works because, as I said before, it appeals to the nostalgia of the fan boy, while also tearing apart the entire superhero concept, sewing the bloody parts back together, and then violating the hastily re-stitched corpse. You don’t get to back the good guys. Your ‘hero’ is a murderous rapist with serious Daddy issues. All your favourite quirky villains are either lightly mocked, or completely deconstructed, as are many heroes, and rightly so. I enjoy superhero comics, but some of us need reminding that, not only can comics do more, but that superhero comics are completely fucking ridiculous.
Wanted also reminds us why there are a ton of villains for every hero in comics. Doing the right thing is rarely fun, and we’re a selfish little race of jumped-up primates at heart. Millar shows us why tabloid reports of rape cases sometimes have a little too much detail, why child abuse sells newspapers like nothing on earth, why Saw and it’s many uninspiring sequels fill cinemas, why kids kill hookers on GTA, and why Folsom Prison Blues is a far better and more interesting Johnny Cash song than Hey Porter. There is a sickness at the heart of our species, a tendency, given the right circumstances, or the right excuse, toward what can only be called evil. We are the only creature capable of contemplating our own existence, but we also invented gladiatorial combat, human sacrifice, and the rape camp.
We’d all like to think we’d use enormous power to help people, but I think super-villains are a bit more like us than we like to admit. After all the plot threads are tied off Millar leaves one question hanging in the air: What would you be capable of if consequences, all consequences, were something that happened to other people? It’s a question worth asking, and a very uncomfortable one, as it should be. The potential for horrifying evil exists in every one of us, and Wanted is very good at reminding us of that most terrifying of truths. It’s something we should all acknowledge, because when we don’t, we get complacent, and complacency has a tendency toward facilitating genocide, among other things.
If you’d prefer to have your intelligence insulted by the watered-down cinematic adaptation, it can still be seen in cinemas nationwide. I’m told it’s quite the treat, if you like misogyny and explosions. If you’d like the full fat, grown-up version, visit your local comic shop or bookseller and demand a copy of the real deal.
Exceptional. 5/5
