“Final Crisis was a bestseller, but it divided the Internet crowd like Alexander’s sword.
One outraged reader even confidently predicted that I would, someday soon, be brought to account for the “evil” I had done.
For a comics fan scorned, it seemed, the measure of evil lay not in genocide or child abuse but in continuity details deliberately overlooked by self-important writers, of plot points insufficiently telegraphed, and themes made opaque or ambiguous.
If only one-TENTH of the righteous, sputtering wrath of these anonymous zealots could be mustered against the horrors of bigotry or poverty, we might find ourselves OVERNIGHT in A Finer World.
That’ll catch on.”
“It wasn’t until the turn of the century that a new approach to comic-book villainy crystallized around a single terrible idea that seemed to resonate with the exhausted resignation of the Western imagination: What if the villains had already won? What if the battle between good and evil was now over, with good bleeding and broken in the corner while evil pissed in its old rival’s sobbing face?
In a world of catastrophic, knee-jerk war politics, typified by moronic medieval terrorists, the apish antics of George W. Bush, and the spinning of his eager-to-please sidekick Tony Blair, it was easy to get on board with this gloomy new paradigm. Better yet, it was a scenario that reinvigorated the superheroes by giving them a real challenge to face. Stories could begin at what was traditionally the end of act 2, with the hero on his knees while a cackling adversary seized his moment to launch the missiles, waken the dead, or threaten the girl. What would we learn by pitting our supermen against the day after the day they let us all down?
Wanted by Mark Millar and J. G. Jones was Millar’s breakthrough work. He and Jones evoked a world that looked just like our own, but its familiar sidewalks and shopping façades hid a big secret that made horrible sense: Twenty years ago, all the supervillains had decided to gang up on the heroes once and for all. Overcoming their natural hatred and suspicion of one another for just long enough, they pooled mega-brains, billionaire resources, deadly technology, and a dozen foolproof plans for world domination. Thus armed, they overwhelmed the good guys before finishing the job with the help of diabolical superscience and evil five-dimensional magic and rewriting history so no one remembered that superheroes had ever been real. All that remained were their echoes in our comics and movies, mocking reminders of a world lost forever to corruption and greed. Wanted’s gleefully tawdry depiction of the world at its worst asked of its young media-literate audience some pertinent moral questions: If you were given a license that put you beyond the reach of all law and turned the everyday world into a Grand Theft Auto playground where any monstrous, violent, or depraved crime you committed would be covered up, as long as you surrendered to a quasi-Masonic “fraternity” of supervillains with VIP access to the best clubs, the coolest weapons, and the dirtiest birds … How far would you go, fan boy?
‘Wanted’ showed an abyss of horror beneath the comforting lies of our everyday world, where a successful coup by comic-book villains explained every rotten politician, every smirking gangster and puffed-up tyrant on the nightly news. For all his growing reputation as a shallow sensationalist, Millar was an altar boy at heart; he used the language of the lowest common denominator to preach hellfire. Wanted was an epic attempted exorcism, but its raw admission of Millar’s own dark-side dreams and its flirtation with a genuinely nihilistic endorsement of every antivalue as the way to “make it” in this world suggested a demon big enough to leave sizable bite marks in any Augustine cassock.
Wanted articulated a new myth for the hordes of suddenly cool under-achievers who’d been lionized by the rise of “nerd culture.” Big business, media, and fashion were, it seemed, so starved of inspiration, they’d reached down to the very bottom of the social barrel in an attempt to commodify even the most stubborn nonparticipants, the suicide Goths and fiercely antiestablishment nerds. The geeks were in the spotlight now, proudly accepting a derogatory label that directly compared them to degraded freak-show acts. Bullied young men with asthma and shy, bitter virgins with adult-onset diabetes could now gang up like the playground toughs they secretly wanted to be and anonymously abuse and threaten professional writers and actors with family commitments and bills to pay.
Soon film studios were afraid to move without the approval of the raging Internet masses.
They represented only the most minuscule fraction of a percentage of the popular audience that gave a shit, but they were very remarkably, superhumanly angry, like the great head of Oz, and so very persistent that they could easily appear in the imagination as an all-conquering army of mean-spirited, judgmental fogies.
In the shadow of The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell’s immensely influential book on social networks and marketing, nobody wanted to risk bad word of mouth, little realizing that they were reacting, in many cases, to the opinions of a few troublemakers who knew nothing but contempt for the universe and all its contents and could hardly be relied upon to put a positive spin on anything that wasn’t the misery and misfortune of others.
Too many businesspeople who should have known better began to take seriously the ravings of misinformed, often barely literate malcontents who took revenge on the cruel world by dismissing everything that came their way with the same jaded, geriatric “Meh.”
The rise of the geeks, with their “SHORT ATTENTION SPANS AND HIGH EXPECTATIONS,” as one New X-Men character put it, was an unstoppable tidal return of the repressed.
Wanted took upon itself to coldly lay bare the desires of the new elite—which far from being revolutionary were sleazy, self-serving, and viciously cynical.
Reduced to numbers and screen names, souls stood out in stark relief, revealing an audience that seemed determined to portray itself as hostile, ignorantly self-assured, conformist, and forever unsatisfied in a world of staggering consumer excess.
It is, of course, telling that I’ve never met any reader at a comic convention who behaved the way many do online, suggesting that the Internet monster is a defensive configuration, like the fan of spikes a tiny fish erects when it feels threatened.
Wanted’s lead was Wesley Gibson, drawn by J. G. Jones to resemble handsome rapper Eminem with an eye on the movie potential, but who stood for every shy, overweight, underweight, misunderstood kid reveling in the power to trash, denigrate, and insult his imagined enemies—who were just about everybody, especially the creators of the comic books, music, games, and movies that brought to these miserable lives the only meaning they would ever know. Geek royalty. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
Wesley acted out the new porn-fueled fantasies of dumping the fat girlfriend, hooking up with hot sex-mad assassin chicks, raping pretty newsreaders, and Getting Away with It All. At its best, reminiscent of the cool, amused cruelty of a Joe Orton play, the bludgeoning effect of Wanted’s uneasy satire exposed the horrible truth: The fragile, asocial, and different really just wanted to do coke, fuck bimbos, and bully people.
The revolution had arrived.
When Millar and Jones concluded Wanted with a full-page close-up of the leering, triumphant Wesley Gibson screaming “THIS IS ME FUCKING YOU IN THE ASS!,” his was the grotesque, swollen face of an outsider culture given the keys to the kingdom and revenge access to all our asses, as endorsed by the same old brute hierarchies. This was a face that any self-respecting boot might wish to stamp down upon eternally, but it was too late.
Wesley was instead what we would bow down to. Wanted was a searing hymn to the death of integrity and morality, and Wesley’s the victorious face of the New God.
