Oh ok. Also this was about a week ago and i;m just thinking off my head that is said something to the effect of, he was a presbyterian and that he was maimed in a lab accident and was dead for 5 minutes or so. and when he was revived he ha realized there was no God on the other side or something like that. feel free to correct me.
I am unfortunately disappointed to report that you are CORRECT.
Professor Solomon Seltzer said:
"It's not that he became embittered after being so horribly disfigured. He just died for a moment on the operating table and recognized the pointlessness of existence.
He discovered that there was no God or Heaven. In fact, no anything that he'd been promised for his lifetime of groveling servitude."
See, I'm disappointed because it's just another example of occasional shoddy writing from Mark Millar, simply because he felt the need to shoe-horn in more 'shocking' material.
The thing of it is that Millar likes making blunt statements to get a point across in his expositional dialogue. The problem is that occasionally it leads to an occasional inconsistency or two. Most of the time, such problems are easily dismissed away by some kind of No-Prize type explanation. Regardless, it's still a bad habit: he has an inability to go back and double check/edit his writing simply because he wants to make a blunt point at a later point in his story.
On the other hand, I completely disagree about the
Wanted's ending being 'bad' or anything like that. Think of the entire story as not an 'anti-hero' book, but an anti-superhero book. Which is what it really is --- the Origin of a Supervillain.
In superhero stories, we get great powers and great responsibility and the death of a father figure and the struggles of a boy trying to become the man he deserves to be and all that yada yada. In a supervillain story, we get great powers and great entitlement instead. The jerk thinks he's graduated to being a real man, when he's just a jerk with the ability to be a Big Jerk.
Remember that Wesley Gibson is basically a low-life schlub with no future, no hopes and all that. His ascension into the extraordinary is led not by father figures, but by people who teach him how to be a big ****ing dickwad. And he proves that he's finally the man he wants to be by wasting everybody else before they waste him.
Wesley Gibson is a supervillain and even though he's the PROTAGONIST of the story, it doesn't necessarily mean we're supposed to be rooting for him. In fact, we're supposed to HATE him. If the end of a superhero story is good triumphs over evil and readers feel good, then the end of a supervillain story is evil triumphs and we all feel like crap.
As Millar puts it,
Mark Millar said:
So the thing that always bothers me about... even films like The Godfather which are fantastic movies... is you know, they really make these guys a lot more heroic than they should be if they are the bad guy. So in the end we REALLY shouldn't empathize with these guys and think, "Yeah! That's really brilliant, you showed them!" We should really kinda hate them in a way and that's what I wanted Wanted to be at the end. That's what I wanted to do you know, just maintain that reversal through the whole thing."
