We start with a recap of Wesley Gibson's problems -- no sex with the girlfriend who cheats on him with his best friend, irritating old man neighbor trying to be nice, mean boss, being picked on by "Spike Lee extras." Millar seems very worried will have forgotten all of this since last issue. Ostensibly we are reminded of all these things because in this issue, called "Fuck You," Wesley says just that to his old life and accepts his super-villain destiny. You can see what Millar is up to by looking at Wesley's little rebellion -- he scatters the papers in the cubicle yelling "Fuck you you fucking assholes" and it is clear that this is a American Dream moment -- his coworkers are shocked, but also a little impressed (one laughs, one looks like he is almost ready to put his fist in the air and join him). Then he kills random people, goes after all his enemies -- including a girl who turned him down for a date, and a guy who spilled ink on him once. The vile non-sense just goes on and on.
Wanted is the complement to the Authority, but does not work nearly as well. The Authority -- especially in Millar's hands -- took the basic idea about superheroics and pushed it to its natural extreme: having super-powers and punching people until they act like you want them to leads to the violence and fascism of the Authority, where you can no longer tell the good guys from the bad guys. Wanted is supposed to do the same thing for that American Dream of quitting your job and doing whatever you want. The problem is that while there is something vaguely frightening about the idea of Superman that can be persuasively jacked up in the Authority, the desire to ditch your job in a cubicle needs a pretty specific strain of nastiness to end with your raping and killing an A-list celebrity as she sobs in the bathtub. I think Millar wants Wesley Gibson to be a kind of Everyman but it seems clear that he is just a nasty racist psychopath. Importantly, the power does not corrupt him -- it is just that now he ACTS on his nasty desires.
That is where Millar's polemic goes wrong, but it also causes problems with his story here. Mr. Rictus is introduced as a bad guy -- even in the context of this story of bad guys. How do we establish that? He kills babies. That is apparently where we draw the line. Killing random young women with a sniper rifle, and shooting your harmless old man neighbor who says the same nice phrase to you every morning is all part of being a badass, but killing babies is where we draw the line. Millar needs the line to create conflict, but you cannot erase the line first or your story makes no sense.
Two things keep Millar in business. First, he can write some great Bad-ass dialogue. "What kind of super-people show up to a fight stinking of booze? [head explodes]" -- "The dangerous kind" will always stay with me. But Wanted, at least the first two issues, do not really have lines like that. Just as Alfred Hitchcock got bad once the restrictions on violence were removed (see Frenzy, as opposed to the earlier much less gory Psycho) Millar loses his touch when he can simply have characters say "Fuck You" all the time. Issue two actually includes Wesley saying "If I was chocolate I swear I'd eat myself right now" which is seriously weak, Lifetime movie network comedy weak.
The second thing that keeps Millar alive is the fact that every once and a while he has a really good idea. I have heard people claim that he steals or borrows them from Grant Morrison, but these ideas show up in his books and he occasionally has a great one. The zombie fake-out in his Ultimate Fantastic Four issue was brilliant and brilliantly marketed -- Marvel made it seem like the Ultimate books were going to cross over with the core books, and everyone went nuts, but both we and the Ultimate Reed Richard discovered the fake out together at the last moment. The idea of Civil War is quite good (though I do not know if that was his). Having the Authority go up against Jack Kirby and all his creations was pretty fun. The end of Red Son, where time travel makes it possible for the "El" in Superman's real family name to be a corruption of L, itself a shortening of Luthor was brilliant (though that one is almost certainly from Morrison, as he used it, less dramatically, in DC One Million). Issue two of Wanted shows Millar at his best, as Solomon explains what happened to the real superheroes after the bad guys re-wrote reality:
Now your father's old nemesis is just a camp, podgy joke who signs autographs for money. The Warrior Princess is a menopausal drunk who thinks she was a TV personality. And as for my own arch foe... [image of a man in a wheelchair] Well, according to the newspapers he needs someone to help him defecate now and spends his long, dull days staring into space, trying to figure out where it all went wrong.
Kingdom Come is dedicated to Christopher Reeve, "who made us believe that a man could fly." In part because of his terrible accident, there was a real sentimental feeling that Reeve in some way WAS Superman. [He was, by the way, brilliant, when he played against this, appearing on The Practice post-accident, as a wheelchair bound criminal mastermind]. Linda Carter will always somehow BE Wonder Woman, which is why she appears as the principal of a superhero school in Sky High. Adam West has of course never transcended his role as Batman, possibly the most famous Batman (as someone said in the comments recently). As vile as Millar is trying to be, there is this underlying compliment to Reeve, Carter and West that I find weirdly moving, because it plugs into the way all three actors are so locked into those roles. Before the world got awful -- before the super-villains took over and re-wrote reality -- Reeve, Carter and West REALLY WERE Superman, Wonder Woman and Batman. On some level, don't we all sort of believe that?
We were recently discussing the underrated Galaxy Quest. What makes Galaxy Quest so moving is that as much as it makes fun of Star Trek, it also provides a narrative in which the Star Trek actors -- many of whom fans know hated being pigeon holed into just those roles -- fully BECOME the characters. The contrast between the actors and the characters is finally resolved to great effect. There is something like that buried in Wanted, buried beneath the vile and casual assumption -- vile because it is so casual -- that its readers will identify with this racist monster who is our protagonist.
Showing posts with label Wanted. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Wanted. Show all posts
Thursday, March 06, 2008
Monday, February 25, 2008
Mark Millar's Wanted 1
[With the film coming out, and with writer Mark Millar in the spotlight, following Civil War with Fantastic Four and Kick Ass, and with artist J.G. Jones on Final Crisis with Morrison, I thought I would take an issue by issue look at Wanted. Some of what follows was suggested by my friend Erin. Wanted also meets my criteria for an issue by issue look: it is not by Morrison, and it is a mixed bag (because you would get bored listening to me just praise or complain).]
The first issue of Wanted introduces us to Wesley Gibson, cubicle-drone whose long vanished father, unknown to him, was part of a secret fraternity of super-villains who control the world. When the book begins and Wesley is 24, and his father has just been killed. Now Wesley will be transformed from hypochondriac whiner into the super-villain he was born to be by his father's friends.
The first three pages are spent on details establishing what a loser Wesley is: his girlfriend cheats on him with his best friend and he does nothing even though he knows, he has cheap Ikea furniture, he works in a cubicle, he gets picked on by kids in his neighborhood, he is a hypochondriac, he hates his friendly neighbors, his father, who he knows nothing about, left his pregnant mother when he was 18 weeks old. "Remember me? Wesley Gibson" he says pathetically, worried we may have forgotten him in the few pages we were away. We see that Wesley allows himself to be manipulated by his girlfriend, made to feel bad for her having sex with eleven co-workers. Then his best friend has sex with his girlfriend again, just to be sure you get it. Millar just piles it on, afraid that we might not get his point with, say, a careful detail. Why the overkill? Because, as the book progresses, we will see that Millar is not simply writing a story. No, he is writing a polemic. And with polemic he must be SURE we get the POINT about our LIVES. Many of the elements of the story work quite well, some are amazing, but when the polemic gets in the way, as it often does, Millar gets into trouble as we will see.
Two details in this montage stand out. At work Wesley complains "This is me taking shit from my African American boss." Later in the issue his boss will taunt him, asking him if he is looking up "www.ku-klux-klan.com or www.small-white-dicks". Toward the end of the issue he will meet Professor Solomon Seltzer, the sort of mad-scientist of the super-villain set, who will taunt him with the choice of "taking control of your life" (i.e. becoming a murderer) or "go back to being bitched at by your African American Boss," as if he could read Wesley's mind. Those kids that were taunting him on the way home from work about his clothes (obviously not work clothes, which is a confusing detail) he calls "Cholo fucks." He ironically says that he eats a fancy sandwich to prove he's "different from the herd." The obvious objection is that Millar, or this book, is racist, and elitist, and the obvious rejoinder is that Millar is writing about a guy who is basically evil in an evil word, so of course the character (not to be confused with the writer) is racist, and elitist. But there is a subtler reason why all of this is trouble, and not only because in hitting us over the head with the sad story of Wesley's life the book assumes we are stupid.
First the difference between sympathy and identification, which I always get into when I get into fights with people. Sympathy is feeling bad for someone else's misfortune. Identification is when we see ourselves in another person, and then feel bad for ourselves. These are two ways of creating a bond with viewers. A sympathetic detail, such as Alex's love of classical music in A Clockwork Orange might make me feel sympathetic toward him. But there is nothing sympathetic about Wesley Gibson. Millar is banking on our identification with the character. His version of the "leave your dead end job and become super-powerful" fantasy (which will be retained in the movie) is rooted in his belief that the reader is an awful person who will see himself in Wesley Gibson, and so become invested in the story. The only person who will identify with Wesley will be someone just like him. The book is not primarily mean spirited because it is racist; the book is mean spirited because it assumes we are. That is why the book includes the scene where his "African American Boss" taunts him about the Klan and his small white penis -- In making her cruel, Miller attempts to give us license to join Wesley in his (obviously racially motivated) hatred with the child's logic of "she started it." Because Millar thinks we are idiots.
We next see how Wesley's father dies, and another bothersome detail comes into play. Wesley's father, attired in an open bathrobe and and underwear, has hired to gay men to have sex in front of him. The first thing we hear from him is "I'm not a homosexual you understand. In fact I've bedded over five thousand women in my fifty-eight years which makes me quite the opposite I believe. I just like to do this gay thing every other year to whet my appetite for the pleasure of the fairer sex. There's nothing like the perfumed touch of a woman after twelve months of heaving, sweating man flesh writhing between one's sheets." So a year of sex with women, followed by a year of sex with men -- this is supposed to indicate his decadence, but the claim to not being a homosexual is something Millar thinks so important to establish he makes it the first words we hear from him. There is nothing in the words to indicate any irony; we are not, I think, to see The Killer as being defensive, of not really knowing himself. Millar has a history in his work of returning again and again to anal rape by and on men (it occurs more than once in his twelve issue Authority run). Bisexuality and a huge number of partners is surely enough to make decadence clear. And yet Millar cannot simply do that. He needs you to know the Killer is decadent, but he also needs you to know, by fiat if nothing else, that he is not one of those people. He is "quite the opposite." This is part of his firm heterosexuality, you see.
All of this would make the book thoroughly repulsive, except for the fact that the artwork is great, and so are many of the ideas of the story -- not to be confused with the polemic. The Killer exits his building sticking to the walls by what appear to be Spiderman's boots. Seltzer's lab is guarded by "a Downs-Syndrome copy of Earth's first superhero." Super-villains re-wrote reality in 1986, the year of Crisis on Infinite Earths. This book came out at the height of Planetary and the Authority's "analogues" for major characters owned by other companies (Apollo and the Midnighter are Superman and Batman, for example). Millar smartly ups the ante -- without naming names he makes it clear that these are not the boots of a Spiderman like character -- in the rewrite the Killer killed Spider-Man and took his boots. "Fuck-Wit" as he is called is a clone of Superman, not some analogue. And the book achieves real surprise with moments like a rifle fired from two cities away, and blithely killing everyone in a sandwich shop for no reason because you can never be caught because you run the world. Millar's story is in place; it is his polemic that is deeply flawed.
The first issue of Wanted introduces us to Wesley Gibson, cubicle-drone whose long vanished father, unknown to him, was part of a secret fraternity of super-villains who control the world. When the book begins and Wesley is 24, and his father has just been killed. Now Wesley will be transformed from hypochondriac whiner into the super-villain he was born to be by his father's friends.
The first three pages are spent on details establishing what a loser Wesley is: his girlfriend cheats on him with his best friend and he does nothing even though he knows, he has cheap Ikea furniture, he works in a cubicle, he gets picked on by kids in his neighborhood, he is a hypochondriac, he hates his friendly neighbors, his father, who he knows nothing about, left his pregnant mother when he was 18 weeks old. "Remember me? Wesley Gibson" he says pathetically, worried we may have forgotten him in the few pages we were away. We see that Wesley allows himself to be manipulated by his girlfriend, made to feel bad for her having sex with eleven co-workers. Then his best friend has sex with his girlfriend again, just to be sure you get it. Millar just piles it on, afraid that we might not get his point with, say, a careful detail. Why the overkill? Because, as the book progresses, we will see that Millar is not simply writing a story. No, he is writing a polemic. And with polemic he must be SURE we get the POINT about our LIVES. Many of the elements of the story work quite well, some are amazing, but when the polemic gets in the way, as it often does, Millar gets into trouble as we will see.
Two details in this montage stand out. At work Wesley complains "This is me taking shit from my African American boss." Later in the issue his boss will taunt him, asking him if he is looking up "www.ku-klux-klan.com or www.small-white-dicks". Toward the end of the issue he will meet Professor Solomon Seltzer, the sort of mad-scientist of the super-villain set, who will taunt him with the choice of "taking control of your life" (i.e. becoming a murderer) or "go back to being bitched at by your African American Boss," as if he could read Wesley's mind. Those kids that were taunting him on the way home from work about his clothes (obviously not work clothes, which is a confusing detail) he calls "Cholo fucks." He ironically says that he eats a fancy sandwich to prove he's "different from the herd." The obvious objection is that Millar, or this book, is racist, and elitist, and the obvious rejoinder is that Millar is writing about a guy who is basically evil in an evil word, so of course the character (not to be confused with the writer) is racist, and elitist. But there is a subtler reason why all of this is trouble, and not only because in hitting us over the head with the sad story of Wesley's life the book assumes we are stupid.
First the difference between sympathy and identification, which I always get into when I get into fights with people. Sympathy is feeling bad for someone else's misfortune. Identification is when we see ourselves in another person, and then feel bad for ourselves. These are two ways of creating a bond with viewers. A sympathetic detail, such as Alex's love of classical music in A Clockwork Orange might make me feel sympathetic toward him. But there is nothing sympathetic about Wesley Gibson. Millar is banking on our identification with the character. His version of the "leave your dead end job and become super-powerful" fantasy (which will be retained in the movie) is rooted in his belief that the reader is an awful person who will see himself in Wesley Gibson, and so become invested in the story. The only person who will identify with Wesley will be someone just like him. The book is not primarily mean spirited because it is racist; the book is mean spirited because it assumes we are. That is why the book includes the scene where his "African American Boss" taunts him about the Klan and his small white penis -- In making her cruel, Miller attempts to give us license to join Wesley in his (obviously racially motivated) hatred with the child's logic of "she started it." Because Millar thinks we are idiots.
We next see how Wesley's father dies, and another bothersome detail comes into play. Wesley's father, attired in an open bathrobe and and underwear, has hired to gay men to have sex in front of him. The first thing we hear from him is "I'm not a homosexual you understand. In fact I've bedded over five thousand women in my fifty-eight years which makes me quite the opposite I believe. I just like to do this gay thing every other year to whet my appetite for the pleasure of the fairer sex. There's nothing like the perfumed touch of a woman after twelve months of heaving, sweating man flesh writhing between one's sheets." So a year of sex with women, followed by a year of sex with men -- this is supposed to indicate his decadence, but the claim to not being a homosexual is something Millar thinks so important to establish he makes it the first words we hear from him. There is nothing in the words to indicate any irony; we are not, I think, to see The Killer as being defensive, of not really knowing himself. Millar has a history in his work of returning again and again to anal rape by and on men (it occurs more than once in his twelve issue Authority run). Bisexuality and a huge number of partners is surely enough to make decadence clear. And yet Millar cannot simply do that. He needs you to know the Killer is decadent, but he also needs you to know, by fiat if nothing else, that he is not one of those people. He is "quite the opposite." This is part of his firm heterosexuality, you see.
All of this would make the book thoroughly repulsive, except for the fact that the artwork is great, and so are many of the ideas of the story -- not to be confused with the polemic. The Killer exits his building sticking to the walls by what appear to be Spiderman's boots. Seltzer's lab is guarded by "a Downs-Syndrome copy of Earth's first superhero." Super-villains re-wrote reality in 1986, the year of Crisis on Infinite Earths. This book came out at the height of Planetary and the Authority's "analogues" for major characters owned by other companies (Apollo and the Midnighter are Superman and Batman, for example). Millar smartly ups the ante -- without naming names he makes it clear that these are not the boots of a Spiderman like character -- in the rewrite the Killer killed Spider-Man and took his boots. "Fuck-Wit" as he is called is a clone of Superman, not some analogue. And the book achieves real surprise with moments like a rifle fired from two cities away, and blithely killing everyone in a sandwich shop for no reason because you can never be caught because you run the world. Millar's story is in place; it is his polemic that is deeply flawed.
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