Author: Mark Millar
Publisher: Image Comics
Rating: WARTY!
Illustrated by J.G. Jones
Note that some of the captions in the graphic novel images accompanying this review may have been altered by persons unknown....
If you want a graphic novel where every frame depicts neither more nor less than a sociopathic fourteen-year-old's dysfunctional wet dream, then this is the novel for you. If you like delusional stories featuring racism, misogyny, poor characterization, and mindless violence - not as part of a particular character's make-up but embedded deeply into the narrative itself, then this one's for you. On the other hand, if you like something that's intelligent, inventive, and actually has a story to tell, then you would be well-advised to look elsewhere.
If you liked the movie Wanted and think the source book might be even more interesting, you made the same mistake that I did. The movie is far from perfect, but it is decidedly leagues ahead of this cheap excuse for a story.
» Women are just bodies anyway, aren't they? «
I'm not a part of the comic book culture, although I have read plenty and reviewed many of them on this blog, and I love superhero movies in general, but my take on these things is a bit off the beaten path, which is, I guess, why I wonder what it means to say that Person A wrote the comic while Person B lettered it. I know these two things are not the same, but honestly, I still don't get that. Why do we even have lettering, when we have computers with keyboards attached which can do lettering just fine?
I don't even know how that works. Does Person A write the thing by hand or write it on a computer, print it out, and and Person B copies it? Is it done by email? On the phone? That really makes little sense to me! I assume it makes perfect sense from the inside, but if you take a step back and look from outside the box, it really looks weird.
Anyway, personal peeves aside, I loved the movie, which I also review on this blog, and which I saw long before the comic book, but while the movie was derived from the comic, the comic is really a lot different and nowhere near as good. The basic story - at least at the beginning - is the same: a down-trodden guy whose parents are not players in his life, an unfaithful girlfriend, a dead-end and miserable job, hypochondria, father dies, son inherits, and so on, but there are many more factors in play here and none of them are good or smart.
There's a lot of talk of super-heroes and super villains, which is not in the movie, and of parallel universes, which goes nowhere. The super-heroes were all wiped out in a super-villain purge in the 1980's, and the super-villains can access the parallel universes at will. I'm not sure what this is supposed to bring to the table. It certainly did nothing for me.
» Your Mom looks better half naked «
The story is set around the idea of five families, like the five Mafia families which 'ruled' new York City in the prohibition era and later, except that each of these five families rules an entire continent. Since there are seven continents, the math doesn't work here. Even if we exclude Antarctica, we're still one short: Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, America North, America South. They all begin with the letter 'A' except Europe!!!! But Europe isn't the one which is left out. The combined continents for this story are the two Americas.
There were some oddities. Some of it, such as the character 'Shithead' made of excrement from an assortment of 666 villains. This harked back to the creature of similar constitution in Kevin Smith's Dogma movie. The name 'Peking' was unaccountably used for China's principle city when the name is actually Beijing, and the term 'number plate' was used - which is a British term for a license plate and which betrays Millar's Scots roots. There was a lot of bad language and nudity, so this isn't a children's comic, but neither was the movie exactly PG-13. Unfortunately, the bad stuff fully appears to be stuck in there purely for shock value and has nothing to do with telling a realistic story.
There was none of the single-handed assault on the compound, as in the movie. Here it was a joint effort by Fox and Wesley to wipe out the villains, and it took a completely different form. Wesley is drawn to look like Marshall Mathers and Fox is drawn to look like Halle Berry.
» Don't I look a little bit like Marshall Mathers? «
So, did I like it? No, not really. It started out as a bit of a disaster for me and went steeply downhill from there. It's awash with racism and genderism which seemed to have been added for no other reason than to be obnoxious, but obnoxiousness is this comic's schtick, isn't it? It never did look like it would reach a the point where it overcame its set-backs and looked like it was actually making a point. it never captured my interest or imagination, and none of the characters were remotely appealing to me.
So in short, WARTIUS MAXIMUS!
