Kick Ass (D :The comic, not the movie.) I'm not sure whether writer Mark Millar is Stupid-Smart or Smart-Stupid. By which I mean he's either too stupid to understand one of the underlying requirements of a compelling story is to create characters a reader can form some kind of empathy with. While being smart enough to know how to pander to an adolescent (in mentality if not in age) readership by filling his comics with lovingly rendered scenes of people being shot in the balls, fried in the balls, shot in the face, having various body parts removed by knives, having a ten-year old girl get shot and beaten, etc.

OR: He's just smart enough to know that if he fills a basic superhero trope-what if superheros really, REALLY, really, no-Watchmen-post-modern bullshit-here with all sorts of post-modern references-exist, like having his protagonist become famous over YouTube, his characters face off over lines like, "You think this is some kind of Harry Osborne vs. Peter Parker moment?", he will create a post-post-modern superhero comic book that will have fat Comic Book Guys giggling and punching each other in their flabby arms with glee and saying, 'Oh, dude! He totally referenced the Punisher, there!'. While being stupid in that the only reason none of his 'superhero' characters get killed or put into wheelchairs or get sent to jail or the mental ward by the cops is that there's no story, otherwise.

It's Idiot Plotting. Like in the horror movie when the Horny Teenagers Split Up to Check Out Old Man Johnson's Allegedly Haunted House And Possibly Suck Face And Rub Genitals Only To Get Meticulously And Brutally Murdered By Hatchet Face Who The Old Dude At The Stop-N-Go Says Haunts The Johnson House, But It Turns Out In The Third Reel That Hatchet Face Is In Fact Poindexter The Nerd Who Is Insanely Bitter That Kelly Terwilliger Didn't Go On That Date With Him. If the horny teenagers had decided, in the first reel, to just reasonably decide, 'Fuck that, let's rent 'Saw 8' and chillax at Stacey's house!', there'd be no movie.

Actually, I've read enough of Millar's work to consider a third option. He's possibly Smart-Bitter. He's talented enough to come up with high-concept comics, like Superman being Soviet Russian, or thinly-veiled celebrities being part of a secret cabal of assassins, or Kick-Ass. But he knows he doesn't have the chops to create engaging stories, or empathic characters. So I'm starting to see a sort of passive admonishment to his audience. 'This is me, fucking you in the ass', the Eminem clone says to the reader in the final page of Wanted. He's in essence, saying, 'I hate you flabby turds who read my junk, I hate the comic publishers for being too pusillanimous to produce anything other than adolescent power/revenge fantasies, but most of all, I hate myself, for I can do nothing else. Fuck my life.'