Superhero Fiction and Vigilante Reality: Self-Referentiality and Quixotism in Millar and Romita Jr.’s Kick-Ass

Abstract

In Millar and Romita Jr.’s Kick-Ass comics series, Dave is an ordinary kid in New who loves reading comics and discussing them with his friends. At home, his situation is not ideal: his mother has died due to a brain haemorrhage and his relationship with his father, James Lizewski, is strained due to unresolved mourning and poor communication. The situation in his immediate social context is, moreover, rather dire: Dave is a witness of daily injustice and crime, which often leads him to wonder why there are no costumed vigilantes in the real world. When Dave creates a double-identity as a masked vigilante and eventually ventures to the streets at night to fight crime, he relies on comic books such as Spider-Man as if they were instruction manuals on how to be a superhero, but reality immediately strikes back with brutal consequences. In a way, Kick-Ass is an ode to a comics genre, acknowledging is most salient plot features, its wacky characters and worlds, and its history as a medium. However, this complex web of self-referential elements also configures an interesting argument of why superhero stories are, precisely, stories, and why this kind of fictional narrative is incompatible with the real world. Therefore, the aim of this article is twofold: first, the discussion focuses on analysing how Kick-Ass identifies, highlights and emulates elements from the superhero and vigilante archetypes, to then focus on theories of self-referentiality which allow for a study of the critical commentary that the work makes of its own medium and genre. Finally, the discussion will turn towards the ideological dimension of the work, focusing on the extent of Kick-Ass’s cynical take on real-life superheroes, its terms, warnings, and optimism.