Anti-Heroes: Kick-Ass 3 #1 Review

As a guy who grew up – and, arguably, grew old – reading superhero comics, it can be hard sometimes to read Mark Millar’s Kick-Ass stories. Because it is all too easy to see myself in pieces of every “superhero” in this book… and every “superhero” in this book is a pretty Goddamned pathetic excuse for a human being.

We’ve got The Juicer: a couch-surfing leech who spends money he should be using to get his shit together on comic books, Blu-Rays and beer. There’s Ass-Kicker, who’s using his low-level of fame (and we’re talking low, citizen superhero makes middle market overnight disc jockey look like Jon Bon Jovi in 1988) to troll for MILFs to bang on the Internet. And then there’s Kick-Ass himself, who uses his father’s death at the hands of supervillains as an excuse to get his own place and to utterly fail to break Hit-Girl out of jail in favor of “training”: working at a fast food joint and arguing about pop-culture ephemera at his local comic store, where they know him by name because he never fucking leaves.

These characters make reading Kick-Ass 3 #1 difficult for its target audience: me, an inveterate comic book geek. And while I have never worn a superhero costume (not even for the purposes of weird sex), I can see bits of myself in all of these losers (I have, in fact, been a middle market overnight disc jockey), and it can make the story a hard go. It is never easy to find yourself faced with your own flaws in a story, particularly when those flaws are embodied by generally ineffective and irritating no-accounts.

That, however, does not mean the story is bad.

Hit-Girl has been captured and jailed following the conclusion of her own mini-series. She has left Kick-Ass her headquarters, her weapons and two million dollars in cash, along with detailed plans to her prison and the request to break her out… which Kick-Ass and his band of “superheroes” immediately fail to do, running like whimpering spastics the instant they see a prison guard. Kick-Ass vows to return after more training, but six months later, he’s still at it, after a fashion: patrolling at night and working fast food during the day, when he isn’t having his buddy Todd take pictures of him brooding at his father’s grave like a “young Bruce Wayne.” Meanwhile, the remnants of his superhero team are killing time watching Marvel movies and getting hammered at Hit-Girl’s secret headquarters, with only Kick-Ass actually doing any superheroing… and even that’s mostly theatrically taking down low-level burglars who are too drunk and passed out to put up a fight anyway. At face value, it’s a pretty ineffectual existence, but Kick-Ass seems to have attracted someone’s attention…

I’ve already said it, but there is no getting around that most of the characters in Kick-Ass 3 #1 are narcissistic, self-absorbed losers with a far higher opinion of themselves and their lives than they in any way deserve. It’s hard to call characters who either use their parents’ death as an excuse to take awesome Facebook selfies, or bemoaning the fact that their parents weren’t killed for giving them a lack of direction in life, as likeable. And any book that populates its ranks of protagonists with – I keep using the word, but it’s really the only one that applies – losers like that is gonna be difficult to really call fun.

But it doesn’t need to be fun to be good. And if you can reconcile yourself with the idea that you’re gonna be taking a ride with these selfish, unlikeable doofuses, there is some good stuff here. Starting with the fact that, in the real world, the odds are that anyone who would put on a rubber pervert suit to go out and fight crime probably would be someone with significant personal issues, and only doing it because they’ve shot their wad at almost anything else they can do. And Millar show us this explicitly; once Kick-Ass and his friends graduate high school, Marty (Battle-Guy from the earlier series) just hangs up the suit and goes off to Harvard, because he can. Dave (Kick-Ass), however, flat-out tells us that he feels he’s screwed up his life so badly, all he has is being Kick-Ass. It might not make these “heroes” likeable, but it feels real, and that’s enough to keep things interesting.

Further, while most of these costumed jerkwads are just cosplaying to have a place to hang and people to hang out with, we see that Kick-Ass has actually improved since his time training with Hit-Girl. He is actually doing superhero shit, like knocking out lights and suddenly appearing like Batman, and making swinging, window-busting entrances like Spider-Man. Sure, even here Millar layers on realism to the scenes – knocking out the lights irritates people who then only give him information so that he’ll go away, and rappelling down the side of a building actually attracts a loud crowd that would have tipped off the bad guy had he been remotely sober and awake – but it’s kinda cool seeing the kid who got his head kicked in the first time he went out in costume actually graduating to things we’ve seen in comics. Sure, Dave is still a self-absorbed, whiny, wanna-be, but now he’s a self-absorbed, whiny, but not completely ineffectual wanna-be… and that’s about as close to real heroism that this guy is likely to get without some serious help.

And while it seems here that Millar has telegraphed the entirety of the story – Kick-Ass gets in over his head with some organized crime group, forcing him to at least try to spring Hit-Girl from prison to get has back and save his ass in the final issue – it’s impossible to read this issue without wondering where Millar will throw some giant, plot-twisting, violent monkey wrench into the works to complicate things, the way he has in all the other Kick-Ass series. It has become its own pattern in Kick-Ass – the pattern where Millar blows up the obvious pattern – which means that no matter how much I dislike the characters, I will be following along to see what’s in store.

For the umpteenth time since we started this Web site, I will place myself in the minority by asserting that I am not a big fan of John Romita Jr.’s art, and there isn’t much in Kick-Ass 3 #1 to change that opinion. His heads and figures are kinda blocky, and his facial expressions sometimes are so exaggerated that they approach caricature – the only way Dave’s buddy Todd is gonna strike fear into the cocaine cartels will be if his giant fucking nose makes them nervous about their supply reserves. But still, there are a couple of cool moments in the art – Kick-Ass blasting into the window looks almost superheroic, and Romita gives a nice nod to his father’s classic Spider-Man No More! cover in a throwaway panel – and Romita’s storytelling and panel layout are clear and simple to follow. But the bottom line is, if you’re a Romita fan, you’re gonna like the art here… and if you’re not, this book ain’t gonna make you one.

How much you like Kick-Ass 3 #1 is probably gonna flow from how much you liked the preceding series. I have been very much up and down with them from the beginning, based almost completely on the fact that there is not a lot to like in any of these “superheroes.” They are self-congratulatory, vainglorious and deluded, doing the right things for the wrong reasons, and doing them badly, when they’re not too wimpy to do them at all. And worse, as comic geeks to a one, they remind me of me in a lot of ways, and it is a hard dollar to get behind characters that whisper, “You’re a loser,” in your ear. But if you can force yourself past that, you’ve got the beginning of another pretty decent deconstruction of superhero comics starting up that you just might like… in spite of the people populating it.