Nobody takes Kite Man seriously. Not in the pages of DC Comics, where he’s a second-class member of Batman’s rogues gallery, and not in the superb animated comedy Harley Quinn , where Matt Oberg first played the green-suited buffoon as an unlikely love interest for Poison Ivy (Lake Bell). She’s obviously out of his league, and this stable and kind dude (who is, let’s not forget, also a supervillain) is eventually pushed aside so that Ivy could end up with Harley.
He may have found a better fit in the equally minor DC baddie Golden Glider, but that sweet note within the madcap symphony of Harley Quinn isn’t enough to sustain the new spinoff Kite Man: Hell Yeah!, which lacks both the sharp writing and deep respect for the source material of the series that spawned it. Following a similar trajectory to the one that led from Big Mouth to Human Resources , Kite Man: Hell Yeah! spins a workplace sitcom out of the more character-driven raunchiness of Harley Quinn, with a sprawling cast of mostly new characters and lots of cameos from familiar faces. Due to a poorly thought out conflict with Lex Luthor (Lance Reddick, in one of his final roles, succeeding Harley’s Giancarlo Esposito), Kite Man and Golden Glider (Stephanie Hsu, taking over for Cathy Ang – lots of recasting going on here) wind up owning Noonan’s, a Gotham City dive bar frequented by goons and villains who have fallen on hard times.
It’s a premise with promise, like the inverse of The Tick’s heroes-o.
