Mark Millar wants to thank you all for the success of his Millarworld books:

I’m writing Nemesis 2 #1 today for Steve McNiven. Steve will start drawing this around May and we’ll launch around September. We’ll get our pre-order numbers in around late August, but between now and Christmas Steve and I will work for free. I’ll have finished the entire series by the time #1 comes out and Steve will probably be finished all the art by the time we get paid. You see, on a creator-owned series you get paid four months AFTER PUBLICATION. So it’s not unusual to get paid for a script nine or ten months after you write it and if it doesn’t sell a certain amount you run the risk of getting paid zero for what might have been an entire year’s work, especially if you’re an artist. And you still have to pay for an editor, printing costs, a distribution fee to Marvel, an inker, a letterer and a colourist.

So why make the jump from company-owned work at Marvel (at the very moment I was one of the two highest-paid dudes there) into something so risky? Well, we’ve had a crazy amount of luck with the Millarworld books so far. Wanted, Kick-Ass, Superior, American Jesus, etc, have all sold incredibly well and we’ve been fortunate enough to sell everything on as movies, video-games and even hoodies and action figures in the last couple of years, retaining the complete rights to our creations at the same time. As you know, the comic book industry has a little HISTORY when it comes to the creators of some of the biggest characters in the world and so after working for the Big Two for most of my professional life this seemed like the next logical step to protect anything I create in the future. But you can’t take anything for granted and, although we’ve done great numbers on the Millarworld launches so far, it really was amazing news for Leinil and I yesterday to see that even the big PRE-ORDERS or Supercrooks #1 have completely sold out and we could be looking at multiple printings for this book too. We took a gamble, but had faith in what we were working on and I just wanted to pass along our thanks in having faith in what we were doing too.

Supercrooks #1 sold out immediately, despite the highest pre-orders of any Millarworld title, if you’re wondering what brought Millar’s gratitude on.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 26th, 2012 at 10:00 am and is filed under Creators, Independent, Industry, News & Views. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.