Millarworld considers the pre-release hype for Mark Millar’s Kick Ass:

“So at the paper I work for, there’s a small group of other comic fans who are usually in the loop with indy projects a little more than myself. They always tell me about the next great film that nobody will ever see or give me a copy of the best comic nobody’s reading…yet they’re usually right on. Some examples of their findings include ‘The Walking Dead,’ ‘The Gift,’ and ‘Napoleon Dynamite.’ So you can imagine my surprise when they told me about ‘The Shades,’ a feature-length film and several shorts made by some guys in our town a few years ago that has screened at a few Wizard Worlds and been making the rounds on burned DVD’s and YouTube. One of the group saw these guys promoting at Wizard World LA just two years ago… The Shades started as a simple idea: what if you were a superhero? What if you tried to take action against the corrupt society that had formed around you, only to crash into the unforgiving barrier that is reality? Would you succeed? Would your emotions get the best of you?——– There’s much more, but this sounds amazingly like Kick-Ass. Has anybody else heard of this? The concept of a normal guy getting his ass beaten for dressing up in a super-hero suit seemed original, but has it been done already?”

“An issue of the Ultimates.”

“And Chuck Dixon had it as an ongoing subplot in Nightwing years ago.”

“Alan Davis wrote and drew a version of this kind of thing back in early-eighties Marvel UK days”

“Special (with Michael Rapaport) is also a movie about someone who thinks he’s a superhero with unfortunate results, and it’s been out since 2006. The concept of Kick-Ass has been around for quite a while – the surprising thing was that nobody’d done it as the focus of a comic for a while.”

Luckily, there are still those who’re willing to defend Mark’s “It’s really the most incredibly obvious idea and I’m amazed nobody has ever done this before” quote:

“I think what he means is ‘I am Mark Millar. Give all your money to me, for I am genius.’ Put differently, Millar has been known to use hyperbole in the past; no need for details like who actually did something very much like this – but only with a minor character or in a different media or whatever – when it comes to hyping your stuff.”

“No one has done anything like this with John Romita Jr. drawing it, damn it!”

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