The Sunday Times talks with writer Mark Millar about Wanted – “the highest-selling creator-owned comic book of the past decade” — rubbing elbows with celebrities, and life on the comics industry’s A-list:
Millar’s comic book stories sell hundreds of thousands of copies and when he flies to Marvel’s New York base every month, he travels first class. Yet the trappings of such a lifestyle are not in evidence in Glasgow.
Sitting in a restaurant, wearing a pair of jeans and a black T-shirt, with his hair ruffled and light stubble on his jaw, he blends into the background. He is resolutely unpretentious and gleefully reveals that he did not own a mobile phone until last Christmas.
“I like peace and quiet, but my worst fears have come true. Now people phone me all the time,” he chuckles.
He also relishes the fact that his friends tell him not to admit in interviews that his favourite films are mainstream, but populism is a concept he is happy to embrace.
“I love the fact that Raiders of the Lost Ark is one of my favourite films,” he says. “It’s the worst kind of snobbery to want to be into stuff that most people aren’t. It’s a defect in character. Whereas being into something that everybody’s into, what could be nicer?
“To create something that everybody likes is the ultimate aspiration. Nobody writes a novel hoping that hardly anybody reads it. Novelists get angry when people don’t read their books and then start sniping at JK Rowling.”
Millar, 38, also reveals that he plans to retire by age 45.
June 2nd, 2008 at 10:43 am
Well 2015 can’t come soon enough.
June 2nd, 2008 at 10:44 am
Wanted has sold one million English language copies? I know it was semi succesful but that seems ludicrously high.
June 2nd, 2008 at 10:59 am
In my view, Millar knows how to write an exciting story that serves as wonderful escapism. I found his Ultimates and Civil War to be incredibly entertaining.
June 2nd, 2008 at 12:36 pm
“the highest-selling creator-owned comic book of the past decade”
Really?
June 2nd, 2008 at 1:26 pm
Really! At least in Millar’s little portion of the world. Or maybe he is just getting caught up in Hollywood hype speak. Hollywood hype speak is a bit like leet speak, only nobody in the real world knows the translation code.
June 2nd, 2008 at 3:35 pm
”
I think the trick is to count each single issue’s print run of the Wanted series (1-6) plus the tpb run…I’m guessing.
June 2nd, 2008 at 3:35 pm
Then you get around a million copies sold.
June 2nd, 2008 at 5:10 pm
2015? That should allow Millar and “Hitchy” to get at least two or three more issues of Fantastic Four out.
June 2nd, 2008 at 5:39 pm
Wow. It’s fun to watch an ego spiral out of control.
Can Mark Millar just admit he no longer writes comic books? He writes movie pitches masquerading as comic books.
June 2nd, 2008 at 5:44 pm
I think the trick is to count each single issue’s print run of the Wanted series (1-6) plus the tpb run…I’m guessing.
If that’s the math, then it isn’t the highest-selling creator-owned comic book of the past decade. I get using fuzzy math for hyperbole, but you can’t use several conflicting types of math in the same press release.
June 3rd, 2008 at 2:45 am
“the highest-selling creator-owned comic book of the past decade”
Somewhere, Jeff Smith and Jack Chick are laughing.
June 3rd, 2008 at 11:18 am
Somehow, Dirk, it doesn’t seem to me that Jeff Smith would be the laughing kind. More of the small chuckling kind, you know, that chuckle that is usually then followed by “Oh dear…”
Thing is, I DO like some of Millar’s stuff, I admit it, I loved ULTIMATES when it came out, and there is nothing wron, nothing at all about writing for a broad audience, but, oh dear, I stopped buying Millar’s things when he started to become a publicity monkey.
He has become the kind of drunken, loud arsehole in a Scottish pub on a Friday night that annoyingly tells everybody not wanting to listen that, “really, ye have ta understand, laddie, not only did I fuck’em all, I then spat in their faces! And I will do it again, too! Because that’s just the kind of lad I am! Now give me another brew!”
And could he please stop bringing up J.K. Rowling? You know, that author that you barely hear anything about? Who has never really pimped herself the way he has?
Millar has deteriorated from a writer with some truly magnificent ideas (and one should give credit to that) to a seriously deluded media whore. He did the one thing nobody should ever do. He bought into his own mythology. That’s a shame, because I wish he would stop hyping himself as god’s next coming and just write.