Warning: spoilers for John Wick #1-5!
Audiences who watched the first John Wick movie know and understand John Wick’s affinity for his pet beagle, Daisy, but that affinity goes far deeper than even the movie suggests. It was established in the first movie that despite his stoic nature, the former hitman is able to find his softer side through his late wife’s final gift to him before she died. Yet, the 2017-18 comic mini-series adds layers to the idea, suggesting that perhaps Wick always had a softer side for animals.
The team of Greg Pak, Matt Gaudio, and Giovanni Valletta delivered a five-issue John Wick mini-series prequel that highlights how the title character first got involved with The Continental. As often are typically his motivations in the movie trilogy, a younger John Wick is on a quest for vengeance against three men and a lady named Calamity who unleashed hell upon a village when he was a child, taking 53 innocent lives with them. It is through these central plots that not only does the mafia manipulate their way into Wick’s life, but the comic also builds upon and re-contextualizes key ingredients to the John Wick character.
Among those key ingredients is John Wick’s connection to animals. As previously stated, the first movie suggests that John Wick’s connection to his dog is something unique to the connection he had to his wife and, beforehand, the concept of bonding with any animal was foreign to him. As seen in the original movie, when Daisy first arrives on his doorstep, John Wick is as confused and perplexed at the sight as anyone else in the same situation would be. However, after breaking down in tears at the sight of his late wife’s letter which accompanied the dog, John warmed up to Daisy rather quickly. It’s as if he was able to bond with the dog despite his cold disposition and violent tendencies. But the first couple of issues of the comic book mini-series contradicts this previously foreign connection by illustrating that John Wick has not only always had a softer side for animals, but he’s also a cat person.
Issues #1 and #2 of John Wick feature the title character’s sole interactions with animals, specifically cats, throughout the entire series. First, in John Wick #1, a young John Wick busts into an empty apartment hoping to find and kill Pecos – one of the men who shot up the village when Wick was a child – but instead finds a cat. He spares the cat and leaves, but later when he returns and finishes the deed, the cat warms up to him whilst John is unphased by the gesture. In John Wick #2, he encounters a stray black and white street cat moments before he prepares to slaughter the respective gangs of Pecos’ cohorts, The Two Bills. Despite the rage filling his heart as he’s getting ready to commit murder, John still takes a moment to pet and feed the cat first.
These brief moments manage to add context to John Wick’s interactions with Daisy without destroying the movie’s prior meaning. The dog isn’t so much a contradiction of John Wick’s prior life as an assassin as much as it is a reminder of his humanity. John always had this part of himself and by caring for cats moments before he lets bloodshed rain down from the sky, it prevents him from steering too far into the dark side. Readers never see The Two Bills, Calamity, or Pecos interact kindly with any animals during the miniseries, but John Wick does. The difference between all five assassins is that John Wick maintains at least a slice of humanity that he can only find through caring for pets.
