I thought that maybe Kick Ass would have gotten the superhero bug out of Matthew Vaughn’s system, but Latino Review’s latest scoop indicates otherwise. The site is saying that the director is attached to helm a movie adaptation of Bloodshot, one of the most obscure heroes of the 1990s comic book bust.

I’m actually a fan of Valiant, the company and universe that gave us Bloodshot, but by the time that character rolled around – in a #0 issue with a chromium cover that is now cheaper than a human life in Tijuana – the company was buckling under the demands of the speculator market and the taint of Image Comics. Bloodshot was essentially a rip-off of both Wolverine and The Punisher – a guy with nanites in his blood that give him a super healing factor and control over machines. While the control over machines thing is a new wrinkle, a not-so new wrinkle is that his memory was erased and he’s after not just the mob but the secret government group who gave him his powers. A perfect meeting of Logan and Frank Castle!

Obviously any adaptation can exceed the original material, but this character and his powers are so hackneyed and uninteresting that it’s hard for me to work up the enthusiasm for a movie version. Maybe Vaughn just wants to create his own ouevre of ersatz versions of better superheroes – he’s got a fake Spider-Man and a fake Batman and Robin in Kick Ass, and now he can get Punisher and Wolverine out of the way in one fell swoop. But if Vaughn wanted to do fake versions of superheroes I wish he’d do fake X-Men and adapt Valiant’s excellent – and ground breaking – Harbinger series instead.