Why Doesn’t “John Wick: Chapter 4” Have A Whole Squad of Dogs that Bite People On the Dick?

It's that time again! Time for book announcements:

Clayface: Celebrity Dirt #3 is out now at comic shops and the usual digital platforms. You've still got time to pre-order Issue #4 before its FOC on September 21.

You can also pick up Be Not Afraid in collected edition; DILF in both book and smell form; and put in a pre-order for the collected edition of Dead Teenagers, which will be out in less than a month, on October 6. Pre-ordering Dead Teenagers will make my bosses especially happy with me.

Not too long ago, I realized that I need to choreograph my action sequences better if I plan to keep writing comics. The pleasure of the form very often comes down to human bodies doing impossible and dangerous things, and these are things I need to learn to depict well, or at least better than I currently do.

For this reason, and for no other, I decided to watch the John Wick franchise, which is (I say with respect) the closest thing there will ever be to a live-action superhero comic. It’s put together, not in shots, but in panels — big, showy, hyper-colorful images, each of which depicts one (1) action. Dialogue is minimal — in the first 20 minutes of John Wick: Chapter 4, Keanu Reeves says maybe 15 words, three of which are “yeah” — and the acting is always done with the full body, not the face. Because the content of a scene has to be immediately legible, without words to accompany it, those bodily postures are always exaggerated just a bit beyond how a real person would move. Even the sets aren’t meant to create a world, per se — they’re all information, with every piece of visible set design intended to come into play during a fight. 

This also makes the John Wick series incredibly silly, in that the “story” is just moving Keanu Reeves around between different locations, each of which provides a fresh example of unsafe interior design. There’s a “dance club” that’s just a slippery concrete ledge with a waterfall and a low railing, and sure enough, someone goes over that railing before the scene is over. An “office” is just a corridor of different glass cases containing different bottles of Dan Aykroyd’s Crystal Skull Vodka; the first time Keanu Reeves is thrown through a glass case, causing the case and crystal skull to shatter, you think “oh, no!” And the second, third, fourth, and fifth times, you realize that they just set up an entire hallway full of glass cases so they could throw a guy through them, which is not compliant with OSHA regulations. 

The fight in a knife store ends with a higher-than-average number of knife deaths. I’m sorry to tell you this, but it’s true. I, personally, would postpone my confrontation with legendary assassin John Wick, should he enter a knife store. I would wait until he was out of the knife store, so that he had fewer opportunities and resources for knifing. That’s not what these guys do. 

None of this, however, is the real reason we are gathered here today.