Kick-Ass

Dave Lizewski, an unremarkable New York teenager obsessed with comics, asks the question no one ever seems to: why hasn't anyone actually tried being a superhero? He buys a cheap wetsuit online and sets out to become one himself — and is almost immediately beaten, stabbed, and hit by a car, spending months in recovery with metal plates holding him together and dulled nerve endings that leave him strangely immune to pain.

When a bystander films him fighting off a gang of thugs and posts it online, "Kick-Ass" becomes an overnight viral sensation — pulling him into the orbit of the far more lethal vigilantes Big Daddy and his young daughter Hit-Girl, who are waging a genuinely violent war against the Genovese crime family. Mark Millar and John Romita Jr.'s graphic novel is a gleefully brutal deconstruction of superhero fantasy.