About A Hit Girl

If you're looking for a comic with someone in a compromising situation with a Nintendo DS, then look no farther.

I enjoyed the second incarnation of Kick-Ass a few months ago, and thought I'd try another book from that bloodsoaked universe. Hit-Girl: Hong Kong is part of an ongoing tale where the murderous teenager dishes out justice to criminals all over the planet. Now, she's just landed in Hong Kong to deal with a triad. There will be blood, and probably lots of it.

Hit-Girl is basically the Punisher with pigtails. (In fact, there's a scene where she enters her new seedy apartment in Hong Kong and you can see an homage to the Punisher on the mailboxes). Just as the Punisher doesn't really fit into the Marvel Universe (because no heroes willingly kill but he offs at least three scumbags before breakfast), Hit-Girl is an odd fit in the Kick-Ass universe. The concept behind Kick-Ass is how a normal person could actually be a super-hero without getting killed, but Hit-Girl murders people with a grace not normally seen outside of a Hong Kong martial arts film. The narrative rules that keep things 'real' with Kick-Ass don't seem to apply to Hit-Girl. She always seems to be from a different comic.

So on her own, devoid of that relative sense of realism from the Kick-Ass books, there's never any feeling that Hit Girl ain't got this. Of course, since this is Book One of Four, complications arise because there are three other issues to go and something's gotta happen in those. But there's never a feeling that she won't succeed because, well, she's Hit-Girl.

So to offset that certainty and attendant surprise, we have scenes that will probably offend someone, somewhere. There's the Nintendo DS scene, and there's a page with someone walking down a hall that may cause some people to gasp. And a few of Hit-Girl's kills are fairly graphic, because, well, she's Hit-Girl.

Goran Parlov's art is very good, with a nice full page of Hong Kong seen at night as one of the highlights.  The action scenes are well choreographed, and his ability to convey emotion (mainly rage and disgust, which are the go-to emotions in this issue) are spot on.

Hit-Girl: Hong Kong Issue One sets up what it needs to in order to continue the carnage for the next three issues. It would be nice to have a bit more character development, but, well, this is Hit-Girl.