By Tim Stevens
Having already established himself as one of Marvel's marquee writers with hit projects like THE ULTIMATES and CIVIL WAR, Mark Millar will be going the extra mile come this summer and fall.
In addition to shouldering the writing on four projects in the months to come—MARVEL 1985, FANTASTIC FOUR and WOLVERINE, plus his creator-owned KICK ASS for the Icon imprint—Millar will be creating a connective tissue between his three principal epics and building to an endgame even more impressive
We caught up with the rowdy Scot to talk about constructing his own world within the Marvel Universe.
Marvel.com: The idea of a fantasy world bleeding into ours or someone from our world being sucked into a fantasy realm is a fairly common storytelling device. However, I am fairly sure we have not seen it utilized in the context of the Marvel Universe spilling into the real world. What inspired you to wrap this device into the Marvel canvas with MARVEL 1985?
Mark Millar: It's an idea I've had bubbling away for a long time. My favorite episodes of things like "Star Trek," oddly, were the cheap ones where they had no money left and would bring Kirk and Spock to Earth to save money on sets. I even liked the "Buck Rogers" episode where he went back to the 20th century and saw the fantastic mixing with the ordinary. I know it was just cost-cutting, but seeing someone paranormal beside the normal always fascinated me. Seeing someone fly on another planet isn't that impressive. It's a fantastic thing in a fantastic setting. But seeing it happen here makes it seem much more special. That's the genesis of my idea behind [1985]. I wanted to do a book about man's first contact with super humanity and the idea of it being the
villains of the Marvel Universe gave the whole thing a much more dramatic edge.
Marvel.com: 1985 is almost a fairy tale in a lot of ways. Is there anything in your previous works or in pop culture you would say this was close to in terms of tone?
Mark Millar: I think fairy tale is a very good description of this. I wanted to do something timeless that has the Marvel characters at their most iconic and the way to make something timeless is to set it in the past, to completely remove it from current trends. This is what they did with "Indiana Jones" and it never goes out of date because it was never, technically, in fashion. In terms of tone I'd say maybe "Stand By Me." It's a story about the end of childhood and 1985 was the end of my own childhood so it really resonates for me and hopefully all the others who came in during the last big boom.
Marvel.com: Your point of view character is a young boy. How does that affect the way the characters act in the story?
Mark Millar: 1985 was probably the final year before the complete deconstruction of the super hero took place. It was happening elsewhere prior to this—most notably guys like [Don] McGregor and [Steve] Gerber—but [Alan] Moore and [Frank] Miller really, really made this mainstream in 1986 and so '85, for me, was the last year we looked at the heroes with the same innocence we looked at our parents. They just seemed utterly faultless at this stage and that's the way they're written in this story.
Marvel.com: What characters are going to make major appearances in the story?
Mark Millar: All the villains and all the heroes. It's that simple. I just wanted to see them all. Even the [corniest] villain would be very frightening and difficult to deal with in real life and so there was nobody I wanted to leave out. This story also marks the origin of a huge villain [for] an upcoming FANTASTIC FOUR arc. [That] story is called "The Masters of Doom" and one of the two men who trained Doctor Doom has an origin here. 1985 is basically his story. It also connected into WOLVERINE via the
Fantastic Four story so I see my 2008 Marvel work as really one big story. These projects all weave in and out of one another.
Marvel.com: The art for 1985 was originally supposed to be wholly photographed. How has bringing Tommy Lee Edwards on to the project to do the art changed that way you looked and felt about the project? Did you find yourself changing your writing approach at all or revisiting the scripts and altering things?
Mark Millar: No, not at all. The scripts remained exactly the same because Tommy just captured everything I wanted from the photo art. He has an amazing quiet naturalism to his work and his take on the Marvel characters is very unique. I think he's about to become very, very famous in comics and deservedly so.
Marvel.com: Building on what you mentioned earlier, for you, what's the significance of using the year 1985?
Mark Millar: It's the end of my childhood as I turned 16 the following year—the age when you can get married in Scotland and thus considered an adult. It also marked a high watermark in Marvel books. I couldn't afford or find most of these at the time and read them later, but we had Miller on [DAREDEVIL], [Walt] Simonson on THOR, [John] Byrne on FF and so on.
Marvel.com: With a few issues now out of your collaboration with Bryan Hitch on FANTASTIC FOUR, how has it met your expectations?
Mark Millar: [It has] more than met our expectations. Our take on FF is very traditional and radical at the same time. The book is moving to a new place and we're just constantly throwing in lots of new characters and situations. But we reckon it's
really going to go through the roof with "The Death of the
Invisible Woman" as this features
Dr. Doom and a tie-in with both 1985 and WOLVERINE. Issue #558 is where the book just goes nuts and we're very excited to see what happens then. By #557 everything is in place and then we can just go mental.
Marvel.com: So expanding on that, following the current arc, "World's Greatest," what's next?
Mark Millar: Well, "World's Greatest" is four issues long and runs directly into "The Death of the Invisible Woman." We've set Reed up with the perfect plan B wife in the background and this obviously comes into play in our next storyline. We also have the FF facing the biggest deal they have ever faced and have peppered the storyline with lots of mysteries. Besides Sue dying there's lots of other big things going on, from Ben's new love—is there more to her than meets the eye—to a new nanny—again, something odd is going on here—and something weird with one of the children. This is stuff we've been planting seeds for since we started and this is where it all starts to pay off. Plus Doom is back. And another huge Marvel villain. I don't want to spoil too much, but these four issues are pretty much my favorite run on anything I've done at Marvel. The first eight issues, when taken as a whole, just work really well.
Marvel.com: You and Bryan Hitch have collaborated before on THE ULTIMATES where the emphasis was very much on the widescreen action. Here, while there is still plenty of spectacle to go around, there seems to be a lot more quiet moments. Did you change the way you wrote for Hitch for this?
Mark Millar: Not really. ULTIMATES had a rep for being all action, but if you read through the book we could go three issues without a fight. We tended to just build up slowly and then go nuts and that's the same formula we're doing with FF.
Marvel.com: Moving on to WOLVERINE, when did this idea to do "Old Man Logan," a post-apocalyptic future story starring
Wolverine, come to you?
Mark Millar: I'm just a sucker for those stories about the big heroes at the end of their careers. Dark Knight was a huge influence on me as a kid and I think Wolverine is Marvel's Batman. He's the guy who fits that iconic mold better than any other. Just seeing him old, grizzled and cranky fits so well and the idea first came to me years back when I was watching "Unforgiven." For some reason that really struck me as a good Wolverine look, probably because Wolvie was based on Clint so much in the early days.
Marvel.com: Is it at all related to any of your prior Wolverine stories?
Mark Millar: No, this is related to FANTASTIC FOUR and 1985. Plus every other Marvel comic in the sense that it's the end of all their stories. It's set in a world 50 years after all the villains got together and beat the heroes [with]
Magneto, Doom and the villain from 1985 leading the charge. There's no heroes really left to even form a fight back as our stories begin. Even the villains have mostly died and we're in this terrible future world where their kids are running the show.
Marvel.com: How different is Logan in the future?
Mark Millar: He's just broken. We don't reveal what happened to him on the night the heroes fell until halfway through the story. But he's just dead inside. The villains destroyed him and left both he and a couple of other heroes around because they were no longer a threat. He's just a farmer now with a wife and kids trying to make ends meet. He can't even look you in the eye never mind pop his claws.
Marvel.com: How about the world of the Marvel Universe? Are there still benchmarks fans will catch or is it unrecognizable?
Mark Millar: Oh, it's there beneath the dust. We get little glimpses and see the kids of the heroes we know well. But America just got carved up into five regions after the big battle and the whole place is like a Mad Max movie with super villains. It's very bleak, but also very exciting. Wolverine and Hawkeye have to cross the entire country to get to what used to be New York and that's the format of our eight issues. They're zipping across in a customized Spider-Mobile with a blind Hawkeye behind the wheel, Wolverine sitting beside him and telling him where the holes in the road are.
Marvel.com: What about the storyline made your CIVIL WAR collaborator Steve McNiven the right artist for it?
Mark Millar: For starters, it's got lots of characters and Steve is great at drawing crowds. This is like a post-nuclear event book. It also has lots of re-imaginings as we update your Marvel favorites in a screwed up way and Steve is a master of design. He can make anything look cool. I just got a page this morning where we see Wolverine literally getting taken apart by
Mister Sinister, Stryfe and some other
X-Men villains and it's so good I need to buy it. He's just reached a new height here. If you liked his CIVIL WAR art you will weep with joy when you see these pages.
Marvel.com: As you have mentioned a few times here, all three of these current projects are interrelated. How can this be?
Mark Millar: 1985 is many things, including the origin of the next great Fantastic Four villain. This guy is one of the two guys who trained Doctor Doom, the guys we never heard about when he was being looked after by these monks. WOLVERINE also ties very directly into FF as the Fantastic Four, who have time-travel facilities, can journey into this nightmare future and interact with what's going on here. Plus there's a whole area of the shattered America being controlled by the 1985 villain in "Old Man Logan." This isn't such a big deal in "Old Man Logan," but I liked having it in there to pull the stories even closer together. Quite cheekily, I've even written my Icon book KICK-ASS into this a little. KICK-ASS is set in the real world and features a kid who loves super heroes so much he makes a suit and gives it a try. 1985 is set in the real world and I've given the two books a few links which you'll see in upcoming issues.
Marvel.com: Were these projects conceived individually and then linked later or was this something you always had in mind?
Mark Millar: Well, 1985 was written first, but when I started doing the other books I started spinning little ideas out from 1985 and then the whole thing become one big kinda one-man crossover. But 1985 is the foundation of everything. It can be read on its own and is very satisfying, but it's also the bedrock of my 2008 Marvel output.
Marvel.com: Can we expect any ripple effects across the Marvel Universe due to all this?
Mark Millar: Oh God, yes. There's some huge stuff coming up. The guys who trained Doctor Doom are coming back. This can't end well.
Marvel.com: When should we start looking for the connections? Are there clues already out there that fans might not have picked up on?
Mark Millar: Yes, definitely. The clues have been planted right from the first issue of FF. Lots of things aren't as they seem and these will be
very apparent a couple of issues down the line. Doctor Doom is at the heart of everything here and that's always a laugh. You know it's worth picking up when you see that big rusty mask.
"World's Greatest" wraps up in FANTASTIC FOUR #557 on sale May 21, MARVEL 1985 premieres on May 28, and the Millar/McNiven team begins their run on WOLVERINE with issue #66 on June 11. Check out past work by Mark Millar on Marvel Digital Comics Unlimited.
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