What I Think About Stuff- Wanted

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The Killer, brought to you in glorious black & white by Guisadong

Wanted Or Revenge Porn at its finest

Mark Millar and I share a strange relationship. On one hand, I absolutely love his raw, unbridled id, as it rampages across his comic book prose.

Jack Kirby ain’t got shit on him.

On the other hand, his plots and character development stretch the fuck out of what us pop culture enthusiasts refer to as comic book logic 

Also known as the ‘Because fuck you, that’s why’ effect.

His work is angry, raw, violent as fuck (most of the time) and seems to hover between honest naiveté and gritty realism, never quite settling between those two extremes. For most comic book critics, this is a bad thing. For me, it’s a gamble. I’ve found that Millar’s strange little imbalance works wonders with most of his work

Not all of it, though.

One thing you can tell about Mr. Millar, however, is this:

He’s an angry, angry Scottsman.

The personification of comic book rage.

And you can see that in his work, too (in my case, it was during his authority run). He’s pissed off at the way the world works, mad at the shitty little tropes that govern our pop culture and he’s mad as fuck at the unseen bastards, the powers that be behind the powers that be (another staple in his work).

That’s not to say he isn’t having his fun with them, however.

Comic Book Iconoclasty 101

Wanted is his singular angriest, ballsiest, contra-establishmenest work. Why? Well mostly because it deals with conspiracy theory, horrible people, the secret powers of the world and of course, good ol’ ultraviolence. What it is, it’s a masterfully super condensed mix of everything Mark Millar.

The next best thing after swallowing him whole, actually.

Is that a bad thing? No. But to be perfectly honest, after reading Wanted, his other works don’t seem as good. In fact, even his Authority run (which I absolutely loved, but then again I love the Authority so goddamn much in general) seemed somehow toned down and diluted compared to Wanted. Why? 

Because Wanted is Mark Millar unplugged. It’s so goddamn raw and powerful, you immediately get sucked into it and find yourself rooting for every horrible son of a bitch you see in its pages. But that’s not only an effect of its powerful writing and presentation, is it? 

Of course it’s not. Wanna know why you liked it, you sick fuck?

Thank you, No-Nonsense Asian Kid.

Because Wanted is the ultimate revenge fantasy of every comic book nerd, every scifi geek, each and every single member of its target audience. It’s the dark, terrible fuel that makes our shriveled hearts beat.

What I’m trying to say is that each and every single one of us that have read this comic book always wanted to shoot, maim and run over every single asshole and bully we ever met. Wanted gives us just that.

Look into your heart, you know it to be true!

Oh sure, we outgrew our elaborate revenge fantasies about how we would like to strap each of them in a chair and kill their parents in front of their eyes, leaving them to live with it, or our more elaborate schemes where we slowly picked apart at their insignificant little lives until they were left broken and ruined, shells of the men (and/or women) that used to mock us. Sure we got over our fantasies of burning them alive, or vigorously training in some ancient Shaolin Monastery and learning the secrets of killing men with a brush of your finger tips.

But we never quite got over the sweet metallic taste they left in our mouths at the mere thought of them, did we now?

To be fair though, seeing the jock end up living in a trailer park out of his own stupidity was as good a result as any.

Now, a lot of people might respond with: ‘these thoughts never crossed my mind’ and ‘you’re a deeply disturbed person’ to these people I will respond thusly:

You’re all a bunch of dirty goddamn liars. But in case you decide to stick to your lying ways, then here’s my take on the matter: Be proud you were creative and intelligent enough to think of enacting in your fantasies and use them go through the hell we call puberty, instead of actually oh, I don’t know…enacting them.

Revenge fantasies are an absolutely natural thing. They happen to everybody and everyone has them. And Wanted is based around that. It’s an elaborate revenge fantasy with all of its horrible implications involved. And I’m proud that Mark Millar was there to present it so eloquently on paper.

And now, on to the actual review:

There’s this guy, see. He’s called Wesley Gibson. Wesley is a pathetic, insecure little man. He’s the personification of what I call the Underdog Syndrome, the kind of person you just wanna take advantage of, because you sure as hell know he isn’t going to fight back. Hell, you could even get away with doing his girlfriend. Pretty much everyone else in the block has done it, so far.

Enjoy your diseases. 

He’s been beat down his entire life and things aren’t going to be getting any better any time soon, not unless something drastic happens.

Like, for example, a crazy bitch with a hot body shooting a bunch of people then telling you you’re the son of a supervillain, whose powers you inherited via his superpowered DNA.

Also, fifty million dollars.

And, let’s not forget, a place in the supervillain brotherhood that has rewritten reality to its advantage, that secretly rules everything and watches over everyone everywhere and allows you to do whatever the fuck you want, whenever the hell you want to do it.

Wesley’s life takes a turn into the horrible that’s so sharp, it ends up bringing him on top of everything. He’s a supervillain in a world without any heroes left and he’s having the time of his life. He hardens himself by turning into a kind of creature that makes Alex from the Clockwork Orange look like a choir boy.

There was me, that is Wesley, and my droogs, that is the Professor and the Vixen, and we sat in the our secret base under New York trying to make up our rassoodocks what to do with the evening. I was initiated that night, dressed in my pretty little suit. This would sharpen you up and make you ready for a bit of the old ultra-violence.

Wesley (now the Killer) is living the dream. He’s angry, he’s trained how to hurt the people that made him angry, he’s rich and he’s unstoppable. His life is on the up and up. But then again, he’s not alone in the supervillain world, is he?

No sir, apparently a secret council of five of the world’s greatest supervillains have split the world and…

You know what? I’m not gonna give you a summary. What I am going to give you instead, is one of the most awesome alternate renditions of the Joker I’ve seen to this day:

Motherfucker gives me nightmares.

He’s the equivalent of Wanted’s Joker, the shade of a once pious man who discovered that his inhibitions and morality were for naught and turned himself into a monster (and subsequently, a world leader). He’s the horrible asshole, the murderous bastard that will nearly ruin everything for everybody and only Wesley can stop him.

The plot isn’t really that important to be honest. There’s treachery, there’s a coup, there’s shocking origin stories

A couple of them outrageously funny ones, at that.

But the most important part is the metaplot. What metaplot? Oh, just the how and why everything’s turned to shit and everything’s run by supervillains. The great big war of the superhumans, where the worst among them decided to have a final punch out against mankind’s last heroes and took the world for their own. How they rewrote reality so they would always come out on top and nobody could ever do anything about it but live under their yoke for the rest of their miserable lives.

But the worst part (aside from the fact that Wanted takes place in a dystopian future run by an invisible dictatorship was this:

Broke my goddamn heart, it did.

That’s Reed Richards, rewritten as a helpless old man. To be perfectly honest, I never liked the guy (hell, he ranks little above Lois Lane in my indifference scale), but to see him like this…I mean, I know Alan Moore’s written a couple of stuff that made me shed manly tears, but this panel fucking destroyed me.

EDITED: According to a point presented to me by Critias of rpg.net, the crippled superhero presented above is not Reed Richards, but Superman, as Christopher Reeve. I had originally made this mistaken conclusion because I thought the Professor was a reference more to Dr. Doom than Lex Luthor. Either way, this scene is still pretty goddamn heartbreaking.

But, a review’s a review and as always, let’s try and list the best and worst parts of Wanted, before proceeding to an elaborate metaphor that likens it to a dish, shall we?

·         Wanted is Revenge Porn at its finest:

REJECTED!

I said it before, I’ll say it again: Wanted is a revenge fantasy brought to life via sequential art. It’s about a man turning into a brutal superhuman machine that lacks morality and is rich as fuck. He’s the avatar of everything every angry man ever wanted to be. And for that, it grabs you by the balls and shoves your face down its pages so you can drink from its foul tasting ink.

·         You find yourself sympathizing with most of the assholes:

My indifference field is malfunctioning! Nooo!

Wanted deals with horrible people. Wesley is an egotistical, inhuman prick and you only root for him because you project your pent-up hate toward him but that’s it. The rest of the gang (like Vixen, the professor, etc) are equally horrible (if worse) examples of mankind, but each and every one of them has a single redeeming quality.

For example, the Dollmaster is a caring dad. The Professor masks his aversion toward unnecessary violence by fighting Mister Rictus’ need for blood and destruction. The Vixen…has a nice ass, but that’s about it.

What I’m trying to say is that Millar took care of his side characters and did the most he could with them. And that makes everything so much more interesting and gets you much more invested when shits ends up hitting the fan.

·         It sets up a superhuman mythos that it presents and resolves in the space of a few pages:

Well at some point it apparently runs out of metaplot and focuses on the fucking, but I’m not one to complain.

Wanted presents a superhero backstory of the world that used to be, by juxtaposing it with parallel earths, hinting at a better world and referencing (directly or indirectly) the general comic book culture, allowing you to get a pretty clear idea of how everything used to be.

It’s immersive in that Warren Ellis-y sort of way, where you just get a couple of hints that drive you crazy and make you want more. In fact, I think I’d love to read more about the world that once was, according to Wanted.

And now, for the bad parts:

·         Wanted’s plot isn’t all that interesting:

Oh no, I totally didn’t see this one coming!

Wanted is a comic book about characters and the cruelties they enact upon each other and everybody else. That’s it. There is a plot (about supervillain politics and a war) but it’s honestly just a device to keep the damn thing going.

What I’m trying to say is that Wanted’s fight scenes and politics only work because its characters work, nothing less, nothing more.

·         What the fuck is up with Wesley?

This is Wesley Gibson two pages ago.

This is Wesley Gibson two pages later, same issue.

He starts off as a neurotic bastard, turns into an amoral superkiller, then retreats back to his original wimpy state, then is a superkiller, then back into a wimp, then a superkiller.

What. The. Shit.

Remember how I said Mark Millar glides between naivete and grim realism? Wesley’s character development is the quintessential example of his weakness. He tries to make him work and presents a man breaking down under the pressure of ruling the world, but this doesn’t fit in here.

You can’t run a revenge fantasy on realism. It just doesn’t work that way. What is does instead is make your protagonist seem like a neurotic little shit (well more so than he already is) and hurt the narrative.

·         The Ending:

This could just as well have been a blank page with the words FUCK YOU printed on it with 50-point fonts.

I get the joke. I get how he stays in character. I get that this is the supervillain talking, not Mark Millar (unless Mark Millar is indeed one of the secret masters of the planet). But dude, seriously. Nothing? You couldn’t even show us Wesley rising to power? Not even how he’s going to be running things? How about how the supervillains decided to fill in the vacant seats of power after their little wart? What happened to the little boy who parents Rictus killed? 

What happened in the end? Because if this is just another ‘fuck you, the status quo wins’ story, then Wanted lost an otherwise great opportunity and wrapped up way too soon.

So this is my opinion on Wanted. Is it good? It’s fucking awesome. Should you buy it? You bet your sweet ass you should! What kind of food would it be, if it was a food?

I guess it would be a knuckle sandwich,

Made from real, honest to God knuckles

With a side of fires that would be set in such a way as in to spell fuck you. Also, you’d have to eat sitting next to paraplegic Reed Richards, his accusing eyes tormenting you for the rest of your life.

Addendum:

They made a movie out of Wanted, so I guess I should talk about it.

It’s retarded, wasted the shit out of the comic book’s potential and it’s not worth the DVDs it was printed on.

Also, buy my book. It’s called Stone Cold Countenance and it only costs a dollar. You can find it here: http://www.bibliocracy.com/e-books/fiction/stone-cold-countenance#.UAEXaZGmH5A

Rock Across The Ages

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Remember that sexy motherfucker who drew me my awesome banner?

yes, this guy.

Long time ago, when we were in the army, we used to toss around ideas on a comic book script. There were a lot of ideas tossed around, very few of them good (or even viable) ones. We settled for a short comic based on rock music, thus giving birth to...

Oh, enough with the introductions: behold the BIRTH OF ROCK AND ROLL, in a moderately historically accurate fashion.

Homo neotherdalensis discovers the electric guitar and sound amplifier

Drum beats in the jungle.

What I Think About Stuff-of Gods, Men & Overmen, Part 1

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The Fruit of Knowledge by Deep Hurting

Of Gods, Men & Overmen, Part 1

DISCLAIMER: This is the beginning of a series of articles intended to present the mythology of today’s popular culture, i.e. superheroes and comic book characters in general. It is not intended as a pro-religion anti-science piece. It’s simply the collected thoughts and observations of a comic book nerd. Enjoy.

Let me go on record by stating that I am religious.

Most of my friends are not aware of this and in fact consider me to be an atheist, or at the very least, apathetic toward the subject of religion. This is because, despite believing, I have chosen early in life to celebrate my faith by myself, instead of shoving my beliefs down other people’s throats and trying to convince them that my own adherence to a certain way of thinking is the one true way.

In the words of renowned atheist comedian George Carlin, you can believe into anything you damn well like, as long as you keep it to your own damn self.

I have found that this disposition has allowed me to enjoy great works by both religious and non-religious artists and it has also allowed me to laugh along with everyone else when a well-said blasphemous joke is thrown around the table. 

To this day, Wormwood’s Pope makes me laugh my ass off.

But most importantly, it has allowed me to approach the subject of mythology, religion and its interpretation in the modern mediums (mostly through comic books) as objectively as I could possibly muster. 

I don’t think it will come as a shock to anyone to find out that comic books and the superhero genre in general is an adaptation to older mythologies and in some cases, a straight-out reproduction of old belief systems. Each and every superhero has always had his roots set inside the rich soil of religious tradition and has used this basis as a means to build his or her own mythology.

But as I mentioned in my Molecule Man VS Dr. Manhattan article, this is not just about using the old gods as a means to fuel our spandex-clad gods. It’s a matter of devotion, of faith if you will.

For a complete analysis on the evolution of mythology and mysticism all the way to the modern superhero, this book makes for an excellent primer.

We live in an age that has incorrectly been dubbed as a time of spiritual indifference and general religious apathy. That is not the case. The fact that a lot of the people in the world choose not to blindly adhere to the established system of beliefs does not mean that they remain idle. If anything, with the advent of the Internet, every single one of us that has even rudimentary access to a computer can immediately share his opinions and seek out a new religion, simple as that.

Hell, in some cases you can just get baptized and ordained by filling out a simple entry form!

The fact that we are currently going through hard times only serves to increase our desire for a spiritual anchor, to find some way of thinking or a belief system that can comfort us, gods that we can pray to and pay tribute to.

Superheroes are part of this solution, albeit in a more…fetishized manner.

You have 5 seconds to identify this character.

Think about it: we pay tribute to them by sacrificing our income on issues, trade paperbacks, action figures and collectibles. Some of us (mostly the most attractive among the masses), honor them by donning  their spandex. We spend huge sums in order to bring them to life on the silver screen. We buy the games where they are featured and we quote or reminisce upon their works or their failings on a daily basis. We even fight over them, spending hours upon hours of arguing each hero’s superiority over the others.

In other words, we deal with the superhero as an alternative to the old world gods. Why?

Because we need something to aspire to. Or, at the very least, to become a symbol of hope or disaster, something that can sum up our way of thinking into one coherent symbol.

21^st century’s symbol for “everything’s gonna be alright”.

For better or worse, mankind cannot exist in a spiritual vacuum. Even atheists, people who choose not to believe in an external, omnipotent force, place their faith in humanity or scientific advancement. This is mostly attributed to the fact that we, as a species, know that there is so much about our universe that we cannot explain or comprehend…yet.

We know, deep down, that we need something to pass the time until the great gap between the sum of our knowledge and the great Unknown has been bridged and we can finally have the answers to Life, the Universe and Everything at hand.

It’s probably something just as simple yet much more marvelous than 42.

The existence of the superhero has also proven something else: that our understanding of religion (and the way gods and men have coexisted for millennia) is experiencing an unparalleled shift. 

Gone are the days when gods served either as anthropomorphized functions in Nature, or as distanced agents of higher powers. Gone are the times of blind devotion and unquestionable faith. This is the age when gods coexist with man in his mind and are shaped and molded according to his whims. The age where the collective will of men serves to change gods into whatever they want at the time; to turn them from forces of good to forces of evil, to change them from the side of the angels to the side of the devils, or let them linger in the grey areas of ambiguous morality for a brief period of time.

We have seen a number of cases where the faithful have caused their gods to experience a severe transmogrification. Want an example?

The multitudes cried for simplicity and by God, they got it!

Our perception of faith and our relationship with our gods has turned symbiotic. It has also allowed us to bring them down to our level. Marvel has done it for decades, by piling problem after problem on its pantheon, forcing them to deal with their erring human side, even as they soak in our adoration.

This is the first sign that man has, for the first time in his history, actively sought to bring himself to the same level as his gods, in an attempt to emulate them. 

Because let’s face it: you can’t emulate faceless beings and you can’t simulate omnipotence or omniscience. But what you can do, is seek to slowly and carefully integrate the idea of becoming something greater by slowly giving yourself cool new powers.

Omnipotence? Pfft. Regrowing a severed limb in 6 seconds or less? Seems legit.

Which brings us to our next topic: morality; specifically, the responsibility of our overmen toward their readers and creators. 

Once again, mythology and ancient stories can be used as a point of reference to this: each god and each man, in his or her turn, shares a certain burden of responsibility. Even in the case of the Greek Pantheon (which was mostly consisting of super-powered assholes), a certain set of rules was followed. In other words, the gods, despite their powers and abilities, had to pay a price for abusing said privileges.

Bitch got pregnant, so I got her half a continent. Bitches love continents.

In the case of superheroes, these rules and responsibilities are presented in the form of ‘codes of honor’, of strict rules that heroes cannot break, first and foremost being their adherence to never taking a human life.

Even the more ruthless of their number (like the Punisher or the Authority), face great repercussions when they kill the wrong person, or when they overextend their reach. Why?

The first reason is hubris. The second is duality.

Hubris is part of our mindset seeking to equalize gods and men. It’s our way of bringing the Overmen to our level, of presenting repercussions for morally ambiguous acts. It’s our way of bringing them down, when they perform an act that we consider to endanger our understanding of societal order.

Why? Well, mostly because we expect our invented gods to be just as vulnerable and worthy of reprisal as we are. Because we want them to be larger-than-life versions of us, the readers (the faithful), but at the same time we want them to share certain characteristics of ours.

It’s why we chose to argue the morality of a prison existing for superhumans in the civil war, instead of the plausibility of it somehow keeping a bunch of god-like beings locked up inside it.

Duality, on the other hand, is the need that we have to understand the fundamental workings of the universe. 

In the words of Heraclitus: “War is the father of all things”. And the meat and bones of each and every superhero story, origin and in the ancient mythology from which these ideas originated, there is war. 

Not so much in the form of an actual, full-scale battle, but more in the shape of opposing forces.

In most cases, it is the war of good versus evil. Of societal norms versus the injustices that we face in our everyday lives. The gods of old fought against demons, malevolent entities and even other gods. 

In the case of superheroes, we have archetypal benevolence clashing with archetypal malevolence.

The evolution of the superhero genre has, of course, served to expand on this idea and create characters that aren’t as goody two-shoes or as one-dimensionally evil as they used to be back in the 50’s. But the core idea remains:

Good will clash with evil every month. Good will triumph.

The stories that could be called more cerebral (or better presented) are stories where the two sides are obscured by increasingly complex layers of character, but the main idea remains the same:

Good triumphs. Good deeds are rewarded. Evil is defeated. Evil deeds are punished.

It may sound simplistic, but it really isn’t. It’s simply a reflection of our expectations from our fiction. We live in a world where we are casually exposed to numerous examples of injustice and we regularly find ourselves exposed to acts that we consider unfair or that we condemn morally. We find ourselves wondering whether crime does pay or not. We see corrupt, obviously immoral individuals rise to power. There is absolutely no way we will put up with this in our fiction.

So there you have it: from our old gods, to us, to the Overmen we seek to become. It’s a matter of faith, of wanting to believe that we can be more than we can be, that things will get better. And things will get better, as long as we are tenacious enough to achieve it. 

Stay tuned for part 2.

Stone Cold Countenance In An E-book!

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Stone Cold Countenance, my very first novel in English, is available for purchase HERE!. You can read the first five chapters for free in the page Stone Cold Countenance and get a full synopsis, but what the hell.

Stone Cold Countenance is a post apocalyptic fantasy novel, set in a world very much like the old West. There's gunfights, killings, revenge in the name of a thousand dead men! There's magic and ancient technology!

There's also bonus content from an upcoming short story anthology of mine, called Under the Staircase! But you know what the best part is? The best part is that this e-book costs only ONE DOLLAR!

Aeternum-issue One, Page Five

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