Culture . 03/20/2008 12:15 AM . Dr. Les Sillars

The just-released trailer for “Wanted,” a movie due out June 27 starring James McAvoy, Angelina Jolie, and Morgan Freeman, looks intriguing. In the voiceover to a series of gunfights and car chases, Freeman’s character is inviting a cube-dwelling hypochondriac named Wesley Gibson, who recently discovered that his supposedly long-dead father was the world’s greatest assassin, to join “The Fraternity.” In the trailer released last October, Freeman’s character waxes philosophical: “It is a choice, Wesley, that each of us must face. To remain ordinary, pathetic, beat down, coasting through a miserable existence, like sheep herded by fate. Or you can take control of your own destiny and join us, releasing the caged wolf you have inside.

“Our purpose is to maintain stability in an unstable world. Kill one, save a thousand. Within the fabric of this world, every life hangs by a thread. We are that thread. A fraternity of assassins, weapons of fate.

“This is the decision that lies before you now: The sheep, or the wolf? The choice is yours.”

The Fraternity, according to a script preview, is a bunch of public-spirited killers carrying out death orders issued by the Fates, weavers from Greek and Roman mythology who read individuals’ destinies in fabrics produced by mystical looms. The Fraternity maintains the world’s “stability,” killing a few to save the many.

The life of Mr. Tumnus—er, Wesley Gibson, is a neutered version of an age-old story line that exists throughout literature—an ordinary person acquires or discovers abilities that set him apart and move him to fight for something larger than himself. The movie is based on a comic of the same name. Wesley Gibson, however, is a long way from the original Peter Parker as Spider-Man or Bruce Wayne as Batman.

First, a little comics background: Superman arrived in 1938, followed closely by Batman and Captain America. The 1940s and 1950s are known as the Golden Age of comics. Superman, Flash, The Green Lantern, and the rest lived in morally predictable, family-friendly comic universes, and sales were through the roof. A single issue of a popular character could sell millions of copies.

Then along came a Spider-Man, created by Stan Lee. Spider-Man first appeared in Marvel’s Amazing Fantasy #15 as a filler story in an otherwise lackluster 1962 series. But the Webslinger was a hit, and soon The Amazing Spider-Man hit the racks. The writing in that first issue is cheesy, even for its intended audience of eight to twelve-year-olds. But the premise, that a man had been transformed into a gigantic insect, almost as in Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, was itself a kind of cleverly-disguised horror story that had thrived in the 1920s and 1930s but largely disappeared in the Golden Age.

More importantly, Peter Parker was one of the first superhero characters with, um, personal issues, as the movie versions of Spider-Man have emphasized. Peter at first wanted to use his powers, not to fight crime, but to make money as a performer. Only after Peter’s selfishness brought about the death of beloved Uncle Ben did the narrator explain that Peter, wracked with the guilt that drives him, was finally “aware at last that in this world, with great power there must also come—great responsibility!” In subsequent issues that first year he remained alienated from classmates, luckless in love, and misunderstood by the public.

Spider-Man and the other characters began in the early 1970s to change in more subtle ways as sales started to slip. With society struggling with everything from Vietnam to rock and roll, the moral clarity that marked the Golden Age began to fade. “A lot of these lines became blurred,” says J.R. Fettinger, operator of spideykicksbutt.com. Batman’s vigilantism, for example, in the 1970s took on an obsessive quality that reflects the recent movies far more than Adam West’s 1960s television show. Then in the 1990s a new generation of superstar artists arose, like Todd McFarlane and Frank Miller, whose creative vision was dark and gritty, with more violence, and waaaay more blood.

Meanwhile, the comics industry has suffered a gradual circulation decline. Today, 300,000 copies is a huge hit. The business reasons why are complicated, involving competition from video games and the internet, pricing strategies, and distribution costs, but the results are clear: today comics are sold primarily in specialty shops and online, with some sales in big-box book retailers. They are not on spinner racks in reach of youngsters fingering their weekly allowance. With access reduced, the age range of readers has crept up, from pre-teen/adolescence to mid-teen/early twenties. Along the way story lines for comics in general became increasingly “mature.”

Just how mature becomes obvious at the comics conventions held frequently around the country. At the Pittsburgh Comicon last May (a mid-level event—the largest is in San Diego), Batman strolled impassively down aisles between stalls piled high with cardboard longboxes filled with back issues, Jedi knights and Rebel pilots clustered around a pin-up artist’s stand, gawking, and ex-Beastmaster Marc Singer jumped out from behind his table to greet passers-by wearing puzzled expressions.

Top Cow Productions, Inc., a small subsidiary of Image Comics (third largest after DC and Marvel), easily had the most professional display at the convention, with larger-than-fictional-life displays of its top properties. “Darkness” is a 25,000 copies/month comic about a trenchcoated mob hit man, Jackie Estacado, who controls snaky-looking demons that come out in the dark. Vice President of marketing Filip Sablik explains him like so: “If he has a problem, he kicks down the door and takes care of it with a gun.” Besides the obvious and Peter Parker’s 45 years of history, what’s the difference between Spider-Man and Jackie? I ask, as Batman makes his third pass by Top Cow’s table, studiously ignoring the cardboard cut-out of the extraordinarily voluptuous Madam Mirage. “Spider-Man, apart from the superpowers, is the guy that every fan is,” says Sablik, after thinking a minute. “Jackie Estacado is the guy we all want to be.”

Oh.

Top Cow, it so happens, also owns “Wanted,” and hopes it will be as successful as other R-rated movie adaptations of graphic novels like “Sin City” and “300.” Comic artists no longer imagine that the comics themselves will make much money; the point is to have a major studio pick up the title. Sablik figures that “The Matrix,” which broke box-office records on its release in 1999, allowed movie adaptations to maintain the “vision” of their graphic novel origins. “Comics,” says Sablik, “have kept pace with the level of social acceptance.”

The premise of the “Wanted” comic is that the supervillains wiped out all the superheroes in 1986 and now rule the world in secret as The Fraternity. The characters, mostly take-offs on well-known comic bad guys, rule not for some utilitarian vision of the good of humanity, as the trailer suggests, but for their own sadistic pleasures.

They have names like “S***-Head” (“The collected feces of the 666 most evil beings ever to walk the earth have taken on sentience”) and “Mister Rictus” (a skeletal-looking former Christian who “lives without a moral compass . . . [he] does everything you’ve ever thought about in your darkest moments”). These characters aren’t in the movie. Freeman plays Sloan, Wesley’s father’s ex-partner, and Jolie is The Fox, in the comic a promiscuous sort who “kills, because she does not care.”

The story begins when The Fraternity introduces Wesley to his killing superpowers. They torture and train Wesley until he learns to kill without remorse, and then he sets off after the guy who killed his father, only to discover that his father is still alive, and then … never mind.

In gory detail the comic shows Wesley gunning down an entire station full of cops in a fit of pique. He is mildly remorseful later, but concludes that the fun of his superpowers makes it all worthwhile. Along the way he tells off his unfaithful ex-girlfriend and otherwise indulges in the sort of adolescent male power fantasies you’d expect. The conclusion is intended to be ironic and sophisticated: Wesley directly harangues the reader as pathetic for wanting to be somebody (Wesley) he’s not.

“I wanted the film to basically be the opposite of the Spider-Man movie,” “Wanted” author Mark Millar told Wizard magazine last year, “the idea of someone getting powers and realizing they can do what they want, then choosing the dark path. The [script] I read was just too tame.”

But how do you create a sympathetic character movie-goers will like out of a brutal, self-indulgent jerk like Wesley Gibson? The Spider-Man movies work because the film returns to the qualities that made the comic character so appealing—his vulnerability combined with a moral compass. He might give in to his dark side briefly, but in the end he does the right thing.

Wesley Gibson, as a comic character, had no moral compass to begin with. The “Wanted” script-writers, needing a scenario in which an assassin could plausibly fight for something larger than himself, created a universe in which the hero saves the many by murdering the few. How inspiring.

Superheroes often face utilitarian choices, as in the first Spider-Man movie: save MJ or the tram full of innocent passengers? A real hero, of course, refuses to submit to the utilitarian calculus the villain imposes on him; what’s the greatest good of the greatest number? A sheep submits and makes the choice; a real hero saves both. We’ll see whether the movie version of Wesley Gibson rises to that level, or whether he’s just another sheep in wolf’s clothing.

Les Sillars teaches Journalism at Patrick Henry College in Purcellville, VA. He is neither a sheep or a wolf.



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