NEAR-MYTHS: KICK ASS 2 (2012)

 In my review of Mark Millar's first KICK ASS collection, I commented that I didn't think it registered very strongly as either null-myth or near-myth. However, the sequel, while it has a lot of the same schematic feel as the first series (and the movie adapted from it), Millar and his artistic collaborator John Romita Jr do a better job of developing their basic idea.

After the end of KICK ASS, the titular hero briefly retires and leaves the job of superheroing to other vigilantes following his example (the exception being Hit-Girl, a grade-school kid trained to be the ultimate costumed crusader by her obsessed father). But he quickly gets bored and drifts back to vigilante activity. Initially Hit-Girl gives Kick-Ass some training, but her guardian finds out and grounds her. Kick-Ass then contacts other amateur superheroes, and though initially they perform a lot of community service, inevitably they get on the bad side of the underworld once more. Even without their more adventurous activities, Chris, the son of the mob-boss that Kick-Ass and Hit-Girl originally took down, vows to eradicate all superheroes, and assembles a group of ruthless killers to become his "Legion of Doom."

Most of the ultraviolence in KICK ASS 2 is as predictable as what appeared in the first series. But there's a much better development of the two central characters' mundane identities of Dave and Mindy, and Millar devotes more time to understanding the motives as to why numerous amateurs risk their lives to dress up as superheroes. This sociological myth is the only thing that gives the sequel a little more gravitas than the first entry. 

COUPLE MORE QUICKIE REVIEWS

Like this group of quickie reviews I did in May, there's nothing about these items that firmly aligns them, in terms of symbolic discourse, as either near-myths or null-myths, which distinction of course matters only to me.

The Mark Millar/John Romita Jr. KICK ASS is, to my surprise, a decent read, compared to the awfulness of works like WANTED and OLD MAN LOGAN. It had a few decent jokes and it presented its ultraviolence competently, even though the choreography pales next to the collaboration of Romita Jr and that other guy named Miller on DAREDEVIL THE MAN WITHOUT FEAR.

I suspect that even though a lot of Millar's concepts are paper-thin BS like WANTED, he took a little more care when he sought to represent the supposed fantasy of all superhero geeks. The geeks will accept some parody, but how much? Yet how can Millar do parody and still keep using the tropes that make his story work? How can the author put across the notion that amateur superhero Kick Ass, rescued from a burning building by firemen, doesn't just get his mask pulled off by the first fireman to lay hands on him? And will the geeks accept the parody of an ordinary guy who almost gets massacred playing superhero, as long as he's counterpointed by a "real-life" superhero who's a total badass, i.e. Hit-Girl?

Again, I'm not recounting the pretty simple story here. But the biggest laugh I got was the ad slug on the back of the THB for KICK ASS: "the greatest superhero comic of all time." Maybe somewhere in the low nine-hundreds out of a thousand.

Finally, while it's true that there are a lot of superhero stories that are as basic, simple and unadorned as KICK ASS-- which I think Millar truly believes to be representative of the real genre in comics if not in all media-- it's the more complex versions of the genre that have kept me invested for more than fifty years.

I've even less to say about the 2004 TPB JSA: THE LIBERTY FILES. It's another "realistic" Elseworlds effort, and the gimmick by writer Dan Jolley and writer-artist Tony Harris is that back in WWII the various heroes of the Justice Society-- including a non-canonical Batman-- operate primarily as covert government agents in mufti, unveiling their superheroic long underwear only when fighting super-powered Axis agents. Because FILES is two separate stories jammed together, they don't play off one another very well. Harris does pretty but static photorealistic art and Jolley produces wordy Alan Moore naturalistic dialogue, but with less eccentricity. No better or worse than most Elseworlds stories.