Respect Dave Lizewski, Kick-Ass (Millarverse)

The minute this got big, I read a hundred different articles, psychologists asking why we did it every night. Were we mad? Were we lonely? Were we just obsessed with comic books? The answer, of course, was a little of all three… but I also liked to ask why they didn’t chase their dreams. How many rock stars just settled for accountancy? How many astronauts grew up to be psychologists?

Other kids were playing Mafia Wars, we were taking down the fucking Mafia and no, it wasn’t normal. It wasn’t even close… but it was awesome, man… and that’s the way life should be.

Dave Lizewski is a superhero with no secret origin. Instead of a revenge mission or any kind of supernatural obligation to do right by the people of New York, Dave was just really, really bored. Rather than join any kind of extracurricular activity, Dave would buy a wetsuit and some mall-ninja weapons online and take to the streets as his alter-ego, Kick-Ass. It was all really cool until his first patrol, where he was shanked in a parking lot, struck by a station wagon and hospitalized for months. But even the collapse of several organs and the insertion of several metal plates into his fractured skull couldn't keep this hero out of the game for long.

Soon, his war against graffiti artists spun out into feuds with real, honest-to-God gangsters. It was then that he'd meet the homicidal vigilantes Hit-Girl and Big Daddy, who encouraged Dave to go after the Genovese crime family. He'd have been spared a ton of physical pain if he hung up his wetsuit for good, but he instead listened to the call of duty and participated in the destruction of the New York mafia. While Dave was never a really good or even half-way competent fighter, his influence as a crimefighter on the decent people of New York could be felt for years to come.

Hover over a feat to see its source.

Physicals

Strength

• Starts exercising in the school gym during lunch time, and switches to a high-protein diet of meat and fish
• Picks Chris Genovese up over his shoulders, then slams his back into the ground

Durability/Endurance

Blunt Force

• His first fight against three graffiti artists sees Dave get beaten down, stabbed in the torso and struck by a car. This event broke both of his legs and damaged his spine. Despite this, he’s able to peel his costume off before the ambulance comes to pick him up
  • The full damage report also includes a ruptured spleen, a collapsed lung and head trauma. It required four operations, two months of physical counseling, several metal plates being outfitted in his head and many weeks of physical therapy to fully recover from.
• Takes a trash can to the back
• Gets a champagne bottle broken over his head, then he’s lifted by the collar and rammed into drywall head-first
• He’s in a burning building when the floor collapses beneath him and he’s covered in wooden rubble. He’s able to climb out from the rubble, but he requires rescuing from firefighters.
• Thanks to the metal plates in his skull, Dave takes an impressive amount of pistol whips to the head before falling unconscious
• To escape from being duct taped to a chair, Kick-Ass gets a group of goons to punch and stomp him until the chair breaks into pieces
• Gets hit in the face with a pipe, but stays fighting
• Takes a brass-knuckled punch to the mouth and a few stomps from five guys but remains conscious
• Fights backs after being struck with full paint cans in the head
• Gets pinned and stomped on by four men, but remains conscious

Other

• He gets jumper cables attached to his testicles and he’s electrocuted for at least ten minutes
• Fights on after getting nails thrown into his face

Agility

• Flees from shooters by sliding and jumping off of cars
• At 31 years old, Dave keeps ahead of a pursuing group of teens for ten blocks

Skill

Ass-Kicking

• Floors three men with baton strikes
• Three men beat Kick-Ass to the ground. After being stomped on for a while, Dave is able to fight back with his batons and kicks from the ground until the assailants give up and flee.
• Beats Red Mist with two wooden chair legs, first disarming him, then knocking him out
• Swings on a rope and kicks in a window, interrupting a mafia dinner. He then smacks up a few guys until needing to be bailed out by Hit-Girl.
• Quickly takes out two guys armed with metal pipes
• Floors two gangsters with baton strikes to the face
• Collaborates with Battle-Guy to take down a college-aged human trafficker
• With a spiked baton, Kick-Ass beats on a big guy, causing him to try and flee
• Gets into a slap fight, then a fist fight with Chris Genovese
  • Chris Genovese received some martial arts training in a mountainous country in Asia, although it was less than legitimate
• Beats on Chris Genovese, eventually knocking him off of a rooftop with his baton
• Attempts to fight some gun wielding toughs, but they eventually floor him with a kick in the crotch
• Fights off some Genovese mobsters, burying some in wooden crates and employing leaping kicks
• KOs a man with two hard hits to the back of the head
• Beats two mobsters, using a nearby chainsaw to bash one man’s head in

Other

• Under Hit-Girl, Dave trains in boxing, then trains in baton fighting against three huge men
• Shoots John Genovese in the crotch
• He trains to swing on ropes and smash through windows
• His allies drive at him in a van. Dave goes flat on his back, then as the van drives above him, he grabs onto bars underneath the vehicle to escape some mobsters.

Equipment

• Carries two batons with wrist straps. During the war against the Mother Fucker, Dave pushed nails through a baton, creating a spiked club.
• Police-grade pepper spray, used on Eddie Lomas
• In disguise as a pimp, Kick-Ass uses a cattleprod hidden on a cane to shock a number of goons
• Uses some rope to rappel down the side of an apartment building and kick in a fourth floor window
• Borrows small sticky bombs from Hit-Girl’s stash to destroy a wall

Ambassadors Suit

During the three-way, planet-threatening battle between the world's heroes, Wesley Gibson's elite assassins, and an ancient alien warmongor, Dave wanted to be on the front lines... but let's be real, he'd die in two seconds. Instead, a witch from the Magic Order named Cordelia Moonstone granted Dave a superpowered suit, magically identical to the ones used by the Ambassadors, allowing him to safely join the fray. Later on, Dave joined the Ambassadors in an official capacity, becoming their representative for America.

This section only covers Dave's use of his superpowered suit. For the full respect thread on the Ambassadors, click here.

General Attributes

• Ambassador suits are equipped with personalized auras that are bulletproof, capable of withstanding atmospheric reentry, and protect from hazardous environments like those with -35 degree temperatures
• Ambassadors are able to call upon three superpowers at a time, from a pool of fifty total. Some examples include:
  • Brute Strength, allowing a hero to stop a runaway train by pushing on the front
  • Giant Size, allowing heroes to stand many stories tall and carry battleships over their shoulders
  • Telekinesis, which allows a hero to raise a satellite from ground level to the upper atmosphere
  • Prizefighter affords a hero an innate knowledge of martial arts, specifically karate and jeet kune do
  • Intangibility allows heroes to walk through walls or large masses of concrete rubble

Dave's Use of the Suit

• He blasts a beam of energy from his hand while flying
• He lifts a large piece of rubble over his head

Miscellaneous

• The metal plates in his skull numb pain by eighty five percent, according to his own estimation. He later claims the car accident made it so that he could “hardly feel anything” down one side of his body.
• His boots and gloves are heavily padded and his wetsuit is insulated. This allows him to press a live wire into a warehouse floor covered in flammable liquor, electrocuting a group of mobsters but staying conscious himself.
• He practices brooding at his parent's graves
• When Dave first put on the mask to become the world’s first superhero, he had a profound effect on probability across the world. This led to more superheroes coming out and acting, as well as supervillains rising to commit evils.

She saved me. Just like superheroes are supposed to. She risked it all just to get me out of there and suddenly I got why they embraced us like they did. Why the movies were created in such a dark decade. Why these characters were created in the first place. We all just need a little color in our lives and the certainty of a happy ending… because real life doesn’t work out like that.