Wanted #5

Here we are, ladies and gentlemen, issue 5 of this godawful series. I cannot properly convey how happy I am that there's only one more issue to read after this one. Anyways, onto the review.

This issue was weird for a variety of reasons. On multiple occasions I noticed that various pieces of dialogue didn't really mesh together properly (the earliest example being on page 3). Mr. Rictus, my favourite character, also started acting a tiny bit strangely before his death at the hands of Wesley (I'll get to that later). All in all, I felt that this issue was kind of just a bunch of plot elements hastily glued together haphazardly and sent out to the presses, almost like Millar didn't really care about this issue as much as the others. This feeling is only enhanced by the very anti-climactic climax and boring falling action. Even the surprise twist at the end was uninteresting and kind of out of place.

Let's start with Mr. Rictus' behaviour. Apparently after killing the Professor in the last issue he took the body back to his secret hideout and cooked it. In this issue he proceeds to sit down to a fine dinner of, well, roast Professor, in front of Adam One and The Emperor. I was almost sad to see that The Future wasn't there, but he was unable to attend, having been shot through the head only a few pages earlier. The Emperor just then suddenly realizes that, having usurped the Professor's position as ruler of North America, Rictus has all the Professor's 'super-weapons', which may or may not have been mentioned earlier. These weapons include 'the hammer of hell', 'the golem from space', 'that rainbow-powered continent-smasher', and a 'giant robot octopus'. It's implied that the Professor was the only one with 'super-weapons', which makes me wonder why he wasn't killed earlier- obviously he's way more powerful than the other guys, why had they not banded together and killed him sooner?

But then there's the question of why Rictus decided to cook and eat the Professor. That's not really something you just DO. I suppose it could have been for intimidation purposes, but surely a man as classy as Rictus wouldn't need to make such an ostentatious show of it. And if we accept that the cannibalism was for intimidation purposes, what, then, was his reason for killing the two actors? Yes, I know, it's supposed to be a clever joke that Millar found funny, and to his credit it wasn't awful, but what purpose did it serve for Rictus? Did he just want to show off his new celphalopodian acquisition?

Incidentally, Mr. Rictus continues to have THE best lines. After dropping two old actors (who are clearly supposed to be Adam West and Burt Ward), he covers his mouth with one hand and exclaims "Holy-two-idiots-getting-eaten-by-an-octopus". When Adam One points out that should he start 'taking cities' with the aforementioned 'super-weapons', Rictus expounds very briefly on the passage of years since the super-villain uprising and then simply says "Bring it on". And those were all the good lines in this entire comic.

So at the end there's a confrontation between Rictus, with all his henchmen, and Wesley and Fox. It was horribly boring, and ends with Wesley deflecting a bullet with a goddamn knife and killing Rictus in the single most dissappointing and anti-climactic scenes I've ever encountered in a comic. For god's sake, Wesley takes out all of Rictus' men in two damn pages! There were tons of them, and it took two pages to mow them all down! He did it practically effortlessly, too, and it felt like a bit of a rip-off. The final battle in a comic should NOT go by this fast, look so easy, or be so goddamn boring. And then, after Wesley slit's Rictus' throat, Wesley's dad (who was standing in a distant corner of the room the whooole time, was completely undamaged by any of the fighting and managed to evade detection), starts clapping and is all 'bravo, something something close enough to catch his final, dying breath, something something treats', and I'll be honest, I was barely paying attention to the entire exchange because I was busy wondering how Wesley's dad got into the building in the first place. Just a few pages previous we were shown that Wesley and Fox had to carve a path in order to reach Rictus, and there's Wesley's dad, clapping like a smug asshole and without a scratch on him. I can think of only one reason that he managed to enter the building unharmed and was left to his own devices, and that's that he had some sort of deal with Rictus, and that makes NO SENSE.

In summary, my opinion on this issue is much the same as my opinion of the other issues- it was boring and I hated it.