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.

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 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.

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

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.

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.

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.