Thoughts From the Land of Frost:
A Discussion With Mark Millar
By Alexander Ness
05.05.03
Mark Millar is a Marvel writer who has gained a fair amount of popularity (as well as notoriety) with his work on The Ultimates. Along with his current gig on Ultimate X-Men and his previous chores on Superman Adventures and Swamp Thing, he also had a small unfortunate occurrence on his well-written, if controversial, The Authority, following the tragedy of 9/11/01.
Mark talks about his past and current career, as well as such upcoming projects as Trouble and Wanted. He is a very outspoken and interesting fellow, so please read on.
AN: Hello, Mr. Millar, and welcome to my column, THOUGHTS FROM THE LAND OF FROST.
MM: Very kind of you to invite me in.
AN: Please tell my readers where you are from, where you live, are you married, kids, cats, etc.?
MM: No cats, no dogs, but I do have a toddler. I'm married and live (most of the time) in Glasgow, Scotland. Glasgow, for anyone who's only heard of Edinburgh, is where they filmed a very large chunk of Trainspotting and, yes, it's exactly like that.
AN: Did you attend university, and if so, where and with what kind of degree field?
MM: I did politics and economics up until the final year of my degree and then dropped out due to severe poverty (as in I couldn't even afford my travelling expenses there anymore). It's the best thing that ever happened to me, though, because it forced me to do something desperate and stupid like try to be a professional writer. Also, every single person I've bumped into from university has been unemployed for the last ten years except for a guy who became a priest. This was a surprise, actually, because he was shagging his way around every girl on the course when I knew him.
AN: God works in mysterious ways. What comic was the one that you read as a child that you best remember fondly now?
MM: I don't remember the actual number, but it was an issue of Action Comics where Luthor had turned Batman, The Flash and Superman into eight year olds so he could kick the shit out of them.
The disturbingly-realistic Neal Adams front had a teeny Flash and Bats lying in rubble, supposedly dead, while Luthor punches a really upset looking Superbaby across the back of the head. Ah, happy days.
AN: How did you get into the comic book industry?
MM: Sheer blood, sweat and determination. I started out doing black and white indie stuff and this landed me a job at 2000AD after about a million rejected submissions. This landed me a couple of Best Newcomer Awards and, after much conspiring on the part of Grant Morrison, I landed Swamp Thing at DC Comics. They weren't interested in looking at me until he offered to co-write my first four issues of Swamp Thing with me -- which was a very kind gesture I'd never make for anyone.
AN: If I might, I didn’t start receiving offers of review product except for the generous CrossGen and Avatar Press until after I landed a number of bigger names for interviews. Whatever the quality of a work, I think some industries do not pay attention unless there is a name attached to the project.
What was your first published work in comics?
MM: The Saviour #1 (black and white, Trident Comics)
AN: In comics who has had the most influence upon your writing?
MM: Probably a combo of Moore, Morrison and Ellis. Moore got me hooked, Morrison (mostly through conversation) taught me the fundamentals of how a story actually works and Ellis is someone I swipe from endlessly in terms of the actual technical layout of the story, the beats, etc. I think Morrison and Moore have a very sequential style, quite classic in the tradition of Eisner, etc, whereas Ellis, Garth and I are a bit more like movie story-storyboards. The other discipline, I think, is the screenwriting style empl
Millar Talks Avatar's The Unfunnies
By Alexander Ness
10.10.03
Come in December 2003, fans can look forward to an industry-wide crossover event dealing with darkness and unpleasant behavior. So what are we talking about? Well, part of it is Avatar Press' The Unfunnies, a creator-owned project from Mark Millar, the acclaimed writer of such best-selling titles as Ultimate X-Men and The Ultimates.
With plans to create several projects running concurrently, in an interesting twist, each of Millar's creator-owned books will be published by a different company under the Millarworld banner. Along with Avatar's The Unfunnies, other publishers tapped for this event are Top Cow, Dark Horse, and Image Comics, with advertising for the books running in all of the titles, regardless of which company is putting it out.
I spoke with Millar and Avatar Press' Editor-In-Chief William Christensen about The Unfunnies, and the event as a whole.
Alex Ness: Who proposed this union of publisher and talent?
William Christensen: I had been hounding Mark for a new series and he was trying to fit something into his schedule. Once he unleashed his mad plan of this interconnected month, it mad perfect sense for us to work together on it.
Mark Millar: The trick was really finding the appropriate publisher for each of the projects I'd devised. The books are all very, very different so the publishers really had to be different too. Wanted (Top Cow), for example, is an adult superhero psycho-drama that could be a big budget action movie with an intelligent spin. The Unfunnies has cartoon characters being shagged up the arse. Luckily, William is very interested in such things and I knew we wouldn't have problems with the content. I didn't want the headache of having a publisher reviewing everything I wrote in advance.
AN: Mark, tell us about the larger scheme of your multi-publisher event? Was it to further establish yourself or has it been an artistic desire of yours to stretch your work across the publishers valley?
Mark: I wanted to do this for a number of reasons. The first is the most obvious and that's the sheer ambition of something on this scale. Nobody had ever really tried something as pan-industry as a multi-company crossover before and that appealed. Being the first to do something like this also registers a lot of attention that the line might not have gotten if all four books had just appeared from one company.
The breadth of the potential readership is also a factor. My natural reader-base tends to read Marvel or DC comics. However, if I can expand this to Top Cow or Avatar I'm helping the sales, however small, on my Marvel books because I'm almost certain to pick up some new readers. The Marvel books also feed into the smaller publishers and the fact that this is happening in the same month we're launching Ultimate Fantastic Four is no coincidence. All the Millarworld books carry ads for the other books and, even though I know Wanted, for example, will sell a great deal more than The Unfunnies, tying them together like this is going to help the smaller, more personal books and hopefully give the line a nice, varied look.
AN: William, are you poaching the United Kingdom for excellent writers, or is the fact that so much of your serious work being published is coincidentally Euro (Alan Moore, Warren Ellis, etc.)?
William: I really love the different sensibilities that the top British writers bring to their craft. They have just been exposed to different stimuli growing up and so much of that comes across as a very fresh approach to comics. I don't have any prejudice against writers from other countries, it just happens that there is an amazing cauldron of talent in the UK.
AN: Give us a nutshell version of The Unfunnies and tell us about your co-creators on the title.
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