Talking Kick-Ass 2 With John Romita, Jr.

In addition to his regular pencilling job on Marvel NOW!’s Captain America, John Romita, Jr. is in the rare position of having a creator-owned comic that is arguably the subject of even more conversation than his Marvel work.In his case, that book is Kick-Ass, currently entering its fourth volume. As the co-creator of the series and the characters who inhabit it, the artist has taken on a gig that leads him to refer to himself as a “hypocrite” and helped catapult that property to success on the page and onscreen. Along with writer Mark Millar, he took a book that many comic fans dismissed when it was first released and turned it into a bona fide franchise for Millarworld, Marvel and Universal Pictures, who are months away from the release of the second in a trilogy of films based on the four comic book miniseries.Romita joined ComicBook.com to discuss the film, the creative process behind the comics, and how it’s taught him that he can’t always trust his first instinct.ComicBook.com: I guess the first thing that occurs to me–my first instinct when I saw it was that it Millar’s sensibilities were a bit juvenile. Is it difficult to combat that when you’re discussing this work? Is that something you worry about, when you have a movie poster that says “The Motherf—er,” that you’re going to lose a segment of your audience?