Mark Millar MBE (/mɪlˈɑːr/) is the New York Times bestselling author of Kick-Ass, Wanted and Kingsman: The Secret Service, all of which have been adapted into Hollywood franchises.
Artists, no matter how good their intentions, are always slower than they think.
When I was a kid growing up in the '80s, the BBC showed those old Buster Crabbe serials like Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers. So instead of ponderous sci-fi or depressing sci-fi or dystopian sci-fi and all the things we're kind of used to, where it's always raining and it's always dark, I thought, "Wouldn't it be nice to do something that was just fun and absolutely nonstop?" Like, I love writing action, and this thing is that. It's all action.
If you feel the need to make everyone happy, you should be a wedding planner not a leader.
The breadth of the potential readership is also a factor.
Marvel movies, are seeming slightly less exciting now that Star Wars has appeared and everything.
If you don't demonstrate leadership character, your skills and your results will be discounted, if not dismissed.
What I do with everything is take things out of real life. You encounter all sorts of stories. It's a lot of your friends and family, sometimes there's quite sad episodes in their life and everything. So just little things I've picked up along the years always find a way into all of my stories.
The past is an anchor with suffering written on the rope. I don't live there now. I am cutting myself free.
I just think adding superheroes to something instantly makes it more interesting. I have a friend who says every movie should either be a Spider-Man movie, or at least have Spider-Man in it. I thought it was such a brilliant quote. It kind of is true, in a weird way.
Jesus, man. Why do people want to be Paris Hilton and nobody wants to be Spider-Man?
You can lead with or without a title. If you wait until you get a title, you may wait forever.
You kind of worry for the characters in a way that you don't normally in sci-fi, because sci-fi tends to be about the ideas, and this is about people.
The ultimate [act] that would be the taboo, to show how bad some villain is, was to have somebody being raped, you know? I don't really think it matters. It's the same as, like, a decapitation. It's just a horrible act to show that somebody's a bad guy.
Even when I was a little boy, when I was seven, I absolutely loved Wonder Woman, and I saw her as one of the superhero greats with Superman and Batman, and I think it's because she was her own thing. She always felt like the real deal the same way that Superman and Batman did. Whereas the She-Hulks and Spider-Women and all that kind of thing felt like a continuation of a concept.
At the moment, I have it planned as a six or seven year experiment, but the books will only ever appear in bursts like this every couple of years and only with the best quality artists.
Matthew Vaughn phoned me up and he said, "Hey, listen, the movie has just done gangbusters. We've got to do the second one. " And I was like, "Matthew, I have no second book. Dave and I haven't done it," and he's like, "You're kidding!" He said, "This movie's just made $420 million!" I was like, ". . . We've got nothing. " So the amazing thing was, because we own the rights, we still get paid and everything, which is fantastic.
I just noticed I've been writing lots of female-led things. Two of them haven't been announced yet, but the big Greg Capullo book I'm doing is a female-led story, and I'm doing another series with John Romita which is a female-led story as well.
I don't know, maybe it's just timely, or maybe it's the fact that I live in a house with four women, but I just find my thoughts kind of skewing that direction at the moment.
Ever since 1980, sci-fi has generally been more Bladerunner than Star Wars. People talk about Star Wars being the most influential movie of all time and creating the blockbuster along with Jaws and that sort of thing, but really there's not been a space opera that anyone can go and see.
The books are all very, very different so the publishers really had to be different too.