Mark Millar Quotes

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.

Anytime something becomes a success in this way you always get imitators. I'm an imitator of the guys I love. I imitate people like Frank Miller, who is a huge inspiration to me.

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.

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.

I wanted to portray very, very dark subject matter and a deceptively complex story in the brightest colours and simplest lines possible to leave the readers reeling.

He [Stuart Immonen] and I have known each other over email for 18, 19 years or something, so to finally work with him is like kissing the girl that you always wanted to kiss.

Batman: a force of chaos in my world of perfect order. The dark side of the Soviet dream. Rumored to be a thousand murdered dissidents, they said he was a ghost. A walking dead man. A symbol of rebellion that would never fade as long as the system survived. Anarchy in black.

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.

I spent as much time writing proposals in '98 and '99 as I did writing scripts.

The success [of the X-Men], I think, is for two reasons. The first is that, creatively, the book was close to perfect ... but the other reason is that it was a book about being different in a culture where, for the first time in the West, being different wasn't just accepted, but was also fashionable. I don't think it's a coincidence that gay rights, black rights, the empowerment of women and political correctness all happened over those twenty years and a book about outsiders trying to be accepted was almost the poster-boy for this era in American culture.

I was desperate to work with Stuart Immonen, who I have talked with for several years about doing a project together. So just the stars aligned. I knew that Stuart had a little break in his schedule, where he would be willing to do a project with me. So this year I've been very lucky.

For years I've wanted to work with this guy, so to actually write at the top of my scripts "Empress, Script by Mark Millar, Art by Stuart Immonen" is an absolute pleasure.

I always think it's a mistake when you actually have to set books aside and actually sit down and research something. I always think they've got to come from within.

I've done so many superhero comics, and I've actually just been really excited about sci-fi, and Chrononauts and Starlight were both sci-fi, which I had a great time doing.

Comic artists have always been part of my social circle. I just like hanging out with artists, and I always see them at conventions or a store signing or something. "Hey, we should do something together."

Cookbooks are almost a substitution for a lost sense of culture. People want some other life than the one they're living, so they buy a cookbook with pictures and imagine themselves as part of that life.

The one thing we can all relate to is family, and family has its traumas sometimes. Sometimes things don't go well for people. Sometimes things are tough. So everybody kind of knows someone who's been in this situation before, and I think that's what makes it work.

When you don't have time to do your job, that's a good indication you're playing the wrong game.

There probably aren't a lot of new superheroes around, so whenever one appears, it makes a bit of noise. Really, most of the people who are my friends write characters they loved as children. I get that, as well, because that's why I got into comics. But I'm also taking this massive liberation creatively, going off and doing new stuff. The first and foremost reason I do it is because I think they're fun, and I can do anything I want. I'm not constrained by continuity.

The trick was really finding the appropriate publisher for each of the projects I'd devised.

Your capacity to grow determines your capacity to lead.

Writers are the most terrible kleptomaniacs.

Oddly, I think if you look at comic books, you look at the shelves in the store, it's predominantly male characters, historically. But if you look outside the window it's 52-percent female, and something odd is going on there. So I do think it's your responsibility as a writer, really, to create stuff that little girls can get into too. I want my daughters to have role models that are female.

I didn't break into comics to write fairytales or crime comics.

If I'm creating a new superhero, it shouldn't be any different from other superheroes in terms of the qualities. Obviously the personality can be different. I think traditionally in comics women have tended to be a girlfriend or the daughter of whoever, whether it's even Batgirl as Gordon's daughter, or whatever. There is that relation of the hero, you know, like Superman's cousin, Supergirl. And that's great. It's fantastic to have a link to these amazing characters, but I kind of like the idea of things being something in their own right, which is why I've always loved Wonder Woman.

What I wanted to do was drown something enormous, like a Star Trek or Star Wars kind of space opera-type thing, but actually make it about someone who was just married to the wrong guy, and that guy just happens to be this amazing dictator, and she has to get her kids as far away as possible from this guy. So something that could almost be a TV movie, if you'd ground it and set it in Wisconsin or something like that, but to give it this enormous setting.

I'm so used to artists saying to me, "Listen, I'm going to have five pages done next week," and then three weeks later I'm phoning them, begging them for two pages. And Stuart [Immonen]is a guy who will promise you five pages and deliver six pages, and the six pages are even better than you could have ever imagined.

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.

When that character and the X-Force appeared, they took the comic world by storm. You have to look at those numbers. And you see that that isn't Rob Liefeld's only creation. There's all these other things, like Cable and Domino. There's so many things that actually could be fascinating onscreen and unlike anything you've ever seen before onscreen. So I think Fox is in a really nice position where they've got something that feels as wide and different as the Marvel Universe.

I'm a huge fan of the Rod Serling sci-fi, where they could take the most odd and enormous ideas but ground them in something very human.

Many of our leadership practices have gone from being tried and true to being tired and tarnished.

Their argument, and I think it's a correct one, is that they'll make more money from the trades and the hardcovers if nobody messes with the creative team.

I think most people know the concept of difficult family situations. So I try to just ground a very big concept in something we can all relate to on some level.

Wanted has gone into second, third and fourth printings of the individual issues and the north American printings of Wanted #1 are now close to 100,000.

Artists, no matter how good their intentions, are always slower than they think.

I didn't want the headache of having a publisher reviewing everything I wrote in advance.

All my kids love superheroes, but my middle daughter in particular is obsessed with Wonder Woman and Batgirl.

Guess that's thirty-one pieces of silver you've got now, huh? Sleep well, Judas.

Likewise, I see no shame in writing Captain America or Wolverine.

The animated books pay the lowest rates at the Big Two and you can forget about royalties.

We ordinary people might lack your great speed or your X-Ray vision, Superman, but never underestimate the power of the human mind. We carry the most dangerous weapon on Earth inside these thick skulls of ours.

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.

Organizations who win, think deeply, choose wisely, and act decisively.

Maybe in this Star Wars world maybe subconsciously I was preparing myself. But I've just found all of my ideas I've been coming up with are big sci-fi things, and I wanted to do a big epic, a big space opera, and this is it. This is mine.

I've been doing the Millarworld stuff for decades, and everybody seems really happy that's working on it.

It's been a very interesting exercise as a writer - writing a little family group, like The Incredibles or The Simpsons or something like that, and setting it in a big Star Wars-type setting. It's been really fun, definitely different from the kind of thing I normally do.

I just trust the people involved. Marvel and DC for the last 16 years - is that 90 percent of the time it's incredible top talent. Like, this is what makes it different from the pre-2000 superhero movies. I would say, except Tim Burton and Richard Donner, it was generally, comic book movies were done by guys who weren't that into the material and people who didn't really respect the stuff. But as everything, whether it's Wolverine, X-Men, Avengers, Batman, all these things, it's just been done by top-tier people. I have total confidence that they'll continue that tradition of being great.