Kick-Ass

AUTHOR: Millar, Mark

ARTIST: John Romita, Jr. (illustrator); Tom Palmer (inker); Dean White (colorist); Chris Eliopoulos (letterer)

PUBLISHER: Marvel Comics

FIRST SERIAL PUBLICATION: 2008-2010

FIRST BOOK PUBLICATION: 2010

Publication History

Originally serialized in eight issues released between February, 2008, and February, 2010, Kick-Ass is a creator-owned series resulting from a collaboration between writer Mark Millar and illustrator John Romita, Jr. Millar said the origin of the series came from an idea spawned with a schoolmate at the age of fifteen, when they both believed the profession of “superhero” to be a legitimate career option. Millar went on to become one of Marvel’s preeminent writers in the twenty-first century, working on titles from the epic Civil War (2006-2007) to The Ultimates (2003-2007), while also working on his own creator-owned comics such as Wanted (2003-2005), The Unfunnies (2004-2007), and Chosen (2004; reprinted as American Jesus, 2008).

In 2004, Millar and Romita collaborated for the first time on Marvel’s Wolverine, on the “Enemy of the State” story arc. Millar began working on the script for the first issue of Kick-Ass in 2007, and Romita joined soon after, lending a sense of gritty, hyperrealism to the artwork. The first issue was released in February of 2008, through Marvel’s creator-owned imprint, Iconic Comics, and, despite the protagonist being a previously unknown entity, went on to have surprisingly strong sales of roughly sixty thousand for the first issue. This was due largely to an extensive online guerrilla-marketing campaign conceived by Millar and Romita. Also in 2007, Millar was introduced to film director Matthew Vaughan. A plan for an independent film, helmed by Vaughan, was conceived, and the remaining issues of the comic were written as Vaughan and screenplay co-writer Jane Goldman worked with Millar to develop a film adaptation. Millar has said that the second half of the comic (issues 5-8) has scenes that were initially found only in the screenplay and that there was some back and forth between both writing teams. The final issue of the comic was released the month prior to the film’s March, 2010, release.

Plot

Kick-Ass follows the life of teenager Dave Lizewski as he attempts to become a vigilante “superhero” in New York City. When not in high school, Dave spends his free time lifting weights and training to become a masked crime fighter. Within months, Dave’s dreams are seemingly ended, however, as in his first encounter with criminals he is severely beaten, stabbed, and eventually struck by a car.

An infirm Dave remains in the hospital for months as he undergoes extensive surgical operations, including the fitting of three metal plates inside his head. Upon returning home, he initially resolves to never again don the mask and suit, but as soon as he is off crutches, he is back on the streets, patrolling. Dave quickly stumbles upon a gang viciously beating someone and, using his clubs, manages to defend the victim until the gang is forced to disperse. Footage of the fight, captured on video by someone with a cell phone, is subsequently uploaded to the streaming video site YouTube, where Dave’s heroics quickly make him a viral-video sensation.

With added confidence from his superhero persona’s overnight celebrity, whom the media has taken to calling “Kick-Ass,” Dave utilizes popular social networking site Myspace as a way for people to enlist the help of Kick-Ass. On his first mission, Dave is overwhelmed by a gang after entering their apartment. As Dave is about to be murdered, a young girl, also dressed in superhero garb, comes to Dave’s aid. The girl, known as Hit-Girl, proceeds to ruthlessly dispatch the gang members through her skilled use of samurai swords. As she prepares to flee the scene, she informs Kick-Ass that they are on the same team. She makes a getaway with her partner/father, a man named Big Daddy.

While Dave attempts to resolve moral issues surrounding his involvement in Hit-Girl’s murder of the drug dealers, it is revealed that the dealers were in the employ of crime kingpin John Genovese, and they were the most recent of twenty-two criminals in Genovese’s network who had been murdered in the preceding six months. Security cameras from other murder scenes show Big Daddy and Hit-Girl as the murderers, and Genovese demands the vigilantes’ heads.

After a new hero, Red Mist, appears on the scene and takes part in a publicized collaboration with Kick-Ass, Hit-Girl persuades Big Daddy that they should form a “superteam” with Kick-Ass and Red Mist. When Red Mist and Kick-Ass go to meet the other heroes at Big Daddy and Hit-Girl’s hideout, they are ambushed by Genovese’s men, who proceed to shoot Hit-Girl and take Big Daddy and Kick-Ass prisoner. It is revealed that Red Mist is really Chris Genovese, the son of John Genovese.

The gangsters proceed to torture and interrogate Big Daddy and Kick-Ass, before executing Big Daddy. Kick-Ass attempts escape and is about to be shot when he is saved by Hit-Girl, whose Kevlar-lined costume had saved her. The duo proceeds to dispatch the entire Genovese crime family, leaving Red Mist the only one alive, though badly beaten.

After defeating the Genovese family, Kick-Ass and Hit-Girl become more popular than ever. Hit-Girl attempts to return to the life of a normal ten-year-old girl and moves in with her mother. Kick-Ass gets humiliated at school and is once more beaten up, though at the end of the book his overall attitude is positive, as his alter ego has inspired a cultural phenomenon. An epilogue shows Red Mist vowing to get revenge on Kick-Ass.

Characters

•Dave Lizewski, a.k.a. Kick-Ass, is a physically average, sixteen-year-old high school student and the eponymous protagonist of the series. Aspiring to be like the heroes of his beloved comic books, he takes to wearing a scuba suit and patrolling the streets of his city, looking for crime to fight. After becoming involved with Hit-Girl and Big Daddy, Dave finds himself in the midst of a brutal war between the crime-fighting, father-daughter duo and John Genovese, a powerful crime lord.

•Mindy McCready, a.k.a. Hit-Girl, is a ten-year-old girl and costumed hero who is highly skilled in a variety of martial arts. Despite her young age, she proves herself as a capable assassin numerous times throughout the book. Her proclivity toward violence, instilled by her father, saves both Kick-Ass’s and her own life.

•McCready, a.k.a. Big Daddy, an older vigilante, has been training his daughter, Hit-Girl, to become a lethal human weapon. He is adept with various firearms and finances his fight against John Genovese with the mysterious contents of a large, silver suitcase.

•John Genovese is a powerful New York City crime boss. He is the father of Chris Genovese/Red Mist and is the primary antagonist of the story. Prone to violence, he will dispose of enemies with his own hands, if necessary. Genovese is killed when Hit-Girl puts a meat cleaver through his head.

•Chris Genovese, a.k.a. Red Mist, is the son of crime boss John Genovese. Initially presenting himself to Kick-Ass as a fellow superhero named Red Mist, he quickly betrays Kick-Ass, Big Daddy, and Hit-Girl, leading to the death of Big Daddy and the final confrontation between the heroes and the Genovese crime syndicate. The end of the book shows him severely beaten by Kick-Ass, though still alive. In the epilogue, Red Mist vows revenge against Kick-Ass.

Artistic Style

Pencilled by Romita, a renowned comics artist with a career that began in 1977, Kick-Ass was the second collaboration between Romita and Scottish writer Millar. Kick-Ass is illustrated with a grittiness meant to recall the urban-crime works of comic writer/penciller Frank Miller and film director Martin Scorsese.

Kick-Ass is set in the real world, as opposed to the more fantastic, brightly colored worlds of traditional superhero comics, and its art is full of dark tones, crowded action, and gratuitous amounts of ultraviolence. The violence found in Kick-Ass is shown to have real-world, often devastatingly brutal, consequences. This is first exemplified in chapter one, when Dave is stabbed and then struck by a car. His subsequent injuries are realistic: He is in a hospital bed, in and out of surgery for months, and then must endure months of more physiotherapy. In the world of Kick-Ass, much like the real world, getting hit in the face—standard fare for most superhero comics—entails drastic physical consequences, such as lacerations, contusions, and fractured bones, all of which are extremely detailed by Romita. Romita’s violence is aestheticized in dense, near-claustrophobic panels, and geysers of blood spout accordingly.

Although much of the violence, especially that revolving around the destruction caused by the pint-sized Hit-Girl, is treated with an almost deadpan sense of macabre absurdity, as the book draws to a close, there are some particularly harrowing moments of horrific torture violence, specifically the attack on Hit-Girl with a meat tenderizer, the electroshock torture of Dave’s testicles, and an extreme close-up on the execution of Big Daddy. At these points, the violence of the art serves to emphasize the real-world consequences that come with donning a mask and cape and taking a stand against violent crime.

Themes

Why do superheroes exist only in the pages of comics and in movies? That is one of the main questions raised by Dave and the book in general. What keeps the majority of the populace interested in celebrity gossip, while devastating crimes are committed daily? Dave laments how in the halls of his high school he sees scores of people emulating vapid celebrities. Dave attempts to counter this apathy in his personal life by becoming Kick-Ass, and in doing so, he inadvertently inspires a cultural phenomenon in which people begin to dress up like superheroes. While Dave is patrolling as Kick-Ass, however, those who follow Dave in dressing like superheroes spend their time engaging in online forum discussion and generally remain just as self-absorbed as they were before Kick-Ass became popular.

The self-absorption of others is in stark contrast to Dave, who is a naïve, if well-intentioned, youth at the start of the book but, by the end, has witnessed and been complicit in many acts of violence and murder. The repercussions of the violence are shown, as Dave is severely injured many of the times he puts on his costume and attempts to fight crime. His injuries leave his father with staggering medical bills—another realistic consequence usually glossed over in comic books.

Another theme concerns communal culpability and apathy. If indirectly, the book touches on the so-called bystander effect (also known as Genovese syndrome), a social psychology theory that asserts that the more people who are witnesses to or who are within earshot of someone in distress, the larger the proportion of bystanders who will ignore the distress cries, as they feel that surely someone else in the community will answer the call.

At the end of the story, even though Dave claims that Kick-Ass has inspired a legion of people such as him to stand up and fight crime, and that “heroes” now walk the streets openly in costume, the majority of these costumed people are shown to be severely out of shape, some obese. One of these self-appointed “heroes” even leaps off a skyscraper, to his death, as he had deluded himself into thinking he could fly. The lasting effect of Kick-Ass’s highly publicized foray into superheroics is left open at the end of series. Red Mist’s closing threat seems to imply that there can be no superheroes without supervillains and that escalation of antipathy is inevitable.

Impact

Upon its initial release, Kick-Ass broke all expectations for the comic’s possible performance, with sales almost ten times as high as expected. The sales continued to increase with each subsequent issue, and a strong online buzz was generated prior to the release of each issue. As each single issue increased in popularity, the talks of a film adaptation generated much anticipation among fans. The film’s production wrapped before the final comic was released, and the film was released within a month of the final comic. At the time of the film’s release, some comic writers, including series writer Millar, believed that this relatively short lag time between the creation of an independent comic series and the adaptation into film form would become increasingly popular.

With its big-screen adaptation a large financial success, with strong box-office and home-video sales, Kick-Ass was part of a new wave of graphic novels to be successfully adapted within a relatively short period of time. After the film adaptation, Kick-Ass continued to have successful sales runs in both its collected paperback and hardcover editions. A sequel, Kick-Ass 2: Balls to the Wall, began in serialized form in Millar’s British comic magazine CLiNT in late 2010. Millar has stated that he envisions the entire Kick-Ass series as a trilogy of books, with Balls to the Wall being the second entry.

Films

Kick-Ass. Directed by Matthew Vaughan. Marv Films/Plan B Productions, 2010. The film adaptation stars Aaron Johnson as Dave/Kick-Ass, Christopher Mintz-Plasse as Red-Mist, Mark Strong as John Genovese, Chloë Moretz as Hit-Girl, and Nicolas Cage as Big Daddy. Developed at the same time as issues 5-8 of the comic, the screenplay influenced the comic series. The endings of the comic and the film differ in terms of exact events but remain the same in spirit.

Further Reading

Azzarello, Brian, and Lee Bermejo. Joker (2008).

Azzarello, Brian, and Eduardo Risso. 100 Bullets (1999-2009).

Millar, Mark, and J. G. Jones. Wanted (2003-2004).

Bibliography

Millar, Mark, and John Romita, Jr. Kick-Ass. New York: Marvel, 2010.

Millar, Mark, et al. Kick-Ass: Creating the Comic, Making the Movie. London: Titan Books, 2010.

Skinn, Dez. Comic Art Now: The Very Best in Contemporary Comic Art and Illustration. New York: Collins Design, 2008.