Why Kick Ass hurts artists

Rating: 1/10 (16 April 2010)

Kick Ass came out over the weekend and its getting rave reviews from hundreds of papers and online magazines. I see " AMAZING!" and " HIGH OCTANE ENERGY!" amid pictures of AWESOME caped crusaders punching their way through the film's title on posters popping up everywhere.
However, until about two weeks ago I had never even heard of the thing. Kick Ass apparently came from a comic book published a handful of years ago by Marvel. Just one of thousands of titles the publishing company knocks out every year.
Kick Ass is one of those " I'm so smart" satires of the comic book world of characters. They try to create a world where one can simultaneously mock and love people who dress up like Batman or Superman. Where putting a ski mask over your head and fighting evil is both COOL and HILARIOUSLY stupid.
There's an off putting idea out there that if you exist in a world that some people don't understand ( i.e. you draw comics for a living and people mock you) then you must work tirelessly to make them 'understand' where you're coming from. As if you can only be complete in the world where the 'clique' of society, the Pulitzer people, the Paris Hilton groupies, the Times Magazine crowd accepts you as one of their own. If Times Magazine doesn't understand you then there must be something wrong with you! Right? Right? Wrong.
Artists don't need to be understood. Comic artists know that the people who read Oprah Book club novellas do not pick up the latest issues of Batman. Its common knowledge so why do artists continue to tirelessly create something that Oprah will approve of? I don't know but Kick Ass is exactly that.
Satires like Kick Ass are written from the 'wink wink I think comics are dumb too' position. They feed the idea that we're ALL in the same boat of believing that Batman is a hopelessly stupid character and none of us buy his comics. We're cool, just like you. We wrote this book to prove it.
To impound the idea that they're stupid they exaggerate the medium to the point of grotesque mimicry. Such as creating an eleven year old girl character who kills so many people over the course of the story that the only way to make her character seem more alive is to have her use such foul language that even the most perverted pervert in the audience will throw back his head, point at the screen (book) and shout, " Can you BELIEVE she just said that?!" What is the point? The only people who truly like this film are the artists in our community who feel the need to be part of the 'It crowd' ( Yeah, comics are so dumb! I don't know why I do that for a living!), the reviewers who want to mock graphic novels because they can't understand visual arts ( 'Comics are for kids. You really do that for a living?') and the poor people in the middle who can't tell the difference ( Whoa! It was awesome! I liked it when that kid stabbed that guy in the guy and ripped out his beating heart!).
The problem with Kick Ass is that for the thousands, probably millions of people who had no idea what Kick Ass was a month ago, they will see a film where an eleven year old murders people without restraint or second thought. It doesn't matter that the people she kills are depicted as evil. A 24 year old good being killed by a little girl is not cool. Its tragic. Usually its depicted as tragic if its depicted at all.
People will go away with the thought that this blatant, violent, foul mouthed mess of a film came from a comic book. Some people will be misguided enough to bring their kids, thanks to the stylized posters that look much more family friendly then they are, and they will leave the theater in absolute shock, dragging their kids with them. And those parents who probably never bought their child a comic book before will now never EVER buy them a comic.
Films like Kick Ass just play into the media's description that comics are evil, stupid and perverse and, most horribly, all the same.
What a mess.