Yesterday, Universal Pictures premiered an all-new Kick-Ass 2 Extended NSFW Trailer at their Comic-Con panel. Directed by Jeff Wadlow, the violent comic adaptation battles evil on August 16. Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Chloë Grace Moretz, Christopher Mintz-Plasse and Jim Carrey all star, and that last name caused a bit of controversy last month when he announced he wouldn’t be supporting the film due to his feelings about onscreen violence after Sandy Hook.

I spoke with creator Mark Millar yesterday about the issue, head below to check it out!

How does this sequel differ from the first film? You have a new director… “It feels like a continuation of the first film, but the world has opened up more. It’s like ‘The Empire Strikes Back’, I know most sequels want to be compared to that but it’s the truth. The first film is pretty intimate. It’s a personal movie with no supervillain. This one explodes like you’re on ice planet Hoth. You feel an expanded universe.”

“I’ve seen some people say that ‘Kick Ass’ glorifies violence.” Including your own cast? “Yes, exactly! To me it’s the craziest thing, because the movie is about the consequences of violence. In the first movie he’s in the hospital for 6 months after his first attempt. If somebody’s cracked in the knees with a baseball bat, they’re hunched over and screaming. If it was ‘White House Down’ it wouldn’t be that way. You know Batman’s gonna be okay, but Kick-Ass could die at any moment.”

It does seem like it takes the violence up a notch. Was there a lot you had to cut from the book though? Mintz Plasse was saying there were some scenes he was glad he didn’t film. “Yeah, there’s 2 books. There’s “Kick Ass 2” and the “Hit Girl” book. “Hit Girl” book is the first half of the movie and “Kick Ass 2” is the second half of the movie. There’s two scenes in the book that got cut. One was a dog’s head getting cut off, because you don’t kill the dog in movies. Even in ‘Independence Day’ you see the dog escape. The other one, in the book there’s an off-panel rape scene. In the comic you see Chris unzipping, and then it picks up from there afterwards. IN the movie it’ slightly different.”

Even since the first Kick-Ass came out there seems to be a growing culture of outrage on the net, sometimes for better and sometimes not. Your work seems like it could definitely be a target for that. “I think the minute people start saying I’ve gone too far, I always feel I must go further. I don’t know if it’s a Scottish thing, but I get so annoyed that someone wants to curtail what I do. I just think, as a creative person, you don’t want that. Some of my favorite stuff is the most outrageous stuff and then some of my favorite stuff is ‘The Lion King.’ There shouldn’t be an online jury. I felt like that with Eli Roth, I’m a huge fan and was castigated for ‘Hostel 2’, which I think is a brilliant film. But we’re lucky, in some ways ‘Kick Ass 2’ isn’t more violent than the first ‘Kick-Ass.’”