UnWanted

So I looked at the graphic novel Wanted today in Kinokuniya. I wanted to check it out, since I had heard about the film version being released this year with Angelina Jolie. The basic premise is that regular-guy office worker with cheating girlfriend and repressive life finds out one day not just that the world is run by supervillians who killed off all the heroes in 1986, but that his dad was the head honcho The Killer (snappy name) and that he has inherited his father's powers. Instead of going the Spider-man route of rejecting the evil, he chooses the bad-guy side.

Sound interesting? You'd be wrong.

I read the first two chapters out of five and I felt like I wanted to lay down and scrub out the inside of my brain. Those first two chapters cover the guy's finding out about his dad, then his "training" which involves first realising that he "hated the whole fucking human race", then killing random people, then killing and raping his way through anyone who'd every wronged him or looked at him crosswise since childhood. Then he's kidnapped by his own people and beaten and tortured for five weeks to "make him less afraid of pain" or some shit. It's macho bullshit lines, like him killing his first person and comparing it to "fucking Marilyn Monroe without a condom". Christ. It's self-destructive nihilistic wish-fulfillment taken to extremes. I was disgusted. The closest I'd come to feeling this way from a book or film was Fight Club. And I think this was worse. It's the kind of thing you expect people like that gunman in Virginia to enjoy.

It actually left me in a depressed rotten mood (almost a fugue-state) for the rest of the day, with scenes out of it playing through my mind like an annoying song off the radio. I'm still trying to shake it off.

The last line of the book is something like "This is my face as I'm fucking you up the ass" and it's a full-page panel of his face and bare chest, grinning through gritted teeth (I should mention that the protagonist is drawn to resemble Eminem).

Jesus fuck.