My friend Colleen and I went on a girls’ ski getaway recently. We’d both been working really hard and we deserved a little down time. She had just bought a car and part of the deal was that she got a free overnight – with food – at one of NH’s few remaining grand resorts. So I packed a few comics, said goodbye to my husband and son and headed up to ski country.
It just seems wrong to have this on the same page as Kick-Ass
We had a great time. NH was experiencing some of that rare warm early spring weather, so the skiing was glorious. It had been years since I skied, so I felt a little like Bambi crossing the pond in the old Disney movie, but after a while I sort of got the hang of it. That was at about the same time I realized I was exhausted and that ended the skiing.
So we had a drink and went back to the resort and an amazing thing happened. It’s something that only happens when two adult women are between the post-ski nap and a five-star dinner at an idyllic North Country resort that has no televisions…
Get your mind out of the gutter. I’m not talking about THAT.
I’m talking about THIS:
Here's Colleen reading MY book
So I’m in the shower and I can I can hear laughing in the other room and I’m thinking, ‘What the hell?’ Then I hear laughing again. And when I’m all done and dressed I go into the room and that is what I find: my friend of 22 years who has never – at least in her adult life – read a comic book. She’s reading “Kick-Ass” (before I have even read it mind you, but I was OK with that) and she’s halfway through it. And she’s laughing.
Ian says this comic book thing may be contagious, and he may be right. I can’t remember if I had to wait to go to dinner while Colleen finished Kick-Ass or if I had to wait to go to breakfast, but I had to wait while she finished it. She declared it terribly violent, a really good story and said she liked it.
And that about sums it up: Kick-Ass, by Mark Millar and John Romita Jr., is a funny, brutal, engrossing, violent, inventive, bloody, wonderful book.
The character of Dave Lizewski is really well-crafted. Millar’s writing captures all the angst and naivete of an average teenage fanboy who wonders why no one has ever tried to be a superhero. Perhaps, it’s because, as we see in the first panels, putting on a costume and strapping on wings doesn’t mean you can fly. But Dave thinks if you put on a mask and help people, it makes you a superhero. He finds out of course, it’s not quite that simple.
Along the way he meets Hit-Girl, a foul-mouthed, limb-slashing, 10-year-old Dave describes as “John Rambo meets Polly Pocket,” and her father Big Daddy, some bad guys and another superhero wannabe, Red Mist, who appears out of nowhere in the Mustang-like “Mist-mobile.”
The illustrations are great, the coloring fabulous and the dialog spot on. The movie is soon coming out and I wonder what Hollywood has done with the book, but apparently Mark Millar was very involved in the whole process, so I’m expecting good things.
Colleen’s agreed to go see it with me. My husband, who hasn’t read the comic, only seen the trailer, wants to go too.
My son also wants to see the movie. He is midway through the book after I withheld it from him until he caught up with some missing homework. It was pretty effective. In the past, I’ve tried grounding him, to no avail. He just kind of goes, “Meh” and he’s on his way. When I held up Kick-Ass and said he had to get through another 100 pages of “Catcher in the Rye” before he could read it, I could tell by his eyes I’d hit a nerve. “That’s a REAL punishment” he complained.
Hey, sometimes you just have to use tough love – and kick ass.
