Mark Millar Quotes

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

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.

Jesus, man. Why do people want to be Paris Hilton and nobody wants to be Spider-Man?

But I also asked why they didn't chase their dreams. How many rock stars just settled for accountancy? How many astronauts grew up to be psychologists? Other kids were playing Mafia Wars, we were taking down the fucking Mafia and no it wasn't normal. It wasn't even close.

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

I'm just running through this list of potential nannies and wondered if we should go for a superhero this time. Do you think Wolverine would be interested? He seems to be on every other team right now ...

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

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.

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.

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.

What we had yesterday has gone away. What we have today will only last this day. What we will have twomorrow no one can take away. So treasure the moments given, appreciate what is offered.

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

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.

I tried my best to fight oppression, but America's at her happiest ruled by liars.

The books are all very, very different so the publishers really had to be different too.

I offered them Utopia, but they fought for the right to live in Hell.

However, if I can expand this to Top Cow or Avatar I'm helping the sales, however small, on my Marvel books because I'm almost certain to pick up some new readers.

It didn't take a trauma to make you wear a mask. It didn't take your parents getting shot ... or cosmic rays or a power ring ... Just the perfect combination of loneliness and despair.

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

Like most people my age, I merely existed.

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 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.

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.

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.

Why train for years to do a job, you bitched about all day? Didn't it make more sense to follow your dreams and maybe do a little good at the same time.

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.

Why don't you just put the whole world in a bottle, Superman?

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.

What's a matter Chris? You shitting yourself? You should be!

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.

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.

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.

I think American audiences are quite interesting in that they can handle almost any amount of violence, but the moment the violence becomes sexual violence it immediately becomes an issue.

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

I'm honestly as happy writing Superman Adventures as I am writing Wanted.

The big thing is it's a domestic drama. Everything else in science fiction tends to be high-concept. Really for the last 40 years or so I think sci-fi's been a little cold and a little inhuman quite often - certainly since the 1980s - and I really wanted to do something that almost felt like a regular, real-life drama but just set it in a sci-fi setting. I think the best stuff is always like that.

I just noticed I've been writing lots of female-led things. Two of them haven't been announced yet, but the big Greg Capullo book I'm doing is a female-led story, and I'm doing another series with John Romita which is a female-led story as well.

One of the things that made Star Wars work was the kids didn't know who their dad was.

I'd love to do something else for Avatar after this.

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.

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.

The past is an anchor with suffering written on the rope. I don't live there now. I am cutting myself free.

I love the fact that they [girls ]are into Superman and Green Lantern and Batman and everything, and they really do have all those toys as well, but I don't want all their role models to be men.

There's almost a universe as big as the Marvel Universe with X-Men. I mean, Deadpool is something I think everybody was taken surprise by, except for the people who read the comic book.

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

The highest form of leadership is one in which a leader raises up other leaders - not as an accident, but as a result of conscious effort.

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.

At the moment, I have it planned as a six or seven year experiment, but the books will only ever appear in bursts like this every couple of years and only with the best quality artists.

I think exactly the same qualities as men [women role model needs], exactly the same, which is kindness, courage and intelligence.

Leaders don't ever "arrive." If we ever think we're done, we are done!

Would you rather see a super soldier battling Nazis or something more serious? Or lesbians down a coal mine? Generally, the films are engaging in the same way as the comics are. It's no coincidence that the biggest movies are genre-related, whether it's Lord of the Rings or comic books.

Marvel books also feed into the smaller publishers and the fact that this is happening in the same month we're launching Ultimate Fantastic Four is no coincidence.

Writers are the most terrible kleptomaniacs.

Honestly, I've never felt better in my life. It's like somebody flicked a switch and I've suddenly realized how crazy I'd been acting all those years. All that talk about interfacing with an ultra-dimensional Phoenix deity – it was absolutely insane.

THOU ART NO THOR!

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.

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 am as resilient as the steel that was once made here, and I am a fighter, in every sense of the word. We all are.