After seeing the movie, I decided to pick up the original source material and see how it holds up in comparison. Now, I'm normally not a Mark Millar fan. I found Ultimates to be tedious; too much over-the-top, look-how-clever-I-am dialogue, a real smug sense of its own coolness. I read the first issue of Wanted and thought the same. The only thing I've ever really liked of his was Superman: Red Son, which was entertaining, restrained, and thoughtful in a way his work almost never is. But, I really enjoyed the movie version of Kick-Ass, so I thought, maybe the book will be good too?

Well, it's pretty good. Compared to the movie, it is far more cynical, in particular about the whole wish-fulfillment aspect of being a super-hero. The ending for our "hero" Dave is not nearly as cheery in the print version, and Big Daddy & Hit Girl (the former especially) are way more disturbed and psychotic. In part, I liked this, but then again, Nic Cage's performance as Big Daddy was so great that any major deviations in his personality seem like negatives. While the bleaker tone of the book (which is still an ultra-violent comedy, mind you) detracts from some of the fun, it is more... realistic, maybe?

One thing that the movie has way ahead of the book is its overall crafting. The film was tightly written with a strong story -- everything fit into place. The book meanders quite a bit, with a lot of wasted material. This is partially just the nature of the media: in a book, even a comic book, you can go off on tangents, while in a movie everything has to fit together nicely. Even so, the characters and their relationships were a lot stronger in the film. What the film also had over the movie -- and again, this is one of the strengths of the medium -- was the repeated trope of watching through different lenses. The book stays on one level, which flattens out the experience a bit, while the film smartly moves among different levels of reality (from the story into the comic book, from the footage of a security camera out into the viewers' space, etc). The movie, then, was far more effective in playing up the experience of consuming media, which, after all, is what the story is all about.

I'd definitely recommend it for comics fans and fans of the movie, but it isn't earth-shattering. 3.5 stars