Mark Millar tells his message board what to expect from him next year:
We’ll fill in the blanks later because some of these won’t be announced until Chicago con (where Marvel want to make a big splash). But here’s what I’m stockpiling at the moment and one of the reasons (besides those six months off) why there’s only 2 Marvel comics out from me this year.
Starting in January…
1/ Me and Hitchy take over a regular Marvel series.
2/ Me and McNiven do likewise.
3/ Me and Tommy Lee Edwards do 1985
4/ Kick-Ass with me and John Romita JrThere’s a fifth comic out next summer, a kind of creator-owned follow-up to The Ultimates, but I’ve only written the first two issues and the artist hasn’t even started yet so unlikely to see the light of day before this time next year. But 1985 is entirely written, the Hitchy project has nine scripts in the can, the McNiven book is three issues in and Kick-Ass is halfway through. So schedule is looking good and most will be scripted entirely before the first issue is published. It’s nice to be ahead of my deadlines for once.
But these all get big art previews in August. So look out for em.
This being the internet, there almost immediately follows a clarification intended to keep rumors from being started:
Let’s knock the rumour on the head that Hitchy has done nine issues. This will only come back to haunt us. Hitchy’s done four issues (great as we don’t launch until January) and I’ve just finished issue nine. So we’re way ahead, but not NINE FULL ISSUES in the can.
Perhaps more interesting is this comment from Millar later in the thread:
[W]hat’s listed above is the last of my Marvel projects for the time being. We had talked about a big 36 issue run, but losing the year really killed that dead and my contract’s up in May. No plans to sign up again for now… I’m going to do creator-owned for a while (maybe a year) before thinking about any other company-owned projects.
Love him or hate him, Millar has been very important to Marvel in the last couple of years. Will his theoretically* leaving the company be problematic for them?
(* – I mean, come on. It’s Mark Millar, the man who defined taking things with grains of salt.)
June 26th, 2007 at 12:24 pm
Bad for sales, maybe.
Good for characters acting sympathetically, absolutely.
The man can not write people in a likable manner.
June 26th, 2007 at 1:09 pm
I’m sure Marvel is backing a dump-truck full of money up to Millar’s house even as we speak.
June 26th, 2007 at 1:52 pm
If Millar leaves, then it really will be down to Bendis.
In many ways, both the best and the worst of the Quesada era of Marvel has sprung from what Millar and Bendis helped stir up.
Especially at the outset, there were plenty of other creators responsible for making it happen, many of whom were arguably far more talented than either Millar or Bendis, but without their work on the Ultimate Marvel titles (as mixed as my feelings are about those), I suspect the rest of those changes – both good and bad – might not have happened.
Yeah, sure, there was Jemas, but the best that could be said about him was that he pushed new formats and opened the doors to Marvel for people who (unlike him) had actual talent, and the worst that could be said about him was that he was every bit as bad a micromanager as Shooter, except without any of the professionalism, who taught Quesada, Bendis and Millar all the worst lessons about how to deal with other people.
But Jemas is long gone, and Quesada might as well be gone, because Quesada’s only real strategy for the past few years has been, “Hand it over to Bendis and Millar, and let them do whatever they want.”
Marvel does have other creators working for them, of course, and again, many of them are arguably far more talented than Bendis has become, or Millar has ever been, but Quesada has been treating them like red-headed stepchildren for so long that I can’t imagine (a) him promoting any of them to Millar and Bendis’ current shared role as unofficial Editors-in-Chief, or (b) any of them accepting, especially since they have to know that they won’t ever enjoy nearly the same amount of freedom.
So, yes, if and when Millar leaves, Quesada really will be reduced to a one-trick pony, and that trick’s name will be “Bendis,” because if and when Bendis leaves, I don’t see Quesada lasting for long afterwards – either he’ll resign, or somebody like Dan Buckley, who might still harbor some animosity toward anyone who was friends with Jemas, will use Bendis’ departure as an excuse to drop Quesada.
June 26th, 2007 at 2:37 pm
All Quesada did was bring in Bendis and Millar? You’re total misappropriation of history is both fascinating and disturbing.
June 26th, 2007 at 2:48 pm
I think Marvel will be just fine when Millar leaves. Guys like Brubaker, Fraction, McDuffie and, yes, Bendis are doing all the heavy lifting these days at the House of Ideas, with many of the so-called rockstars like Millar and Jeph Loeb somewhat marginal players at this point (as the world moves past their eternally in-production projects).
Getting off the topic a bit, is it a “British thing” to refer to Marvel and DC comics using the plural form of verbs?
Here’s an example from the Millar statements above:
“We’ll fill in the blanks later because some of these won’t be announced until Chicago con (where Marvel want to make a big splash).”
Rich Johnston does the same thing over at “Lying in the Gutters”, with stuff like “DC are publishing…” or “Marvel were announcing…”.
Is this a “color/colour” thing, or should I have paid more attention in my high school grammar classes? Just curious.
June 26th, 2007 at 7:47 pm
“All Quesada did was bring in Bendis and Millar? You’re total misappropriation of history is both fascinating and disturbing.”
In the balance? Yes, that’s all he did that can be said to count in his favor anymore (and even that’s stretching it), because after hiring all sorts of other talented creators to revamp his franchises, he’s imposed slipshod but nonetheless oppressive editorial mandates that have completely negated those creators’ contributions.
The best example of this that I can think of is the X-Men. Quesada brings Morrison in, and while I’m not a fan of everything Morrison did, he did give the X-Men a creative vision that they’d been sorely lacking, perhaps ever since Claremont left. And then, when Morrison leaves, Quesada undoes everything Morrison set up to revamp the X-Men, and even when Quesada hired Whedon to replace Morrison, he doesn’t let him determine the direction of the franchise.
While I do believe that many of the stories from the “peak” of Quesada’s tenure were vastly overrated, I have to admit that they constituted an improvement over what preceded them near the end of the Harras era, but the problem is that now, in many ways, the creative status quo of Marvel as a whole is worse than it was when Harras was fired.
So, again, yes, just like Jemas, Quesada did some good, but lately, he seems to have done his damndest to cancel as much of his own good deeds out as he can, which is why, in the balance, I say that he hasn’t done much.
June 27th, 2007 at 12:45 am
K-Box I’m gonna have to disagree with you here. I’m not the biggest fan of Joey Q either and I certainly didn’t like CW but he also brought in Brubaker, Fraction, and Slott. Sure Millar has had too much sway and Bendis has done better work in the past but the line as a whole is looking rather healthy right now. He also green-lighted Planet Hulk, WWH, and Annihilation and those all proved to be top notch. Plus Captain America and Daredevil are seeing their best runs in years and that’s INCLUDING one of them losing the title character. Plus he also oversaw (and later pooped on) my beloved FF run from Mark Waid and saw the success of She-Hulk, Young Avengers, and Runaways. Give the man at least a LITTLE more credit…
June 27th, 2007 at 7:36 am
Bryan Hitch has already done four issues of his next project? After taking eight months to finish ULTIMATES 2 #13, which only came out in May?
You’ll forgive my scepticism. Millar made exactly the same “We’re way ahead and it’ll come out monthly” promise in advance of ULTIMATES 2, and it turned out to be arrant nonsense.
June 27th, 2007 at 11:29 am
Yes, it’s British grammar. Applicable when emphasising the individuals within a group rather than a collective personification of the group itself.
June 27th, 2007 at 11:33 am
Paul, well, Bryan did say he’d finished Ultimates II in December didn’t he? That’s 6 months…
June 27th, 2007 at 12:58 pm
[b]I don’t see Quesada lasting for long afterwards – either he’ll resign, or somebody like Dan Buckley, who might still harbor some animosity toward anyone who was friends with Jemas, will use Bendis’ departure as an excuse to drop Quesada.[/b]
Did I miss a memo somewhere? Since when is Dan Buckley vindictive against people who were friends with Jemas? Seriously…I’m curious about this now.