Last summer Mark Millar's comic series Wanted became an Angelina Jolie blockbuster. Next up? Kick-Ass, his series about a high school student who turns his love of comic books into a calling when he dresses up in a mask and suit.

Of course, he's just a kid who reads a lot of comics -- and his first attempt at crime fighting gets him beaten and stabbed. Once he gets out of the hospital he tries again, and a YouTube video of him saving someone from getting beaten up makes him an online celebrity.

A MySpace page where people can ask him for help -- sort of like the iPod-era Equalizer -- leads to an ambush. He's rescued by Hit-Girl, a little girl in a purple suit and domino mask who carries a sword and happens to have a penchant for decapitation. This is the world of Kick-Ass -- idealistic kids crossed with hyperviolence. Hey, time to make a movie!

Matthew Vaughan, who directed the Daniel Craig gangster thriller Layer Cake back in 2004, is directing, with British actor Aaron Johnson as Kick-Ass. Nicolas Cage plays Big Daddy (which could be a good thing or a bad thing, thought these days we're leaning towards bad), an ex-cop who trains his 11-year-old daughter to be the vigilante Hit-Girl, played by Chloe Moretz from the Amityville Horror remake and Bolt.

But are the studio knives out for Kick-Ass the way they were for Wanted? That comic tells the story of a cubicle-dwelling office worker who finds out his dead father was a member of a society of villains who killed the superheroes and set up their own world order. Told that he inherited his dad's superhuman aim, he drops out of society and embraces evil, killing, raping, abusing -- and becoming the bodyguard of one of the Five, the ruling council of supervillains. By the time it hit the theater, they were still assassins, but they were the good guys. All the nihilism and anarchy that made the comic so surprising was gone.

So we'll have to see how badly Kick-Ass's edge gets blunted. Like Wanted, the carnage isn't gratuitous; if Hit-Girl punched the bad guys and left them hanging in a little sling like Spider-Man in the seventies, it wouldn't be the same story. The fact that she cuts people's heads off -- and does it because her dad told her to -- forces you to think about vigilantism and what it would really be like if people in masks and capes walked the streets doling out grievous bodily harm.

Last time, Universal didn't seem to know what they'd bought. A major studio might have the same misgivings about latchkey kids becoming child assassins, and might tone the whole thing down. But so far director Vaughn, who has produced more movies than he's directed, is making it solo. Does that mean he'll embrace the ultraviolence, matinee showings be damned? A moviegoer can dream.

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