Review:
Kick Ass: Creating the Comic, Making the Movie

To celebrate the cinema release of Kick Ass, the motion picture based on the celebrated comic series of the same name written by Mark Millar and drawn by John Romita Jr., Titan Books has published Creating the Comic, Making the Movie, a glossy coffee table volume which takes an inside look at the creation of both the comic and film versions of the same story.

The tome’s 176 thick, full-colour pages are bristling with images taken from both the comic and the film. The majority of the text is written by Mark Millar himself, who describes the journey of the story from his original notes to the finished art panels and their big screen equivalents. Along the way we are treated to sidebar notes and comments from artist John Romita Jr., director Matthew Vaughn, screenwriter Jane Goldman and the cast and crew of the movie.

The book is the paper equivalent of the ‘making of’ documentaries and commentaries that you’d expect to find on a DVD. It is littered with interesting factoids and anecdotes about the conceptualisation and realisation of Mark Millar’s story. In fact it turns out that the comic and film were developed side-by-side, with Millar talking to Vaughn about the story’s potential even before the final version is published.

One amusing such factoid is that Mark reveals that the name of the main character was decided by a charity auction – the highest bidder was a real guy named Dave Lizewski, who paid over three thousand dollars for the privilege of having Kick-Ass’s character named after him.

Another interesting piece of the story is that when Matthew Vaughn shopped his script for the film version of Kick Ass around Hollywood, no-one would touch it due to its violent and subversive themes. In the end he had such faith in the material that he financed the film himself from start to finish, independent of the studio system.

One thing that may also surprise people is that Aaron Johnson, the actor cast to play the role of Kick Ass on the screen is actually British, not American. Matthew Vaughn was apparently set on using an American actor, but after endless screen tests couldn’t find the right guy. Then Aaron came in quite late on in the audition process, pretends to be American and Vaughn approved him right away.