John Romita, Jr Describes His Animated Kick-Ass Sequence

I think I'm one of the few that is still on the fence about Kick-Ass, the upcoming adaptation of Mark Millar and John Romita Jr's comic book by director Matthew Vaughn. I wasn't as wowed by the Comic Con footage as many were. But one of the things I am intrigued about with respect to the project is Romita's animated sequence that will appear somewhere in the flick. We learned about this a couple of months ago, and now the artist has spilled some details of what we can expect to see.

Talking to MTV, Romita describes the animation as short but sweet. "The animated sequence is about a minute, minute and a half, and it's a very wild computer program that allows us to do this," he told MTV News. "I don't need to do as many drawings as you think, but they're able to do the animation with models that I've drawn." The sequence will evidently look quite a lot like Romita's art for the comic, and is designed to tell the origin of Big Daddy, the character played by Nicolas Cage. "There's a comic book that Nicolas Cage's character has drawn as a shrine to his victims," Romita explained. "It's basically an origin of him."

Romita is an artist I didn't much appreciate when I was a kid; I found his stuff to be bland compared to some of the other superstars of the time. But I realized his stability and versatility at some point, and now he's a guy I really enjoy. To see his line work brought faithfully to life in animation should be a treat. Just look at some of the pages he's done for this book alone and it's hard to imagine how I could have ever dismissed his stuff. I just hope the sequence doesn't get released online before the film opens. I'd be too tempted to watch it, and would rather just see it in full-screen glory.