I just love the fact that all my pals are basically looked after. You know, we have these amazing deals, these guys split 50 percent. We have ownership 50 percent, all the bonuses 50 percent, and everybody's going to be alright. So going forward into the future, every one of these Millarworld projects, as we call them, 50 percent partners on everything. So it's just a really happy environment to be working in.

The lovely thing is, if Marvel had a Spider-Man movie over at Sony or something, they own the rights to the character, and the editors and producers make suggestions and get notes and things. But you're talking about Matthew Vaughn and Jane Goldman. They're two of the best people in the world. The notes are just things like, "This is absolutely brilliant."

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 breadth of the potential readership is also a factor.

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.

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.

If you want to build a high performance organization, you've got to play chess, not checkers.