Wanted back

Top-tier and indeed top-shelf Mark Millar freely available again with its original non-movie cover. If superhero comics are wish-fulfilment fantasies for young men, then this is the ultimate superhero comic.

Wesley Gibson lets people walk all over him: he lets his bullying boss walk all over him during the 9-to-5, dead-end endurance test he calls a job, and he lets his girlfriend walk all over him when she's not shagging his best mate – so I guess his best mate’s leaving footprints across his badly bruised back as well.

Then one day the veil is lifted when he suddenly discovers his lineage, for his father was a master assassin – no, THE master assassin – from a cadre of supervillains whom nobody knows exist because they stole our memories both of themselves and of the heroes they'd slaughtered. Now they control the world behind the scenes whilst pirating other dimensions, but one faction amongst them's growing reckless: someone who misses random cruelty and sadistic joy, and wishes to start dishing it out again. Probably should have begun before Wesley found out what he could do, because now he's going to do it. In fact, now he's going to do whatever he fucking well wants to whomever he fucking well pleases. The man has skillz.

Millar mocks us all in our mundane worlds, but don't take offence, relish it. For those who like toilet humour, there's a creature made from excrement that dishes out "death by dysentery".

You'll like the artwork too: spectacular. If J.G. Jones had drawn The Matrix as a comic, you wouldn't have needed to see the film.