Moral panics & films & comics

Never mind Kids, teen promiscuity, drug-taking and AIDS-spreading - what I want in a film too hardcore for kids to be allowed in to see it is extreme violence, foul language, and spandex costumes. And so we have Kick-Ass, already getting the Daily Mail in a right old tizzy.

I read the original for Kick-Ass, by Mark Millar and John Romita, quite recently, and thought it was pretty good. It made me laugh outloud once, and chuckle several times. It's got some of the most gory panels I've ever seen in a comic (a fairly mild example on the right). And the story is pretty interesting, even if its central concept (teen dresses up as superhero because he's bored and depressed, gets involved in pretty bad shit) isn't as clever as it seems to think it is.

The reason I read Kick-Ass (I'm not a massive fan of superhero comics, even deconstructionist/revisionist/postmodernist ones, except for Moore and Gibbons' Watchmen) is that Mark Millar's earlier work The Unfunnies is one of the cleverest, sickest, funniest and most fascinating comics I've read for years. Typically, while Kick-Ass is, despite its supposedly controversial content published by Marvel (now owned by Disney), and about to fill every multiplex, The Unfunnies had problems even getting published, and looks unlikely to ever be reprinted. I would have thought that Brass Eye and South Park would have inured people to comic (meaning humorous, here) renditions of paedohphilia, but Millar's use of cartoon animals and their primary coloured-world in a story of child pornography, prostitution, medical malpractice and the occult seems to have been a step too far.

Like the best satires, The Unfunnies forces an examination of moral attitudes and social practices. Inserting social issues into a mode of representation which is usually restricted to certain stereotypical humorous situations forces an examination of how those issues relate to everything else that we do, either in the social world, or in the representations that we consume. Kick-Ass, on the other hand, is just a better take on the same stuff that Heroes ripped off.