Mark Millar reviving ‘Kick-Ass’ with black female lead; what could go wrong?!
When Mark Millar isn’t busy ripping off other people’s ideas with a lazy “What If?” twist, he’s usually being problematic in his portrayal of African Americans. When he’s not being problematic in his portrayal of African Americans these days, he’s usually doing something (at the very least) thinly veiled in misogyny. Usually he’s doing all three at the same time within a story’s run. So, you know, what could go wrong with Millar making Kick-Ass‘ new protagonist a black female?! Maybe, maybe the fact that Millar is just going to write the first issue of this new run is portentous of something actually promising. I’m not holding my breath, though.
Mark Millar’s Kick-Ass isn’t just making a return—it’s doing so without its main character, Dave Lizewski, in the Kick-Ass role. This time, the mantle is being passed on to someone entirely different.
Revealed by The Hollywood Reporter, the new Kick-Ass monthly series will feature an entirely new supporting cast, and won’t be set in New York—but the biggest change about the series will be the fact that the person behind Kick-Ass’ green-and-yellow mask will be an African-American woman (although no further details about her have been released yet). Why the change? Millar—who will write the first arc of the series alongside John Romita Jr. on art, before handing over the reigns to writer Daniel Way—wants to make Kick-Ass a “legacy” comic, where the story comes before the identity of whoever is in the costume:
Kick-Ass is like James Bond or Doctor Who where with a new face and a new situation and it suddenly feels very exciting. Every four volumes or so I want a different person in the mask. Sometimes it might even only last a single volume or even a single issue.
Makes sense, especially as, as Miller hinted at, this isn’t the first time he’s returned to the series after it originally ended in 2010; he spearheaded both a Kick-Ass 2 ongoing and a Kick-Ass 3 miniseries between 2010 and 2013. If there has to be more Kick-Ass to come, changing it up with a new lead and new setting is the least Millar can do. The next volume of Kick-Ass begins in January 2017—alongside the first issue of a new ongoing Hit Girl series from Millar and Rafael Albuquerque.