Saturday 30 June 2012

Wanted: More Believable Action

So I just finished the limited series of Wanted by Mark Millar (Kick Ass)  and enjoyed his fresh look at comics once again.  Millar seems determined to create comics that question the meaning, purpose, and stories of a typical comic.  In Kick Ass he tries to show a kid becoming a superhero with no special attributes.  It was a satire of the typical spandex wearing vigilante.  In Red Son he envisioned Superman growing up in the USSR and falling in line with the ideology.  He loves to take the typical story and turn it around allowing the reader to see the archetypes of a normal comic.  Millar is brilliant at this, and from the comics of his I have read this seems to be his thing, deconstructing the superhero.

In Wanted he starts with a 24 year old loser who has a terrible job, a cheating girlfriend, and nothing much going for him and turns him into a supervillain like his old man.  This is how the villains are created, through inheritance.  And our protagonist is a fairly bad/evil person that shoots just about anybody.  He is drawn to look like Eminem and his sidekick looks like Halle Berry.  So you get to see Eminem going around killing innocents and kissing Halle Berry.  But more than that this world all of the superheroes are dead so there is no one to stop him, except other villains who disagree with him.  There is a lot here in such a short space and I have barely scratched the surface.  I will have to read more Millar to better assess his style.

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