In the first official movie still from Kick Ass 2: Ball to the Wall we surely got acquainted with Colonel Stars and Stripes, but we also took another look at the movie’s hero, young Kick-Ass portrayed by Aaron Taylor-Johnson. In the first movie, Dave Lizewski is just a teenager loser who puts up a diving gear and starts going around the streets beating snatchers with batons… at least, he tries to, but gets beaten time and again. He anyway manages to become some sort of matinee idol and to get rid of the bad guys, winning his adored Katie Deuxma‘s love. Well, you may not believe it, but in the comics Dave is even more a loser than he is in the movie. And he surely doesn’t hook up with Katie.
David Lizewski, Dave for everyone, was an average teenager in New York City. His mother died of a brain aneurysm when he was very young, and his father, Jimmy, found it difficult to cope with the fact that he had lost his beloved wife. Dave became his only anchor to reality, a situation in which he was forced to act as the adult between the two. The boy developed some ways of escaping reality in order to live a “normal” life, such as video games, porn, and, 
especially, superhero comicbooks. He became a true comicbook nerd, and spent many hours reading the adventures of his beloved heroes. His passion became obsession, and Dave started to think that, if there was a world that really needed superheroes, it was the real one, in which he was living. He decided to become NY’s first superhero, and designed a costume for the career he had chosen as his own. He started working out at the school gym after the lessons, and tried to put up some muscles with high-protein food. Finally, he felt ready for his official debut as the greatest superhero ever. Actually, his debut wasn’t a remarkable one at all. He found three guys painting a wall, and, after putting his costume and mask on, he offended them and provoked them to fight, attacking for first with a small bat. The thugs were too many and too much for him, and one of them stabbed Dave, who ran away from the scene. While crossing the street, the boy also got hit by a car, and the driver fled away, leaving him with both of his legs broken and his spine crushed. With pure willpower, Dave hid his costume and waited for an ambulance, which luckily arrived and took him to the hospital. He told the doctors and his father that he was robbed and beaten. Parts of his destroyed skeleton were replaced by metal plates, and Dave underwent intense physical rehabilitation to be able to walk again. At the end of his hospital adventure, months later, he promised to himself that he would have never tried heroic actions again. A promise that was meant to be broken.
One night, while walking in the streets, Dave saw a man being attacked by three thugs for robbery. Without thinking about it, he donned his costume and intervened to save the man. This time, he brought two mini-bats, instead of one. And this time his attempt was successful. His incident had damaged his nerve endings, thus making Dave almost immune to pain: beaten over and over again, he kept standing, trying to land a hit on the attackers. 
Exhausted, the thugs escaped, but the man was saved; plus, a young guy from the crowd that gathered to see the fight filmed the scene with his cellphone, posting the video on YouTube: Dave’s masked identity became a local celebrity in no time, and received his “superhero name”, Kick-Ass. His deeds inspired hundreds of other people, who created their own masked identities to fight crime (actually, most of them just created web pages with pics of themselves in costume). Dave, meanwhile, became more self-confident even in his private life, and managed to get close to Katie Deauxma, the girl he had a crush on, only to discover that she started talking to him just because she thought him to be gay. He agreed to play the part of the “gay best friend”, thus staying close to Katie, in a way or another. As a superhero, Kick-Ass created a MySpace page, in which he invited people to ask him help for any trouble they had. On his first assignment, he met the vigilantes Big Daddy and Hit-Girl, two highly trained, self-proclaimed heroes who killed the criminals Kick-Ass was fighting with. Shocked by his new understanding of how tough crime-fighting could be, Kick-Ass entered a period of self-imposed retirement, but he came back to action to accept the challenge of another new hero, then revealed to be a criminal in disguise and his future nemesis, Red Mist. Time later, he revealed to Katie that he wasn’t gay, and that he was Kick-Ass: the revelations didn’t have the planned effects, and Katie had her boyfriend beat him; later, she sent the boy a photo of her performing oral sex to her boyfriend, thus ending her “friendship” with Dave. This personal trauma however didn’t stop Kick-Ass’ activity as a crime fighter, and New York could feel safe under his protection. Sort of.
Dave Lizewski is an average guy, sometimes under the average, a teenager who’s not popular, but is not a geek either. He has a real obsessions with superheroes, an obsession that led him to become a real life one, but he doesn’t have any other distinctive feature. As Kick-Ass, he’s much more popular, a true idol; he finds in his masked identity a relief valve to be anything he cannot be as his simple self, and masks his thirst for popularity with a thirst for justice. He is almost invulnerable from pain, after his accident, and his metal plated skeleton gives him quite an endurance; he doesn’t have any other skill, and he’s not even able to properly use the batons he always carries along. Hit-Girl trained him a little in combat, but the path to become something similar to a fighter is still a long one.
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