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.

Occasional Personal Discomfort: Powers: Bureau #2 Review

This is a hell of a thing to say, but Brian Michael Bendis’s creator-owned books remind me of having herpes.

Hear me out.

To get herpes, you have to get laid (or really enjoy the taste of toilet seats, but I’m going to assume that if that’s your thing, this isn’t the Web site you’re likely to be visiting, what with the lack of the words, “girl” or “cup” in the URL). And that’s good. But then after a while, there is an itch. And that itch lasts for a good, long while, and while you’re waiting for it to pass, it is maddening. And then one day the itch is satiated, and that is awesome… until the itch comes back. And the itch stays for an indeterminate period of time, until the next respite. Which is great… but the whole time, you’re hesitant to get laid again, because as weird and satisfying as the agony-and-the-ecstacy cycle might be for you, it would be a hell of a thing to pass it on to someone else.

[ED. – Rob – this is STUPID. Bendis’s books have nothing to do with herpes. You just seem to want to write about herpes. Get to the Goddamned point… unless there’s something you want to tell me… Amanda]

Okay, here’s the point: Powers: Bureau #2 is the middle of a story in a book that is known as much for being delayed as it is for it’s general excellence. And this issue delivers the best of Bendis’s dialogue, with delightfully perverse imagery and some well-executed suspense and action, albeit with some leaps in logic and mildly confusing story points along the way. However, this issue was a week late from its last solicitation in November, and while the next issue is currently set for two weeks from now, I’ll believe it when I see it. So even though it’s a good issue, it’s like walking in mid-boink… and not knowing when the itching is likely to stop.

The Cycle Of Abuse – Review Of Hit-Girl #5

[Ed. note – Attention any vigilantes whose crime fetish is knocking out rampant spoiler bombs: I have a taser, a panic room, and a crate of whiskey. Do your worst.]
I have to admit that, although I was a big fan of Mark Millar’s Wanted, when the original Kick-Ass dropped back dropped back in 2008, I didn’t scramble to read it. In fact, it took renting the movie version, or possibly stumbling across it on cable, I don’t know – I drink, what can I say, and Chloë Moretz’s star turn as Hit-Girl, to really draw me in. Sure, the put upon nerd who turns vigilante thing had been done to death, but the little girl who just wanted to please her dad to the point of psychosis? That was new. That wasn’t a sulky teenager with a vainglorious mom like Silk Spectre, involved in the family business because it was expected. This was a young child who’d developed an amazing – and terrifying – skill set. Hit-Girl worshiped her father and he seemed to love the hell out of her right back, with both parties oblivious – in this story about serving justice to criminals – that dad was a perpetrator of systematic, pervasive child abuse.

Don’t believe me? Read Hit-Girl #5.

A Couple of Major League Yobbos: The Secret Service #5 Review

Editor’s Note: Spoilers Galore? I must be dreaming.

When I reviewed Mark Millar’s and Dave Gibbon’s The Secret Service #1 back in April, well, let’s say that I wasn’t impressed. I was unimpressed enough to put the issue, and the series, on my list of biggest comics disappointments of last year. And that first issue was even more disappointing in retrospect; in a year where Sam Mendes made Skyfall, which wasn’t just a good James Bond movie, but was simply a good movie, Millar’s snark-filled, ultra-violent re-envisioning of James Bond as some kind of dickish football hooligan with a mad-on for the chavs or twats or poofs or whatever the hell the English call douchebags became not only unnecessary, but also obviously small-minded and petty.

But hey: that first issue was nine months ago. And I suppose my initial impressions might have been a mistake; after all, I can think of at least one other mistake I could have made nine months ago that I would not only be regretting today, but doing my level best to pretend never happened and if it did, pretending that it in no way applied to me.

So while I did read The Secret Service #2, #3 and #4 and saw nothing there that would make me change my initial impression of the book, I figured I’d check in with the fifth and penultimate issue to really look to see if enough had turned around to recommend it in time for you to get up to speed for the big finale in a couple of months.

Short answer? Nah. While Millar seems to have veered away from the overt lifting his protagonist Gary from Grant Morrison’s character of Dane in The Invisibles, The Secret Service #5 is still a combination of the most adolescent of revenge fantasies, combined with what seems to be a scathing indictment of genre fans and their priorities in life. And when I say “genre fans,” well, if you’re reading a comics Web site and therefore probably have a stack of longboxes in your home? That’s you and me, chief.

I Don’t Believe It, It Must Be True: Hit-Girl #2 Review

I have always had mixed feelings about Mark Millar’s and John Romita Jr’s Kick-Ass. On one hand, I feel like it has a tendency to go for over-the-top, nihilistic violence as a simplistic deconstruction of the superhero genre. Which, while effectively demonstrating that the concept of superheroes in the real world would be somewhat ineffective and silly, means that we’ve gotten a lot of likable characters getting their faces kicked in so that Millar can try to make a point. It doesn’t take a genius to point out that a dipshit with a stick in a spandex suit would lose to the business end of a .45, and after a while, seeing it happen over and over again just feels fucking mean. There’s no great joy or enlightenment in seeing a costumed adventurer you’ve grown to like  getting stabbed and beaten to death; it just feels like the comic writing equivalent of having your head jammed in a junior high school toilet while a jock bellows, “Superheroes are fucking stupid, wuss!”

The best part of the Kick-Ass universe has been Hit-Girl, who is as close to an actual superhero as exists in this world. And even granting that the character was probably only created to show that a kid sidekick would grow up to be hopelessly warped, and that any really effective superhero would need to resort to extreme violence in order to be in any way effective, she provided the only real and exciting superhero action in any of the Kick-Ass miniseries. And while we are only in the second issue of the Hit-Girl miniseries, and while it’s probably safe to say that, as with Kick-Ass and Kick-Ass 2, everything will end in tears, that particular book is simply action-packed, interesting, and just fucking fun. At least, for now.

Putting The Band Back Together: Powers #10 Review

Brian Michael Bendis’s and Michael Avon Oeming’s Powers has been a dicey read for me for a long time now. A comic that started as a unique take on the superhero book, where some regular cops worked regular cases that just happened to involve superhumans and included some of the coolest dialogue you could find in a comic book, it eventually… evolved. Or devolved. Into a book where the regular cops got powers and secret identities, and the compelling partners at the core of the book split up, all while Bendis and Oeming started putting out, say, an issue a year, whether we needed one or not.

If the original Powers arc, Who Killed Retro Girl?, was the comics equivalent of Twin Peaks season one, the more recent arcs have been more like Laverne & Shirley after they went to Hollywood… assuming Garry Marshal had had the brainwave to replace Shirley with The Great Gazoo. Which is somewhat of an unkind comparison, because I always kept Powers on my pull list, because even while the characters shuffled and I lost track of the plot between issues, it still offered some of the best dialogue in comics, and there was always something interesting going on, even if some issues felt less like seeing Muhammed Ali in his prime in 1979 than it did watching Muhammed Ali trying to eat prime rib in 2009.

You get all that? Good. Now forget it all. Because Powers #10 is flat-out the best issue of Powers since the early, early Image Comics days. It has it all: the crackling dialogue, Walker and Pilgrim back together doing interrogations in the box, and real, human stakes behind the superpowers. It is awesome, and one of the best single issues of not just Powers, but of any comic book I’ve read in weeks.

Small Idea Comics: The Secret Service #1 Review

EDITOR’S NOTE: If spoiled, the Director will disavow any knowledge of your actions.

I’m going to get the unpleasantness out of the way up front and recommend that, if you’re interested in reading Mark Millar’s and Dave Gibbons’s The Secret Service, you just skip the first issue of and think about picking it up when the entire story is collected into a trade. Because there’s a glimmer of a decent and potentially fun idea in this issue which might make it eventually worth reading, but it is wrapped up here in a gaggle of thoroughly unlikable characters, derivative plot points, and shock value slapstick violence. It is like watching an episode of Springer where Jerry hands out .44 Magnums; there is a certain level of entertainment value to the spectacle, but of the kind you would never admit to strangers.

The high concept behind this book is: what if James Bond was a real thing in the real world? Which is fine as these things go, but it put into stark relief the kind of comic books that Mark Millar writes when it’s something he owns: books that can be distilled down to the kind of elevator pitch one would make to Michael Bay, possibly while sharing a couple of rails.

Let’s go down the list:

Interruptus: Powers #8 Review

I like Brian Michael Bendis’s Powers a lot. It has been on my pull list at my local comic store, where they know me by name and ask me to stop acting out the term “pull list” in front of the paying customers, for more than ten years. I have all the individual issues that follow the first “Who Killed Retro Girl?” arc back when the book was published by Image Comics. And I even like this individual issue of Powers. But I’m not going to recommend that you buy it.

It is, in fact, all but pointless to buy this book, because it doesn’t matter whether it’s good or not, or if you like it or not. Falling in love with an individual issue of Powers is more pointless than falling in love at summer camp. It’s more pointless than falling in love with a hooker. It’s roughly akin to falling in love with a hooker in a city that isnt your own, that you might come back to in a few years, and as you’re zipping your pants you realize that all you remember is that her name is P-something.

Because this comic book simply. Does not. Come out. Ever.

The Adventures of Hype Man

Mark Millar’s been teasing this for a while, but it was finally “announced” in the back of this week’s sixth issue of Millar’s and Leinil Yu’s Superior: Millar and Dave Gibbons are going to be collaborating on a comic.

The Secret Service, written by Millar with art by Gibbons, is coming out in February under Marvel’s creator-owned comics Icon imprint. It’s gonna be six issues… and that’s about all we know at this point:

We don’t want to give too much away at this stage… you won’t hear anything else about The Secret Service until the middle of November…

The only other tidbit about the book – and it really isn’t even ABOUT the book – is that Millar is auctioning off the right to name the book’s villain to benefit his former school. Right now that bidding stands at $1,625, which is a little pricey… but totally worth it.

Who wants to kick in a few bucks to make Mark spend 120 pages writing a story about the epic adventures of Grant Morrison?

(via Comic Book Resources)