One odd thing about Mark Millar's career is that he hasn't actually created all that many original characters.  There's some 2000AD work, of course, and he co-created Aztek with Grant Morrison.  But pretty much all of the work that's made his name has been with other people's characters.

Now, Millar is setting out to change that with his four "Millarworld" books.  Different formats, three different publishers, but unified by the fact that they're original creator-owned Mark Millar ideas.  First onto the shelves is the six-issue miniseries Wanted, a collaboration with JG Jones.

Hapless nerd Wesley Gibson leads an utterly miserable life of boredom and humiliation.  His boss laughs at him and his girlfriend cheats on him.  Life is shit.  But everything changes overnight when Wesley discovers that he's inherited the fortune of the absentee father who, it turns out, was actually one of the world's top supervillains.

In other words, it's a Mark Millar version of "One day my real parents will take me away and I'll become a princess."  But because it's Millar, Wesley gets to be a gun-toting leatherclad psycho instead.  Something that he doesn't seem altogether happy about, it must be said.

None of this will come as a particular surprise to anyone who's familiar with Millar's work.  Millar often seems to approach superheroes on the basis that superheroes are a reader's power fantasy, and who'd want to fantasise about being Superman when you could just destroy everything in sight with impunity like the Authority?  Or, indeed, like the villains.  Frankly, if you're going to have inane power fantasies, the villains make much better material for it than the heroes, most of the time.  Sinister plot elements as dark fashion statements is one of Millar's favourite devices, consciously or otherwise.

This sort of cynical, over-the-top black comedy is pretty much standard in Millar superhero comics, and Wanted is no exception.  That said, it does work rather better here than it has in some other titles he's written in the last few years.  On books like Ultimate X-Men, I could never quite shake the feeling that the main point of the exercise wasn't the characters, but the unutterable coolness of Mark Millar.  He often seemed to approach everything with an unhappy layer of irony that resulted in stories a bit short of genuine emotion.

You could say much the same thing here - Wesley's dismal relationship with his girlfriend has no emotional content and is simply a shorthand for comedy emasculation, for example.  But Wanted's characters were built to work on this level, and as a result it seems less artificial.  It's still ultimately an exercise in tongue-in-cheek cynicism, and it doesn't benefit from a needless riff of Bizarro (yes, yes, he's called Fuckwit, that's hilarious).  But this is one of Millar's favourite themes being allowed to shape a miniseries, rather than trying to hammer existing concepts to fit.

JG Jones, of course, is a fantastic artist for this kind of story.  He manages to hit precisely the right tone where his world looks real and yet somehow shifts seamlessly to accommodate gun-toting costumed supervillains.  It's deadpan art, which largely leaves the jokes at the idea level and presents everything as if it were perfectly normal.  That's the best way to go with something like Wanted, which could easily come across as hopelessly broad if it was played more explicitly for laughs.

If you don't like Millar's writing then this probably won't change your mind; it's essentially the same sort of thing you've seen before, but presently rather more directly.  But if you did like that kind of thing in Millar's other superhero comics, then you'll probably love this - and it does have great art.

Rating: A-

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