Traipse - Millar Cycle - Kick Ass

(The planned post isn’t quite ready, so we’re doing this instead. Sorry that it messes up the transition in the Gilgamesh post, but it still follows thematically)

Because Mark Millar gets it. As a matter of fact, Mark got it way before the rest of us.

-- Rob Liefeld, Introduction to the collected edition of Kick-Ass

A Jack Kirby Transplant

The literature of male impotence is a strange beast, especially when it disguises itself as the opposite.

Ostensibly a power fantasy about a young man turning himself into a superhero, the book portrays protagonist Dave Lizewski as a disturbing and disgusting loner, venting his anger and hatred on the minories that the police don’t care to investigate too hard. If, in fact, the events of the book are really even happening as he portrays them, as his unreliability is established early on in a scene where he stalks a girl he has a crush on to the local tennis club (note how the grip on his racquet echoes the grip of his baton). The book is full of Dave being degraded with sexual insults, his testicles injured, his sexuality being questioned, and all of his reactions are precisely those of someone awful, someone we cannot sympathize with. He is a “nice guy”. Rather than talk to the girl he likes, he stalks he, he pretends to he her “gay best friend”, he dresses up in a costume and shouts at her bedroom window in the middle of the night. Rather than work on his social skills, he digs himself deeper into the online subculture he is invested in, getting dramatically upset about minor details in superhero lore and choosing which jobs to take in the hopes that the women will reward him with sex. He is terrified of African-Americans. In this, Dave is actually in a very strong tradition of masked racists dating back to the early 1900s, when Birth of the Nation presented the KKK as heroes, a band of masked and caped vigilantes who “saved” the south from those horrible freed slaves that were going to ruin the government by voting and putting their feet up on the table.

I had twenty-eight different requests in my inbox, but this one really jumped out at me for some reason. The girl sounded nice. Like maybe she’d go out with me if I sorted this out. That’s all I could think about the whole way over. Supposing she was really, really hot? -- Kick-Ass, Issue # 3

Big Daddy shooting his daughter in the chest to toughen her up

Chris Kyle, in CRAFT International garb

Big Daddy, the violent evolution of Dave, is every bit the monster. To give his daughter an “interesting life” he kidnapped her and turned her into a psychopath with no regard for other human beings. He gives her cocaine to snort before fighting, under the auspices of it being a special scientific formula to help her combat skills. She’s sure to call the Italian mobsters she’s fighting “dagos”, yet another racial insult. He pretends to be a cop who lost his wife in a tragic accident, but he’s really just a nobody with an expensive comic collection. Dave compares him to the Punisher, Frank Castle, an apt comparison in terms of aspiration, if not actual details. Castle was also the idol of “American Sniper” Chris Kyle, whose unit was called “The Punishers”. Kyle hated all Iraqis with a violent passion, and spent a great deal of his service time essentially roleplaying as The Punisher, believing that it was his God given duty to deal out justice to those “savages”. He also details in his autobiography traveling to New Orleans with his brother shortly after Hurricane Katrina, setting up shop on top of the Superdome to kill “looters”. He claims to have killed about 30. Millar’s opinion of Big Daddy doesn’t seem terribly high, as, after being revealed as a huge fraud, is quickly dispatched with a quite graphic shot to the back of the head, echoing the execution of Tuton by Midnighter in one of Millar’s Authority issues.

This rejection of the superheroic encroaching in our world seems a direct reaction to that of his old writing partner, Grant Morrison, who views superheros as the greatest thing ever and cannot wait for their arrival through the vortex into our dimension (more on this to come). Such an optimistic view, while noble in aim and aspirational in sentiment, ignores that the vast majority of superhero comic output much more closely resembles Dave’s battle to feel better about himself: a masked vigilante takes justice into his own hands, beats the shit out of someone they see as a criminal, and leaves the police to clean up the mess, off panel. The reason that, say, Jack Kirby’s New Gods stand out so much is because they deviated from this formula and presented a bizarre take on religion and philosophy alongside said beatings -- which were conveniently all given to the members of an organized crime syndicate or the soldiers of an evil invading planet, so you don’t have to think too hard about the victims (except in a few notable instances, where, for example, the slaves being freed are given the position of prison guard and immediately turn just as bad as their captors). Morrison sees us taking flight alongside these wondrous gods and transcending high above the world; Millar opens his book with a mentally ill man in a Kirby style outfit killing himself trying to fly. The reality is much more likely to be Chris Kyle than Clark Kent. 

But, like a murderer, simply fantasizing would only cut it for so long. --Kick-Ass, Issue #1

In the end, what does Dave’s work amount to? Essentially nothing. Some random mobsters are dead. One guy stopped from getting mugged. A cat saved from a burning building. Big Daddy is dead. A new fashion trend is popular, and inspires an unintentional suicide. He gets beat up by the girl he likes' boyfriend. None of it has come to anything at all. He’s still the same pathetic little monster he was before all of this, jerking off alone in his room.

Whether you like this message or not, Millar’s argument is well made: people like Dave will not be improved by setting themselves up above others, by granting themselves moral authority above others, by presenting themselves as the Savior who deserves your adulation. They aren’t doing it for the right reason. Until they get over the resentment and the anger and the basic shittiness that characterizes their outlook, they’ll never be superheros. Dave is happiest driving around with a pothead, talking about all the great things he’s going to do. Cosplaying is a fun hobby, but planning out the violence you and your pal are going to commit on whatever socially appropriate victims you can find is pretty sick.

A Young Jeffery Dahmer

This is only part of why having John Romita Jr. as the artist is such a coup. I’m not sure who made the decision to draw Dave to look like a teenaged Jeffrey Dahmer, but it works disturbingly well. And as the long-time penciller of Spider-Man, who may as well be the flagship character for whining male sadness, the implied comparison only manages to make Dave look worse. Peter Parker complains, oh yes does he complain. But he also does something about it. He tries. He puts in effort. He has interests outside of his hobby, attending class, studying science, graduating college, becoming a school teacher... He actually talks to women, even. For all his numerous faults, Peter is everything Dave wants to be and isn’t. Dave isn’t proactive enough. Dave won’t grow and change as a person. Everything is someone else’s fault, everything is the world fighting against him, nothing is ever his fault. Peter can’t help but always blame himself for every little thing, and literally his origin story (the real one with Uncle Ben getting shot, not the incidental details about the radioactive spider) is about consequences and taking responsibility for your actions.

It’s strongly implied at the end of issue 1 and in opening parts of issue 2 that the entire series is just a fever dream. Dave finds himself naked, rather than in costume, and his recovery time is remarkably fast and complete for someone having undergone that much  trauma. I haven’t read Kick-Ass 2 or 3, so I’ve no idea if this is expanded on or not, and it doesn’t really matter one way or the other. If it is “all a dream,” it’s still a very sad one.

 

Does Millar hate comic fans? I don’t think so. Other comics by him display a reverence for noble characters like Superman and the ideals he embodies. Dave is a very specific type of fan, the toxic, short sighted, mean, bitter, and quite awful type we’ve probably all met online or in person. The book empathizes with him to the extent of allowing him to tell his story, of allowing the reader to make their own judgements rather than outright condemning him from omniscient third person panels (“The story you are about to read could happen to you, comic reader!”). If anything, the book is a call to do better, to not be Dave Lizewski. Don’t get caught in petty jealousies, don’t sublimate your hatreds into violence, don’t project your inadequacies onto others... Come to terms with your problems and work on them. Read comics, but don’t make reading comics an elaborate fantasy world you retreat into to avoid dealing with the world.

Why? Because there’s worse on the way if you do. If this is what happens to the type who style themselves superheroes, what about those bastards who decide that being gritty 90s anti-heroes is everything they ever wanted?