Not so long ago, superhero stories were a bit…
limp.
I prefer the old one. Hasn't got his cape either.
Actors were told doing a movie could end their careers,
and once-powerful comic book houses
were running out of money.
So, one hired a small group of creators
to try and turn things around.
A decade later,
and many of the most iconic superhero stories,
that gross billions of dollars, were turned into Hollywood movies,
and kick-started a new fascination with superheroes,
came from this man.
It's funny, we think of comic book movies as like,
they're indestructible, they've been around forever,
but anybody who grew up in the '90s will know it was far from it.
There was these terrible superhero movies made in the '90s.
And it was even seen as risky to do a Batman movie back then.
They couldn't get Superman right. They were trying over and over.
Marvel itself was actually going into bankruptcy in 1999.
They were filing for Chapter 11. It was very famously in a bad spot.
And they had to eventually rely on cheap labour like me.
Mark Millar had just turned 30 when he started working for Marvel.
He'd grown up in a working-class family just outside Glasgow,
but had to drop out of university aged 19
after the death of his parents.
With very little money,
Mark went to his local library every day
and worked on submission scripts
to try and make it as a comic book writer.
And it paid off.
Mark landed a gig writing for the British comic 2000 AD,
and after years keeping his head just above water
eventually took over writing The Authority.
That changed my life,
that book changed everything for me.
The Authority became so popular it drew Marvel's gaze.
Editor-in-Chief Joe Quesada invited Mark
to revamp their iconic core characters.
I remember going in for my first meeting,
asking if there was a coffee machine, they said,
"We can't afford the coffee machine."
Somebody told me they'd actually sold the doors
to their meeting room,
they'd sold the doors on eBay.
So, things were so bad.
But the thing with being at rock bottom
is no one's particularly precious.
Mark had the freedom
to restart these 40-year-old franchises from scratch,
throw out all their baggage and do whatever he wanted.
That was really exciting for me.
I thought, this is a chance to be Stan Lee,
to come in and just start it from Issue 1 again.
While his colleague Brian Michael Bendis was given Spider-Man,
Mark was given X-Men, and they both worked from one key idea.
What if we…
…created the Marvel Universe as happening right now
instead of 1961?
This wasn't fantasy, like Narnia or Middle Earth.
These new stories would be set in modern-day America,
the readers' America.
It's going to seem amazing.
If some guy swings buy on a web past your house,
it's pretty spectacular.
I think the very first one I did was X-Men.
It was quite easy for me to write from a newcomer point of view
because I was a newcomer to that stuff.
I hadn't read X-Men growing up.
I gave them all the wrong powers, I had Wolverine flying.
This kind of stuff.
It kept getting sent back to me.
They said, "Go and look this up online."
Thankfully, once he'd done his research,
Ultimate X-Men was a huge success.
And the way Marvel works, which I love,
is if you have any success there, they say, "What do you want to do?"
So, I did the X-Men that came in as the number one book,
I was like, The Avengers would be cool, so I did that.
And then I did Wolverine, I did Spider-Man and so on.
Everybody stayed out of my way.
They let me do what I wanted to do with the characters,
and each one was bigger than the last.
So, it was a lovely period, it was great.
War has started.
What no one realised at the time
was that Mark was writing the blueprints
for the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
His series The Ultimates was the major inspiration
behind 2012's The Avengers movie,
and was Time magazine's "Comic Book of the Decade".
Mark went on to write Old Man Logan
and the Captain America: Civil War storyline,
which became one of Marvel's biggest commercial successes.
The creative freedom Mark had in that office with no doors
or coffee machine had paid off.
But a conversation with Stan Lee was about to change everything.
In 2003, Mark was interviewing Stan Lee
for a feature in SFX magazine.
He said, "You should go and do your own stuff."
He'd read what I'd been doing, and he said to me,
"You'd be really good at creating your own characters."
I'd never considered it until that point.
I'd always wanted to work on other people's characters.
I thought Stan would be impressed, but he couldn't care less.
He was like, "Trust me, go and create your own stuff."
And the next day, if Stan Lee tells you to do something,
it's a bit like Moses, isn't it,
being told by the burning bush to do something.
So, the next day I remember buying a pod and I went on the train.
I sat with a pen and wrote out the idea for Wanted.
And a few months later,
I had a movie deal with Universal.
I was like, "This is really easy."
You just write it down and send it away,
they give you a movie, Angelina Jolie's in it. Brilliant!
Stan was right.
And how did the actual interview go?
The audio wasn't working. I was recording it.
I interviewed him for two hours,
and halfway through I noticed that it wasn't taping.
And I was like, "Oh, my God." Right?
And because he was Stan Lee, I was too embarrassed to say,
"This isn't working. Can we do this again?"
So what I did, and I've never told anyone this before,
what I did was I faked it.
I roughly remembered what Stan was saying and I typed it up.
But Stan Lee sounds so much like Stan Lee,
that it's quite easy to fake it.
So, it was a Q&A text interview
for a magazine I was interviewing him for,
and Stan didn't even notice.
I sent it to him for approval. Stan was like, "Yep, looks great."
He said it was fine, okay.
So, in 2004, Mark started his own company, Millarworld.
Over the coming years, he wrote Kick-Ass, Kingsman
and Jupiter's Legacy.
He had helped transform comic books
from niche to mainstream
and turn them into staple modern storytelling genres.
Under his direction, superhero stories
no longer need to be about guy gets powers,
guy makes a costume, guy fights a supervillain.
Millar's stories go deeper,
with characters that are just as human as they are super,
living in the world we're in right now.
My thing I'd say to everybody is just think,
what will Marvel and DC never dare do?
You know, start where they draw the line.
Really interesting, that's what I've done with Jupiter's Legacy.
I was reading a lot a few years back
about 1929 and the Wall Street Crash.
I was like, this all looks familiar.
Weirdly, the other cycle of history that's been repeated
is coming out of a massive global pandemic as well.
So, it is really odd, these things do tend to move in these cycles.
I wanted to do a story about that.
The rise of nationalism is another thing.
Like, after the financial crash in 2009,
for the next decade,
you had people turning to extreme, radical,
generally right-wing solutions, and we're seeing that again now.
And Jupiter's Legacy, if it's about anything,
is about breaking the cycles of history.
Do better next time.
So, the idea is that it's kind of boomers versus millennials.
It's like the kids looking at
what their parents have done with their lives
and thinking, you guys could be doing so much more.
Instead of catching bank robbers,
stuff Marvel and DC movie characters have been doing,
fighting supervillains for 90 years,
we could actually stop starving in Africa,
we could be stopping human rights abuses in other parts of the world
and actually turn the place into a utopia.
-Petra, I know you don't-- -I'm not you.
I can't keep taking hits and just get back up.
I can't watch friends die because some asshole--
But the story is all about
people thinking that extreme solutions
are the best solutions and it going horribly wrong,
and using history as a guide for them.
So, I'm making it sound quite intelligent.
I'm looking forward to watching this myself. It sounds good.
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