Reviewer: Iain Burnside
Story Title: Crime Pays
Written by: Mark Millar
Penciled by: J. G. Jones
Inked by: J.G. Jones
Colored by: Paul Mounts
Lettered by: Robin Spehar, Dennis Heisler & Mark Roslan
Editor: N/A
Publisher: Top Cow
Millarworld is nothing more than a vanity project, as the name suggests. Mark Millar conjured up a lot of stories that for one reason or another were not suitable for publication by Marvel; therefore he used his name to get independent publishers to peddle the books for him. As appreciative as those smaller companies no doubt are for the extra money and added attention Millar’s fanbase could provide to their other titles, Wanted still feels like a big missed opportunity. It’s offensive, sure, but no more than Chosen or The Unfunnies are. Yet those books actually have something to say and offer a fresh perspective. Wanted is beginning to read like a junior high school piece of fan fiction. To paraphrase Bendis, it’s like Millar drank himself into a coma for three days straight and awoke to find he had a fully scripted comic series sitting there. And really, when vanity is the name of the game, nobody is going to tell Millar to go away and add some gravitas or originality to it. Top Cow certainly doesn’t care – they just want the cash and justifiably so.
The tragic part is that this series started out with such promise. Nobody offers more hard-hitting action through a wider lens than the scribe of The Ultimates. Nobody can present such subversive mayhem than the man who gave The Authority their last stand. Nobody can conjure up a more stunning fish-out-of-water tale than the writer of Superman: Red Son. At least, that’s what we were told. Based on the evidence of this long-delayed issue, I would beg to differ.
Wesley Gibson, the lead character in this mess, has left behind his old life of servitude and humiliation upon finding out that his recently deceased father was in fact The Killer – the baddest of the bad, heading up the top-secret supervillain Fraternity that rules the world in the absence of any superheroes left to fight them. Wesley embarked on a therapeutic bout of rampage along with his new girlfriend Fox, until his mentor, The Professor, was murdered by Mister Rictus, who was planning a rebellion within the Fraternity in a manner very similar to Stephen Dorff’s character in Blade, Christian Kane’s character in Angel and numerous other bad guy threats. For a comic so concerned with sticking two fingers up at the industry’s establishment, this is all rather familiar.
So now, after his insane bout of lawless abandon, Wesley is beginning to feel blue following the death of The Professor. I’m not really sure what the point of wasting so many pages is on this. Absolutely nobody in their right mind can contemplate sympathizing with Wesley for bursting into tears at the thought of not raping a female cop after slaughtering all of her precinct colleagues. Likewise, nobody can sympathise with Fox for comforting him and telling him that this is merely a phase all newly initiated Fraternity members go through. As for Rictus – forget it. Nobody can single him out as the antagonist just because he wants to kill his fellow villains in addition to some innocent civilians. There is nobody here to relate to, nowhere to invest our emotions in, and so reading this book becomes nothing more than a hollow experience.
Millar tries to make things more substantial by piling on the gore and aiming for the shock value. Out goes any semblance of wit, to be replaced by expletives and toilet humour. Out goes any possibility of purposeful narrative for endless scenes of dismemberment and gunfire. If Millar is aiming for an all-out assault on the senses in order to try and use controversy as his scapegoat then he is still failing. This does nothing but numbs the senses and makes the reader struggle to make it past the first scene out of tedium. You see, if you want to go for the edgy approach then it helps to have a little something called a point. Millar should go and read The Dark Knight Strikes Again. Call it an education.
Still, congratulations to J.G. Jones and Paul Mounts for at least making this visually interesting. I would go into more specifics but it would mean going through this book again, which is something I just really do not want to do.
