A few days ago, in chatting to a friend, I compared comics writer Mark Millar to Malcolm McLaren. And with McLaren now dead, I’m going to explore that comparison some more. What I’d got in mind was their ability to hype projects that tend to collapse under more than a minute’s thought. But that’s fine, because a minute counts as an attention span these days, and both men have demonstrated their ability to occupy young minds perfectly well for that duration.

This is something I’m especially conscious of having seen Kick-Ass. I’m pushed to know what to say about the film other than it’s crass and entertaining, and if you’re in the mood for that then it’ll provide empty calories perfectly well. There is blood and there is swearing, and it’s all done with a laconic attitude. And it took a good deal of thinking to make it that way, lest you think I’m being dismissive.

Just as Stan Lee and Steve Ditko bottled sixties teen angst and distilled it to come up with Spider-Man, Mark Millar and John Romita Jr (himself the son of a classic Spidey artist) have concocted something entirely in tune with 21st century adolescence. The teens in Kick-Ass are plugged into Facebook and Myspace, victims of street crime, and are considered gay by their objects of desire. A world away from the dilemmas that young Peter Parker was faced with, and there’s no sense of the aspirational aspect of Parker’s character. He wanted to do well at college, and as a press photographer, and had a sense of duty when he became a superhero. In Kick-Ass, the protagonist is motivated by nothing more than the desire to be as cool as the characters he’s grown up reading about in comics.

If Millar is McLaren, then Kick-Ass is his Bow Wow Wow. Huh? Well, just as the controversial element of that manufactured band was 13 year old singer Annabella Lwin, the real stand-out character in Kick-Ass is Hit-Girl, an 11 year old brought up by her father to be a killer vigilante.

McLaren had a knack for spotting the coming zeitgeist, as he did brilliantly with Buffalo Gals — which introduced turntables as an instrument to many — and Double Dutch — a whiff of Johannesburg packaged without the coffee table element that was part of Paul Simon’s dabbling with African sounds. Millar has a similar capacity to see what’s on the horizon and respond to it, drawing attention to what he’s doing so you know he’s the man with the plan. And, like McLaren, he knows the value of a collaborator, working with artists at the top of their game — Bryan Hitch on The Ultimates, and various other fan favourites on one spectacle after another.

Note the distinction between spectacle and spectacular. Rarely does Millar’s work live up to the exuberant hype he puffs it up with. The exception is Red Son, an imaginative and well-executed alternative version of Superman had he landed in the corn fields of the Soviet Union rather than America. That project brought together Millar’s interests in politics and comics, and is very well-regarded. But it hasn’t sold that much, and Millar’s career trajectory is all about hitting the big numbers. Which is all well and good, and he’s got it down to a fine art — there’s something about his work which resonates with the core comics readership. But as with McLaren, that’s a skill more to do with identifying a demographic than conjuring up something of substance.

Go see Kick-Ass and enjoy the hell out of it. There are thrills and spills aplenty, and it’s delivered with verve by director Matthew Vaughn and his co-writer Jane Goldman. Just don’t expect to have anything to think about afterwards — Millar likes to wind people up, but it works mostly on the Barnum principle (‘You can fool some of the people some of the time…’) rather than because he’s saying anything that bears investigation.