No, scratch that. Millar's comic, published in a single volume in 2005 by Top Cow Comics, is something it takes a twisted genius to come up with. While most of the rest of us would imagine a world where supervillains run roughshod over everyone else and decent people struggle to eke out an existence, let alone a resistance, Millar instead has generated a world order run in secret by an Illuminati of supervillains.
This strange order of things arose about 20 years ago when the supervillains in the world united with a plan: Why not team up and get rid of all the world's superheroes once and for all, and proceeded to do so.
It makes sense, once you think about it, since every superhero has a score or more of regular supervillains on their roster, many of whom (for dramatic and storytelling reasons) are more powerful than the hero himself. Batman alone has the Joker, Two-Face, Mr. Freeze, the Riddler, Bane, Poison Ivy, the Penguin, Ra's al Ghul and the entire League of Assassins, Amygdala, the Scarecrow, Mr. Zzazz, the Calendar Man ... and on and on and on. Put them all together, and he wouldn't have a chance. Same goes for Superman and any other hero you can think of.
So that's what the supervillains did, back in 1986. They either killed the superheroes, or altered the timeline so that they weren't superheroes anymore -- they were actors who had played superheroes on TV shows or in the movies, and so on. It would be as though Christopher Reeve actually were from another planet, or Adam West really were the world's greatest detective -- and yet both men were unaware of this.
The supervillains, with their foes out of the way, now ran the world, from the behind the scenes. Any time they committed a crime, they covered it up through their vast network of controls.
Once Wesley Gibson has been fully inducted into this new world, and the readers with him, the action begins. Not every supervillain is content to rule the world if no one knows about it. What's the point in ruling the world if you don't get to frighten people? So a rift emerges between the "good" supervillains and the "bad" ones, as the more psychotic ones step out of the shadows, neutralize their colleagues who have been holding them back, and everything starts to go crazy again.
Best of all is the ending, which I won't ruin for anyone who hasn't read the comic, but it's got a brutal in-your-face message to people who hate their jobs, feel their lives suck, and spend $20 picking up a trade paperback.
It's a great idea for a comic, and there are some genuinely brilliant scenes in the comic, but this isn't one I'll be reading again. It was just too crude: the sexually denigrating remarks, the runaway potty mouth, and the struggle between amoral characters and their nihilistic foes drained the book of a lot of its pleasure.
Even the pleasure and wit that do survive are tainted by the foul language. Naming characters "Fuckwit" and "Shithead" is the sort of locker room humor that schoolyard bullies enjoy; it's not the sort of thing you hope to find in your reading material, either casual or serious. And by the time the comic was over, Millar had dropped so many F-bombs, it was amazing there was anything more than a smoking crater left of the comic.
Perhaps this was meant to show how tough the characters were, or how uncouth; but without some sort of counterweight, all it left me with was a feeling of emptiness -- the story was clever enough that better writing would have made it more memorable and worth reading again.
Copyright © 2006 by David Learn. Used with permission.
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