The Cycle Of Abuse – Review Of Hit-Girl #5

[Ed. note – Attention any vigilantes whose crime fetish is knocking out rampant spoiler bombs: I have a taser, a panic room, and a crate of whiskey. Do your worst.]
I have to admit that, although I was a big fan of Mark Millar’s Wanted, when the original Kick-Ass dropped back dropped back in 2008, I didn’t scramble to read it. In fact, it took renting the movie version, or possibly stumbling across it on cable, I don’t know – I drink, what can I say, and Chloë Moretz’s star turn as Hit-Girl, to really draw me in. Sure, the put upon nerd who turns vigilante thing had been done to death, but the little girl who just wanted to please her dad to the point of psychosis? That was new. That wasn’t a sulky teenager with a vainglorious mom like Silk Spectre, involved in the family business because it was expected. This was a young child who’d developed an amazing – and terrifying – skill set. Hit-Girl worshiped her father and he seemed to love the hell out of her right back, with both parties oblivious – in this story about serving justice to criminals – that dad was a perpetrator of systematic, pervasive child abuse.

Don’t believe me? Read Hit-Girl #5.

Millar’s Hit-Girl series has traced Mindy McCready’s attempt to adjust to typical suburban home life. Her step-dad Marcus wants her to keep her cape hung up, lest Mindy’s nocturnal activities put her fragile mom over the edge. School has sucked because the popular girls immediately sniffed out that Mindy was weird; it’s hard to fight back against the Mean Girls’ catty comments when your skill set mostly involves leg breaking and your school campus has a zero tolerance for violence policy. And, meanwhile, somewhere out there is Ralphie Genovese, the man responsible for her beloved father’s death. This, above all the crap with which Mindy must now deal, she can not abide.

So, issues #1-#4 set up Mindy’s hunt for members of Genovese’s mafia clan. She’s quite successful, although she has to roofie Marcus and her mom to get out of the house at night. Because Mindy is a girl who makes sensible and sane choices. However, she continuously either fails to understand, or doesn’t seem to care, that the end result of violence is always more violence. Genovese’s gang suspects Marcus is somehow behind the damage that has been done to their people and business, not Mindy. What is the price of vengeance when it merely results in bringing danger to your loved ones?

If at any point in time, you, the reader, had any concerns that Hit-Girl wasn’t going to come out of this in one piece – Kick-Ass sidelined, goons bursting in with guns on Mindy, Marcus, and mom in her home – you needn’t have. Hit-Girl gets the better of her attackers. Hit-Girl comes out fine.

Mindy, on the other hand…

…is a broken little girl, who hallucinates psychotic advice from her dead dad. This is a child whose damage from her father’s long term abuse of her mind is not going to be healed merely by being brought into a loving and nurturing home. Where is the justice for Mindy?

To exacerbate matters, Mindy thinks that the best way to keep her promise to Marcus about “retiring” is to keep her hand in by training others:

Why wouldn’t she think that training others was the right thing to do? After all, she learned it from her dad, the bestest and most loving dad in the world. And so, the cycle of abuse and violence continues.

Overall, Millar’s Hit-Girl mini was fun, until I really stopped to think about it. Lots of kick ass (and Kick-Ass!) violence and bad guy comeuppance. What’s not to enjoy about that? However, John Romita Jr.’s weirdly proportioned little kids, including, especially, Mindy, drive home the fact that we’re dealing with tweens and teens here. These are not the hot Hollywood teenagers that Greg Land lightboxes in an X-Men comic off Pamela Anderson’s discarded Playboy shoot. They’re kids. They’re the ones we’re supposed to be protecting from the violence, not the ones perpetrating it, not the ones who should be its victims. Maybe sometimes it’s not so bad to actually stop and think about what it is you’re reading…and get me kind of excited about the next Kick-Ass movie.