Kick-Ass: Hit Girl
Real Name: Mindy Macready
Abilities: A prepubescent trained killer, Hit Girl has been raised by her father to be crime’s worst nightmare. Mindy is presumably an expert martial artist and gymnast. She carries two katanas and shows little or no hesitation in using them to injure and maim her opponents. Mindy has also been raised to be knowledgeable and comfortable with a wide array of military weaponry. This familiarity makes her perfectly comfortable using makeshift weapons (like shafts of wood, bar stools...) to stab, bash, and otherwise kill bad guys.
Background: Hit Girl’s childhood has almost exclusively focused on training to fight a one-child-war-on-crime. Raised by her father, Big Daddy, Mindy was rewarded with normal parental pampering (ice Cream, toys, etc.) for participating in assassin-style training (learning to use guns, fight to the death with blades, etc.).
While only 10 years old, Hit Girl’s appearance belies her nature. A ruthless killer, Hit Girl eliminates the guilty AND their accomplices with extreme prejudice. Big Daddy has made sure that Hit Girl has been indoctrinated to admire and emulate vigilante style heroes (comic books, John Woo and Clint Eastwood movies, etc.) and to despise bleeding-heart liberal politics. Hit Girl’s upbringing has been warped, and her adult-like sensibility (and expressive vocabulary) is a product of it.
Resemblance: Hit Girl is likely to stand out in the Kick-Ass lineup as extremely original. However, she kind of embodies qualities belonging to a whole array of comic book figures.
The obvious parallel is to Robin- fast, small, and acrobatic, she’s Big Daddy’s own girl wonder. She’s got the utility belt, loaded up with gadgets by her father, to boot. Of course, Hit Girl’s gritty, up-close and personal fighting style is Wolverine-esque. She also has the "surprise, I’m not dead after all" thing going for her when the fighting starts.
She’s a little more disciplined and polished than the ol’ canucklehead, though, and the assassin thing kind of screams Elektra to me. Then again, the two swords and the vulgar, in your face *$%#-talk has Deadpool written all over it.
Actually, when I dig deep, the most fitting parallel I come up with is the Cassandra Cain incarnation of Batgirl. Trained from early childhood to be a hired killer by her adoptive father, Cassandra was a childhood prodigy who could even go toe-to-toe with Batman himself in a fight. Mute, the part of Cassandra’s brain that would typically evolve to contain expressive speech, developed to read body language instead. Consequently, Cassandra was an amazing and intuitive combatant. Cassandra is actually my favorite Batgirl to date- why a whole slew of writers have pushed this character into near-obscurity in such a short period of time, I’ll never know.
Big Daddy
Kick-Ass
Red Mist
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