Did Kick-Ass kick enough ass?: Various studio bean counters are still counting beans, but this CNN article is pretty typical of the box office reports from this weekend. It’s safe to say that Kick-Ass isn’t quite performing to expectations, battling for the number one spot against a movie that opened a few weeks ago. It’s important to keep in mind that no matter how much Kick-Ass ultimately makes—whether it turns a healthy profit, whether it earns Mark Millar enough royalties that he becomes the second richest Scottish comic book character—when it comes to big Hollywood movies, it’s often more a matter of how a movie is perceived to do at the box office than how much it actually does. So if Kick-Ass does pretty well, but not as well as expected, it’s likely to be seen as a failure (See, for example, Peter Jackson’s King Kong, Superman Returns, etc.) Following the similarly disappointing Watchmen—for which expectations were sky high—this could imperil the future of R-rated comic book superhero movies for a while.

Speaking of Kick-Ass…: There have obviously been one million reviews of it this week, but I’d like to point you toward Jog’s review at The Factual Opinion because a) Jog is a smart guy and a great writer and b) Jog’s a comic book guy a lot more familiar with the source material and the dude’s who created it than a lot of film critics.

“My 10 most important books”: Check out this list of books from a Christian Science Monitor feature, particularly #7, “Mighty Avengers Issues #160-177.” “Avengers were my group, at a time when the FF was popular and X-men were trendy,” wrote list-maker Tim Kane. Huh. That’s food for thought. The Avengers have been Marvel’s B-Team for most of their existence, huh? I guess that makes the fact that they’ve been on the top of Marvel’s food chain for so many years now kind of remarkable. Behold the power of Wolverine and Spider-Man getting Avengers ID cards!

“District asked to remove library book”: And that library book is…? Jeff Smith’s Bone, one of the (if not the) greatest success stories of a comic book breaking into the library market and introducing kids to comics. I suppose it had to happen eventually, but man, how weird is it that it took until now to happen?

Dark Horse lets Hammer in: I’ve already pointed this out elsewhere (self-promotion!), but Dark Horse’s first Hammer collaboration is going to be a spin-off of the English language version of the Swedish flick Let The Right One In, which was based on a novel. Which would make it a spin-off of a remake of an adaptation, which is kind of cool or kind of depressing, depending on what angle you look at it from. I’m going to go with cool, given the publisher involved—they’ve had a longer and better track record of comics based on film properties than any other publisher. Just ask Star Wars fans.

“I’m not a big comic guy. Who’s not taken? Is anyone left?”: That’s actor David Duchovny, being asked by Time magazine which superhero he’d like to play in this Q-and-A feature.

Tim Gunn’s latest superhero crossover: Critiquing the costumes of super-women. Interestingly, he immediately runs into the tension between the two extremes that fans are always talking about on the Internet: On the one hand, overly-revealing costumes are kinda dumb, but on the other hand, being a superhero is all about expressing idealized forms.

I can’t decide which cover freaks me out the most: Bully’s latest Ten of a Kind has all sorts of madness on it, from the site of Popeye reading a book to the…thing that greets Dagwood on the moon.

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