Aside from leaving the Daily Mail coughing up its own spleen in indignant rage, Matthew Vaughan’s post-modern Kick-Ass has also re-opened the debate on superhero movies. Have they gone too far? Have they become unrecognisable from the innocent and idealistic days of Richard Donner’s Superman?

We’ve certainly come a long way from plucky cow-lick-curled heroes standing in front of a billowing Stars and Stripes. 11-year-old girls in comic book films are no longer limited to pointing up at a tree and wailing “my kitty!� – these days they’re saying the c-word and getting punched in the face by grown men. Villains aren’t cackling scientists driven mad by horrific accidents anymore – The Dark Knight’s Joker was an unexplained force of nature, holding an entire city hostage because, well, it was a hoot. Even the heroes themselves are less clean-cut – in last year’s Watchmen they were pathological killers and rapists, with even the most normal of them having a serious kink for women in PVC.

This evolution isn’t surprising, considering the source material has been getting steadily darker and more challenging over the years. It took five decades of superhero comic books before Alan Moore and Frank Miller came along in the 1980s, helping to kick start the graphic novel and proving that comics can be used to tell very different kinds of stories. Quite simply, they began to treat superheroes and vigilantes as real people, re-imposing the laws of physics and the legal system on them and hitting on the obvious truth: you’ve got to be a bit crazy to put a mask on and fight crime.

When these colourful characters began to migrate to the big screen, it was in their safest, most recognisable form. After all, comic book movies were a new genre, and you can’t turn a genre on its head without first establishing its rules. So we got a boy scout Superman, a gothic Batman, a chirpy Spiderman, a bubblegum Fantastic Four. X-Men in 2000 was one of the first superhero films to place its heroes in a realistic world, facing discrimination from a suspicious public. But then, they also had a villain who was half-frog, so there was still a long way to come.

2005’s Sin City was the first film to riff on the visual style of comic books. By then, audiences were familiar enough with the once-nerdy form of storytelling to recognise that visually, Sin City was a comic book come to life. If comic strips had not been so ingrained in the public consciousness by this point, then Robert Rodriguez and co-director Frank Miller would never have been able to mimic and twist the look of it so effectively.

But getting audiences to take a superhero movie seriously was the real challenge. Watchmen was the graphic novel that pioneered the idea of heroes as real, flawed, downright disturbed individuals, and yet despite a faithful and actually rather good adaptation from Zack Snyder it failed to find a wide audience. Perhaps audiences just weren’t ready to go that far. Christopher Nolan had rather more success with The Dark Knight. Being a sequel and starring comics’ most famous face, Batman, huge box office returns were guaranteed. But what came as a surprise was the critical reception. The film was met with an orgy of praise from people who had not realised that superheroes could be used to tell a sprawling crime epic, touching on the frailty of life, man, and sanity. Comic book readers had known for some time that this was possible, but The Dark Knight undoubtedly marked a turning point in superhero cinema, in the same way that Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns and Batman: Year One had done in print years earlier.

What surprised me the most about Kick-Ass was how remarkably faithful it was to the rules of the superhero genre. Some call it a parody, but I wouldn’t go that far. Certainly it touches upon that, but the story beats lovingly adhere to the superhero tradition, right down to the hero attempting to leave his alter-ego behind at the top of the third act. The film depends on the audience knowing these comic book clichés through-and-through in order to work. Ten years ago it would never have been received so rapturously.

Now that comic books are entrenched in our culture, film-makers can start having the sort of fun that graphic novel writers have been enjoying for years. You can’t become self-referential until the audience shares your reference points. You can’t expect audiences to take a superhero seriously as a human being until the sight of someone in a costume has stopped being ridiculous. Traditional comic books films will always be popular, especially in the middle of a recession. This year sees the release of Iron Man 2, and films like Green Lantern, Thor and Captain America are in the works, not to mention reboots of Spiderman and The Fantastic Four. These sorts of film will always be the mainstream form of superheroes on screen. But so long as they are there, showing us what superheroes should be, films like Kick-Ass can creep in under the radar and gleefully play with the conventions.

By Abigail Chandler