Graphic Novel review: “Wanted”
When I heard that the movie being released soon, Wanted, was taken from a graphic novel, I decided that I needed to read it.
One of the reasons was that I’d heard from one of our readers, R.A. Porter, than he was worried about how different the movie would be compared to the original story.
And now that I’ve read it, I have to agree. First off, not even counting what you read online about it, there is no way this graphic novel could be made into a movie these days. Not with the utter evil and carnage that engulfs Wanted.
Not without changing it big time.
Wanted basically takes your old superhero story and flips it head over heels. You get the evil side of things, and not just some bad guys, but a bad universe, over multiple dimensions, where all the superheroes have been basically wiped out.
Evil reigns free. Men, women and children are killed for fun.
And the story is very adult, obviously. Sex, blood, death, and character names that contain curse words. Like Sh*thead and F*ckwit. The first guy is named for feces because that’s what he is: A blob of poo. And he kills someone by locking them in a car and flooding it with crap.
Gross.
The main plot of Wanted revolves around Wesley Gibson, who is like Mr. Anderson from The Matrix. A wimp, stuck in a white-collar job and with no hope of becoming a man anytime soon. His girlfriend is sleeping with his best friend, and he’s too much of a bum to even do anything about it.
When his father is murdered though, Westley discovers that he himself possesses abilities to basically kill with powers he never knew he had. Skills that allow him to destroy even OTHER superheroes and villains with relative ease.
He joins the Fraternity and discovers that basically in 1986, all of the super villains decided to get together and completely destroy all the superheroes, and rewrite reality as we know it. Superheroes become a thing of fiction or legend, and the evil heroes run the show from behind the scenes.
And they control everything. You can kill a crowd of people, and the cops can do nothing because they know who is behind it.
So with that synopsis, you can kind of get how this movie might not have a chance to be interpreted as written originally by Mark Millar.
In the movie, supposedly Wesley will join a group of powerful assassins that are justice enforcers, not evil killers.
The novel itself was interesting and a very unique read for me. Most every comic I’ve taken up so far usually has a good guy or hero that is fighting against evil, and they usually prevail. Not in Wanted.
The end is pretty good too, and there are some fun twists along the way. Not one of my favorites of all-time, mostly because I tend to not align on the evil side of things, even if it’s just in a story, but it was still something worth reading.
Mike’s Rating: 7 out of 10
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