The biggest problem with Mark Millar's Hit-Girl mini-series is that it didn't come out sooner. The series is stuck attempting to fill gaps between the two Kick-Ass volumes that really don't matter now. On its own merits, it's a reasonably enjoyable offshoot of the main storyline, and it's enough to wonder why Millar didn't simply label this story Kick-Ass 2 and ship it before the previous series.

Issue #4 sees Mindy deal with Genovese's drug gang in her trademark, profanity-laden fashion. Her larger struggle is in maintaining her cover once her adoptive father Marcus shows up at the scene. This is where Hit-Girl works best -- it offsets all the grotesque humor and displays of violence with Mindy's more mundane efforts to placate her parents and fit in at school. I've more than had my fill by now of seeing innocent bystanders have their brains splattered on the floor, children cursing like drunken sailors in a David Mamet play, and meta-textual jabs at the comics industry. This book proves there is heart at the core of the Kick-Ass universe.

John Romita Jr. and Tom Palmer produce some attractive visuals in this installment. As always, the arrangement of Palmer providing finishes and ink washes over Romita's works out in the book's favor. Millar's big action sequence is a car chase, and luckily Romita is one of the few storytellers with the chops to pull it off in this medium. The one real quirk to the visual is that the younger characters are very oddly proportioned. Mindy and her classmates seem to have the heads of teenagers and the bodies of five-year-olds.

Though Millar does his best to raise the stakes for Mindy and her family in issue #4, as well as build on the looming threat of Red Mist, the drama simply isn't there. We already know how all of this is going to play out. The best that can be said for the series is that the art and smaller character drama are enough to offset this flaw.

Jesse is a writer for various IGN channels. Allow him to lend a machete to your intellectual thicket by following @jschedeen on Twitter, or Kicksplode on MyIGN.

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