Movie News
“Kick-Ass”: Mark Millar Interview
Last week, Ain’t-It-Cool-News said that Matthew Vaughn (Stardust) will be co-writing (with Jane Goldman) and directing a big screen adaptation of Mark Millar and John Romita Jr.‘s “Kick-Ass.” Now, Millar has addressed the rumor at Newsarama.
Newsarama: First off Mark, this is the first title in your second “wave” of Millarworld titles, correct? Is this an all-new concept for this new collection of titles, or something that you had back when you were launching the first wave and have updated?
Mark Millar: Kick-Ass is the fourth book in the first phase of my creator-owned plans. Ashley Wood and I had talked about doing something, but it never worked out and the ideas were broken up and used elsewhere. So this is a brand new concept and the official fourth Millarworld title created to take the place of Run. It’s a story I’ve had gestating for quite a while and is really the simplest idea in the world.
NRAMA: So spill…
MM: It’s about a sixteen year old kid who is so into comics that he just makes himself a costume, paints up a baseball bat and goes out looking for trouble. He decides to become our world’s first superhero. On the face of it, it sounds ridiculous, but the notion of an ordinary, non-powered human being going out and trying to help people has been done in everything from the original Atom to Batman. In many ways, it’s my favorite kind of superhero story because the potential for drama is enormous. This guy hasn’t been injected with super-soldier serum or rocketed from a dying world. He just does 100 press-ups every night and maybe takes karate lessons and tries to eat healthily and so he’s massively, massively vulnerable. It’s really the most incredibly obvious idea and I’m amazed nobody has ever done this before, but the book just feels so unlike any superhero comic I’ve seen before. I don’t play it for laughs at all. It’s too easy to take the piss out of something like this. I just play it absolutely straight and use this as a starting point in the story… imagine this kid going out there with his mask and his baseball bat. What would happen next? The obvious answer, of course, is incredible violence and that’s where the fun begins. This book breaks down everything we love about superheroes and builds it all up again in a new way. We’re very excited about it. Johnny and I both think we’ve stumbled onto something potentially enormous here. [more…] 
