Kick-Ass 2 Could Have Kicked Ass Better

Contains spoilers for Kick-Ass and minor spoilers for the newly released Kick-Ass 2 (trade paperback). Also some foul language and discussion of sensitive topics like rape. Thanks, Mister Millar.

I don’t completely dislike Mark Millar. For awhile I thought that he was just really hit-or-miss; I adored his work on The Ultimates but absolutely hated Wanted. After reading Kick-Ass 2, I’ve discovered it’s just that I prefer my Millar confined by the limits of writing for an established franchise within the rules of writing for a mainstream big name character or team.

The problem with Millar unleashed and running free is wildly imprinted on Kick-Ass 2 and a huge part of the reason that I just didn’t really like it very much.

Teenage Dirtbag

Kick-Ass was also not my favorite book, but I didn’t entirely dislike it, I just disliked parts of it (and I definitely enjoyed the movie more). The action, of course, was fantastic; action is what Millar and whichever artist he’s working with really excel at. The story was great; the concept of a bored teenager doing a stupid bored teenager thing isn’t very new, but having that thing be fighting crime is pretty novel. Hit-Girl and Big Daddy were great characters and even Dave Lizewski, while on the surface a pretty cliche teenager, ends up being someone interesting to read about, as you realize how deeply his mother’s death and his father’s struggling really affects him, past the teenage ennui.

At the end of Kick-Ass, Dave and Mindy McCready (Hit-Girl), have taken down the biggest mob boss in the city – who just so happened to be the father of Red Mist, Kick-Ass’s turncoat superhero best friend.

Avengers fuckin’ Assemble

Set not too much later after the first book, Kick-Ass 2 opens with Mindy training Dave – she’s given up the superhero lifestyle in an attempt to have a normal 12 year-old’s life but he still needs her help not to totally suck. Dave’s life has reached an odd normality as he lives a double-life a lot more extreme than most teenagers; he sleeps during school because instead of going out at night partying, he’s doing street patrols, superhero team-ups and searching for the perfect Justice League-style Super-Team to join.

The team, Justice Forever, materializes, led by an ex-Mafia thug (who will be played by Jim Carrey in the movie, which is by far the best thing to come out of this book) and quickly recruits Kick-Ass. Now, the bits with Justice Forever are my favorite parts of the book and I’m really sad they don’t last that long. Events rapidly go from good but tense to holy shit that’s dark.

The Mother Fucker

The villain of the piece is Red Mist, now having rechristened himself The Mother Fucker. And what a villain he is. Having been Kick-Ass’s first superhero team-up in the first volume, he has plenty of dirt and info on Dave – not to mention everything Kick-Ass spilled when he was being brutally tortured, also in volume one.

This is where I start really having a problem with the book. Personally I’m not particularly squeamish when it comes to violence or even dark content; but it has to be well done. When things start going bad, really bad in Kick-Ass 2, Millar turns up not only the “sickening violence” that Kick-Ass was literally marketed to have, but the body count. It’s at this point where the bad things just feel gratuitous and no longer like any type of plot development. The scale of the violence is significantly ramped up from volume 1; there’s a rape in Kick-Ass 2 that really turned me on the book. Violence was extreme in Kick-Ass, sure, but there was never plot device rape. Ugh.

The idea is for The Mother Fucker to break Kick-Ass, but we see so little of the emotional aftermath of his crimes that it’s hard to really get emotionally invested. Either when Dave takes a moment to indulge in his emotions, he’s hurried past them (“…but going full-pussy like this is completely unacceptable.” “Get into costume and grow a pair, Kick-Ass.”) or when we do take a page or two to explore how he’s doing, it’s so wooden that it’s not really emotional, thanks to Millar’s lack of being able to write teenagers (specifically Dave interacting with his friends) as anything but tiny assholes. The best parts are between Hit-Girl and Kick-Ass, unfortunately those quickly turn into Hit-Girl suiting back into ultimate badass mode and not allowing emotions from either Dave or herself.

Sidenote: Hit-Girl is the best thing about Kick-Ass, in my opinion. She’s handled pretty well and is a believable character, not to mention being very unique. Though I’m really not into this series any more, it’s enough to make me go pick up her spin-off.

“You are not a superhero, you are a little girl with a personality disorder.”

The ending events of Kick-Ass 2 are awkward and it does finish up as a cliffhanger. The awkwardness of the final big fight aside, I actually sort of liked the ending. While I wouldn’t call it satisfying thanks to the cliffhanging nature, it was interesting and not cliched like so much of the mid-book action was. There’s some great narration by Kick-Ass and some fantastic dialog from Hit-Girl, material that finds all of the high notes of the first book. The ending takes a moment to step back from ‘sickening violence’ and black comedy to focus on the characters, which is something Millar really needed to do more often in this series.

In the end, Kick-Ass 2 definitely helped me release I like my Millar restrained. While I’m going to pick up the next Kick-Ass trade because I’m a completionist (the worst thing to be as a comic book reader), I have no desire to run out and purchase any of his other creator-owned works (Nemesis, Chosen, War-Heroes, et. al.). I guess I’d just rather see Mark Millar with an editor and producing something amazing like Red Son instead of turning to the last page of a trade to literally see the main character breaking the fourth wall to flip me off (I still hate you the most, Wanted).