Deluxe Celebrities

Eminem and Halle Berry on “Wanted”

Walk into a major bookstore these days and you’ll probably see a TV playing clips from Wanted, which opens today. Nearby, you’ll see a collection of Wanted, a six-issue comic book published in 2004.

Wesley and Fox are played by James McAvoy and Angelina Jolie in the film version of Wanted, but in the comic (above), J.G. Jones drew them to resemble Eminem and Halle Berry.

But what’s in those pages is very different from what’s on the screen. Both stories begin with a woman named Fox recruiting a cubicle jockey named Wesley Gibson to take his father’s place in a secret society called the Fraternity. The tales diverge from there.

And that’s fine. The producers of this very violent but funny movie had several reasons for not doing a word-for-word adaptation:

1. It would have been too expensive. By changing the Fraternity from supervillains to assassins, the producers saved a heck of a lot of money on costumes and makeup. Instead, they shelled out for cool effects and stunts.

2. It’s a comic book about comic books. The original Wanted satirizes everything from Adam West’s Batman to DC Comics’ Crisis on Infinite Earths. Just about everyone in it is based on a DC character, including representations of Bizarro and Clayface whose names are too vulgar for us to print. The movie has no trace of these references.

3. A movie needs a good guy. Even though he’s an assassin, the movie version of Wesley has a moral basis for his actions. You can root for him. But in the comics, he robs, rapes and kills innocent people without a second thought. And his enemy – Mr. Rictus, an amalgam of the Joker and the Red Skull – is even worse: He’s a cannibal.

So why read Wanted? I was asking myself that as I slogged through all the sex and violence. Then I read the last two pages, which really threw me for a loop, but in a good way. Of course, that’s just me. In the end, you may find it to be just a big pain.