WARNING: This article contains spoilers for the new Kick-Ass #1 by Mark Millar and John Romita, Jr., as well as for volume one of the original Kick-Ass.


After three miniseries starring nerdy teen Dave Lizewski beneath the green mask, Mark Millar and John Romita, Jr. had promised an entirely different take on Kick-Ass, one featuring a new hero. Patience Lee is not only a grown-up, she's an army veteran and a single mother. Unlike Dave, she actually has the skills to fight crime, and also has stakes beyond catching the attention of the cutest girl in class. This is a more mature story, and, as Millar has presented Patience in interviews, this is a hero more in line with the current age.

One has to wonder, though, why this series is flying under the Kick-Ass banner.

Motivations

Whereas Dave initially put on the costume out of "the perfect combination of loneliness and despair," Patience picks up the mantle for survival. Coming back from Afghanistan, Patience discovers that her husband has left her, tearing down her plans to go to college on the G.I. bill while he works -- after she had supported them throughout their life together. Worse, he's left Patience with his debt, and if she's going to make enough money to keep her family afloat, the only game in town is working for seedy clubs that host an array of illegal activity.

Or.

Or she could rob those clubs.

So, that's a plan. She puts on the costume, in a scene paying homage to Dave's debut, and vows to steal from out-of-town gangsters -- both details because, "I don't want anything that leads back to me" -- pledging to donate whatever she doesn't need to worthy charities.

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The tension here between the original Kick-Ass and Patience is that Dave set out to fight crime for mostly selfish, ill-thought-out reasons, whereas Patience heads into the night to commit a crime, though her intentions were good. (Her original idea was "rob a bank.")

That's not a bad place to start overhauling a familiar hero. That very much is the difference in perspective between a woman in her thirties with two kids and a teenage boy with too much time on his hands. Patience is much more sympathetic than Dave, and it's clear that this is going to be a much more character-driven story.

So, where does this approach go wrong?

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Where the new Kick-Ass falls short, though, at least after the first issue, is its ability to stand out from the crowd. When the original launched ten years ago, it felt incredibly fresh and asked an fascinating question: What would happen, really, if a guy put on a costume to fight crime? The answer, in Dave's case, was a brutal beating followed by an escalating series of unintended consequences. Millar and Romita weren't the first to do the "superhero in the real world" concept, but their take was original and unique.

The problem with Patience's debut is that we've seen this story before. Hell, there are two relatively similar books that have launched within the last few months, Tini Howard and Gilbert Hernandez's Assassinistas at IDW's Black Crown imprint, and Silencer at DC, where it's actually co-created and illustrated by Romita. And while her military training makes Patience the capable hero we want in the current age, it also brings her story much more in line with traditional superhero adventures. Millar and Romita will have to find a few more twists and turns in the coming issues to make Patience rise above the rest.

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Which they just might do. In the books that brought Millar to fame, comics like The Ultimates, Wanted and classic Kick-Ass, those first issues were topheavy with wild, extreme ideas, taking everything just a bit too far and then escalating from there. But his more recent work, like Empress and Huck, shows a more gradual build. Millar is still drawing readers in with the early chapters but has taken to structuring each chapter with more of an eye toward the story as a whole. The new Kick-Ass #1 pointedly doesn't take things too far -- but this is only the beginning.

To be clear, what that means will have to be different. There is a lot of violence in this issue, and there will no doubt be a lot more throughout the series. But with a different character, and different stakes, Patience's ordeals will necessarily need to diverge from Dave's. A lot. Frankly, if this issue had featured the category of torture Dave Lizewski endured in 2008's Kick-Ass #1, readers would rightly be outraged.

Legacy

A question unanswered in this issue is whether the new Kick-Ass takes place in the same universe as the original. Where Patience gets the costume is glossed over completely, and we don't get much sense of why she gives her name as "Kick-Ass" when confronted by the mob. Is she taking inspiration from the original? No one seems to recognize the costume, or be aware of the previous existence of costumed heroes -- other than a mention of "crazies from New York City" who "dress up like superheroes" to fight crime, which is more or less an apt description of Dave and Mindy.

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If this is a legacy story in the sense that Patience is picking up from Dave -- and not just in the sense of Millar and Romita rebooting their character -- that does add a strange layer of complexity to the story, and also bolsters the case for running Patience's story under the Kick-Ass brand. We already know that Dave inspired other heroes, but if after his retirement he inspired a successor, this opens up incredible possibilities. For one, Patience is already -- and by design -- a much more capable hero than Dave was, immediately overturning a few "legacy hero" tropes. And a new Kick-Ass might also catch the attention of the original Hit-Girl, who is returning for another series next week, one more factor pointing toward this being the same universe.

Patience comes out on top in Kick-Ass #1, though she's made powerful enemies. To truly carry on Dave Lizewski's legacy, things will have to get very bad for her, very fast. Millar and Romita undoubtedly know this, and it will be worth watching how and whether they can translate the intensity -- and not just the violence -- of the original onto a new type of hero.