Whether we like it or not, from here on in Marvel Comics and Marvel Entertainment is officially owned by Disney Studios. What effect this will have on the comics and characters as a whole has yet to be fully realized, but many can agree one of the positive outcomes of this new ownership has been “The Avengers: Earth’s Mightiest Heroes” a full fledged action adventure series starring all of the heroes we know and love fighting as one super team against Earth’s most impossible foes.
After a very disastrous animated attempt in the late nineties many fans recall with disgust, Disney has rebooted the animated franchise including all of our favorite heroes the aforementioned series failed to include and have considerably gone all out creatively and artistically. While the series will satisfy fans of the actual title, the intent of the series is to garner brand new fans of the titles and characters being pushed on a kids channel geared toward boys and will undoubtedly win over a brand new generation of true believers.
Okay so I didn’t love the first mini-series/graphic novel from Mark Millar, and sure, I thought “Kick Ass” the movie was pretty crummy, but overall I was pretty interested in seeing where Mark Millar and John Romita Jr. would go with volume two, the highly anticipated follow-up to the comic book series that proved to be most controversial. I mean sure it’s fishy that this came along right after plans for a sequel were talked about, and fine, many of the new characters seem oddly capable of being…oh… put in a movie with a big star at the helm, but nonetheless I was open minded to the first issue of volume two that sticks true to the first arc of the comic book and thankfully doesn’t adhere to the events of the live action movie.
One of the saving graces of “Kick Ass” is the casting of Chloe Moretz, a young girl who manages to completely and utterly steal the show from every single cast member here including Clark Duke, and she’s managed to spawn an unlikely legion of admirers who came to the movie to see a little girl mutilate everyone in her path. While “Kick Ass” never quite manages to muster up the sympathetic story it did in the comics, Matthew Vaughn completely wins over the crowd with Hit Girl aka Mindy, the most interesting character in the bunch who is given the most interesting conflict in the film as this character whose own life manages to play out like a typical hero origin. Little girl loses her mom after her dad is framed for a crime, she’s trained by him to become a killer, the dad dies and she avenges him in cruel and unusual ways. I assumed the girl would hit the big time after seeing her steal scenes from Joseph Gordon Levitt in “(500) Days of Summer” but here Matthew Vaughn shows that he takes the character very seriously and never dodges her sheer brutality in the face of schmoes who happen to come across her blade.
