The Four Color Media Monitor

The Daily Collegian of Massachusetts provides me with a reason not to waste any time on Mark Millar's Wanted:

In "Wanted" by Mark Millar, a young man named Wesley, who despises his miserable life, learns the world is really run by super villains.

His morals and ethics are progressively stripped away, until he becomes an utter sadist, murdering and raping at will. On the final page, scores of bodies later, the protagonist shouts insults at the reader, a triumphant monster. The message of the comic is casting aside your inhibitions and embracing a life of brutality is a positive, liberating experience.

Oh...my...god. This is what all these years of comic book publishing has led to? Shudder. No wonder I did not want to waste any time on Ultimate X-Men years ago when it began, and, as I later discovered, Millar wrote a story in which Ultimate Wolverine abandons Ult. Cyclops in a deep valley, all so that he can go back and seduce Ult. Jean Grey for the purpose of sex. Just what kind of entertainment is that? And what genuinely positive messages can be gotten from that?

I do not believe media representations of violence will "make" people commit such crimes. However, the glamorization of violence, in which it becomes an act of emancipation or a form of art, is extremely distressing to me. There may not be a causal relationship between watching violence in the media and committing it, but a continuous diet of violent images can nonetheless be harmful.

Atta boy, that's saying something alright! And the bad messages this monstrosity features are most definately a reason to avoid the book.

Many young people, men specifically, seem to embrace media violence. Last semester, when I saw the movie "Sin City," based on a series of violent graphic novels, much of the audience applauded the violence. The dramatic justifications for the brutality were largely ignored while the cruelty itself was reveled in. In horror movies such as the "Saw" series, the plot seems largely a pretext for slaughter, and the slaughter serves no greater purpose than to please the audience.

There is a profound element of dehumanization in these works. Victims are reduced to little more than livestock, while inhuman butchers cut them apart. In "Wanted," ordinary people are preyed on by the main character, first in revenge for minor slights, but ultimately to satiate his boredom, such as when he attacks a police station and kills the people inside. There is no rhyme or reason to this chaotic orgy of destruction - instead it is meant to represent the character's newfound freedom.

For some reason, the part about the police station being attacked by the book's antagonist reminds me of the reports on when a police station was attacked by gang of Islamofascists in Paris when the really big riots broke out in late October in France. Aside from that, the dehumanization of the victims in Wanted is what really makes me sick. Violence that's done solely for sadism, as Wanted does, is a leading reason for why people become apathetic to violence in real life.

There's one part in this article though, that I'd like to make a correction upon: it's when the writer says "palestinian terroritories" in one of the paragraphs of the article. Correction: those are rightfully Israeli territories being controlled by Arab/Muslim terrorists, that being the PLO and the Hamas, et cetera. But the writer is most definately right when he says that, "cultures bent on violent liberation ultimately turn to suicidal behavior." Yep, that's quite right. As is the last sentence:

Works that glamorize violence, without illustrating its consequences, should not be accepted, let alone applauded.

Quite right.

I once heard via one of the comics stores I sometimes go to that Millar, before becoming a comics writer, used to be a speech writer/editor for politicians in Europe. And if that's what he first worked in, then I'd think he should've stayed there. Politicians, IMO, do not good comics writers make.

The plot of the book is reminicient of a computer game that may have been called "Postal", one of those games in the Doom vein that features a character ("the postal dude") whose victims may even include quite a few civilians. This book sounds almost like it, only worse.

If Wanted is going to be solely about violent, inhumane carnage and messages, then maybe it'd be better to call it "Shunned".

Labels: indie publishers, moonbat writers, violence