Comics / Comic Reviews / Marvel Comics

Kick-Ass 2 #3

By Hervé St-Louis
September 5, 2011 - 12:43

While Kick-Ass learns about what it means to be a super hero helping others, one of his new ally from his new band of fellow vigilantes gets a visit from a new breed of super villains headed by an old ally of Kick-Ass.  If the Colonel, the strongest and most experimented vigilante of the bunch can fall easily, can Kick-Ass and the other vigilantes resist the onslaught of the new villains?

Millar continues with the over the top and just shocking visuals that have made his work so popular with Hollywood. If you thought that a dog biting the genitals of a man was rough the last issue, this issue, you’ll see a lot more that can be done with a dead dog and his owner. It’s creepy but meant to show us that the villains mean business. And that’s the problem. We know, from their posturing that they are sick bastards. We know it’s a bloody war. So how does showing us even more gore and retarded action and creepy dismemberment help the reader get the story? Is showing us how tough the villains are a way to make us fear for the fate of Kick-Ass? I mean, by the end of this series, he’ll probably lose an eye or a foot. We can expect that much. So how is it that all this gore help the story in anyway? Millar just shoves violence and gore for the sake of it. It doesn’t really help explain the characters’ motivations or establish a plot point. Well, ok. We know the new villains are bad mother*ckers and that they took out the Colonel rather quickly.

Here’s something that I noticed that I rarely pay attention to usually. The entire comic book is one big advertisement for other projects Millar has worked on with Marvel Comics. I couldn’t find any of the current slurpee ad or anything else but stuff related to Millar. This is getting ridiculous and the gore in this issue only helps to elevate Millar as some kind of grand master of gore and over the top violence. It’s funny as I write this because I’m usually quite desensitized to this stuff, but here I am yapping like a Baptist preacher on Sunday morning about the way Millar’s Kick-Ass has crossed a line.

Well, to be honest, I still enjoyed the book. It was the first one I read this week. The story of this kid dressing up as a super hero is still interesting and if this is not this generation’s Peter Parker, I don’t know who is.

Romita here is more polished than his recent work on the Avengers which is not looking too good. The storytelling is good. It seems that series like this one are better suited for the man than stuff like the Avengers where there are as many characters to draw but on a larger scale. Here, the scale is human. These goons in costumes still look good in them and if Romita has a weakness it’s that. They still look like super heroes instead of idiots dressing up with pantyhose Lulu Lemon gear.

Rating: 8.5 /10

Last Updated: August 31, 2023 - 08:12