Look at this:

http://nerdbastards.com/2012/09/27/fox-marvel-movies-move-forward-with-mark-millar/

Good choice, bad choice?

The biggest problem I have with the work of his I don't like is his approach to continuity and the kind of irreverent approach to the characters (in some cases). I'm kind of a fan of irreverent humor (though I hate the term, so it's sort of making me cringe to use it), but it's not what I read comics for (or watch comic book films for). I like these characters, and since I grew up on them, I've formed a more sentimental attachment to them than, say, the characters from Pulp Fiction or Clerks or something I first consumed as an adult. If I someday miraculously outgrow this attachment, I won't be hoping to read clever deconstructions of the comic books I used to like;I'll just stop reading funny books.
In other words, I don't want to read stories about comic book super-heroes by cynical writers who think they're too cool for comic book super-heroes.
This probably sounds like I really hate Millar's work, despite my original statement to the contrary. I don't. I like the stuff that doesn't convey this attitude, and there is plenty of that. As a writer, I think you can leave that sort of thing at the door sometimes. As a consultant, maybe not so much. I basically think they need a fanboy (like Whedon) in that kind of role. Unless I'm reading him wrong (which is entirely possible), I don't think Millar is a full-on fanboy (despite working in the industry).
Then again, the characters I like best are mostly on the Marvel Studios roster, so they're not involved in this. Well, except the Surfer and Ol' Benjy. And Doom. And Galactus. And...

Millar tends to write his comics in the wide-screen style - like picture-boards for a movie. So having him as a consultant for movies is actually a fairly good fit for his abilities. He has an exciting style for big moments and action scenes.

That being said, he will need to tone down his adult content considerably. I've also been critical of his grasp of Marvel's character's personalities and histories (Civil War had nearly every character being portrayed out-of-character, in my opinion).

I don't see Marvel merging their cinematic universe with Fox anytime soon, and I think the Marvel Studios movies have been much better. I guess I'd prefer their own take on the characters, so part of me hopes the Fox movies fail, although the odds of them letting these franchises go is slim given how superhero movies have dominated the box office. X-men has a big advantage in that they have thousands of characters and a movie like Wolverine doesn't require the main character to stand on his own the way Spider-man or the FF would, hence all of their movies of the Avengers-type advantage. Honestly, I think Days of Future Past could be awesome and the time travel angle allows them to bring back all the characters who were killed in X3, which I wish they would just ignore really. I'd also expect the Origins characters to show up.

I don't like the idea of another FF franchise. I think they might just embarrass themselves. No doubt Millar will have them go dark and that probably won't work well with the FF. The people remember those movies being bad.

Maybe that #@!% mouse will finally get whats coming to him.

...because he basically deconstructs and reconstructs superheroes with modern sensibilities. That's his gimmick. His Ultimates is basically just taking the tropes of the Avengers that have been ingrained in them, pulling out the main points, and reconstructing it with a different genre (i.e. Ultimates is basically the Avengers in a Michael Bay Film). His fantastic four is basically Fantastic Four in Harry Potter/Hogwarts. His Unfunnies is Cartoon Characters in a Paul Anderson Film. Wanted is Secret Society of Supervillains in Fight Club. Kick Ass is Spiderman in Superbad.

I just finished typing that and I realize that its more like Millar knows how to combine superheroes with movies. That's his schtick more than anything else. He understands the tropes of superheroes and how to successfully merge that with popular film. That's what you need from a movie consultant. Millar knows the edge he has to walk in order to balance all of this correctly and I think he'd do a fine job as a Marvel consultant for film.

- l.k.

Millar was the guy who cut his teeth on the DC Animated Universe stuff (winning an Eisner for his Superman work). His Ultimate FF and Ultimate X-Men weren't all that illicit. Even his Ultimates (barring the Hank Pym/Wasp Domestic Violence and Hulk Rapes and Eats People) wasn't that explicit and could easily be edited out.

And he is just going to be a consultant. He isn't going to be the writer. If anything, he's going to be the guy who says, "This property would be great as a Paul Thomas Anderson movie. Or this one would be perfect for a Michael Bay style movie.

- l.k.

Giving the guy the benefit of the doubt, but his Ultimate FF wasn't dark. It was basically Harry Potter meets Fantastic Four with the Baxter Building as Hogwarts and Reed Richards as a scientific Harry Potter. That would probably fit well with the whole "How do I get more of that sweet sweet Twilight money after the franchise is over?"

An FF with a young cast of 20-somethings would be exactly what the movie franchise needs.

Heh-he that does tickle my funny bone! I would love to see Howard the Duck smack Donald around.Howard is ruining Donalds innocence in that picture.

Reed was effectively an indentured servant of the Baxter Building, poached at a young age to build them super-weapons. He was also portrayed as a troubled young man with an abusive father, incapable of relating to most human beings while desperate for recognition. He was also wracked with guilt over Ben's transformation, worse because while the original story had Ben know the risks of going into space on an experimental craft, Ultimate Ben just stopped by to see Reed on a college road trip only to get turned into a giant rock monster by being in the same general area. There were a few saving graces in his life, most notably Sue, but it's pretty easy to see how he went bad once those lifelines were gone.

Also (as Omar Karindu once pointed out), the Ultimate Fantastic Four never really discovered anything beneficial for humanity. If anything, they just found trouble that caused civilian casualties (for example, the Zombieverse) . And the secret civilizations they found were far more corrupt; for example, while the original Namor was a tragic anti-hero, Ultimate Namor is just a murderer and a rapist.

This isn't an indictment of Ultimate Fantastic Four's quality, just commentary that everything had a much harder edge.

If the movies flop, Marvel has a shot at getting the rights back, or at least taking over creative control.

Millar's Ultimate FF was far darker than the original version by Stan though. Compare Doom from that series to the Doom from the FF movies. By dark, I don't mean the characters themselves have to be grittier, but rather just the story. Keep in mind that I'm not comparing this to DKR, I'm comparing it to the Swiss Family Robinsons of comics that they were originally used as.

...which is sort of mid-range action, adventure dark. It isn't a Spielberg movie, but it isn't Saw either. It feels like a British sci-fi book, like his later FF run which seemed like he merged Gerry Anderson and the FF.

I get that it is dark, but it isn't as dark as Millar can go. It isn't Chosen or Unfunnies dark. It isn't even "Wanted" dark.

- l.k.

I don't see Marvel asking for any merging simply because they've had nothing but relative success in terms of their movies.

I think Fantastic Four is going to revert in the near future, I don't see Fox getting that off the ground. I don't know what the time table is for a reversion is though.

I would like to see the properties not owned by Marvel revert back, but that's unlikely at this point for the X-Men and Spider-Man franchises.

But I think the most likely scenario is for Fox and Sony to start reverting the production of the movies to Marvel while still holding the distribution rights. This was the same thing that Universal and Disney did, where Disney/Marvel would make the movies and Univeral would distribute them. This gives the distributor a guaranteed source of revenue without having to worry about production costs and the risks of a movie bombing. This gives Disney/Marvel a better quality control process.




I don't think so. Millar is a very commercial creator, he knows what will sell. And if he thinks a darker FF story will sell better, then he will do it. But I don't think that's the case. Millar is also very willing to take chances. He started off on Superman Adventures. He worked at Wildstorm, then the Ultimate line, then Marvel, then back to creator owned work.

Not explicitly, but almost all of Millar's work has a cynical and even nasty tone to it. Very few Millar characters ever do anything for altruistic reasons, and their heroic deeds tend to be either heat-of-the-moment impulses or deliberate acts of self-aggrandizement.

For example, the Ultimates; Cap does what he does because he's used to following orders for the (perceived) good of God and Country. Hawkeye and Black Widow are black ops goons who are even less picky about what orders they'll do, and enjoy the killing. Iron Man's a thrill seeker with a desire to die with a good reputation once his brain tumor kills him. Banner and Pym are troubled man-children who want to be respected but will use force to achieve that respect (especially Pym). The only character who fits into the classic hero mold is Thor, and even he's hardly above using situations to promote his political agenda (such as refusing to fight the Hulk until America doubles its foreign aid budget).

His Superman Adventures was just pure altruistic fun. Trouble, although bad, wasn't cynical. Marvel 1985 didn't read as cynical. His Jenny Sparks series was pretty optimistic (despite the fact that the main character was dead). Even his Spiderman was more about conspiracy than anything else.

But everything else isn't necessarily cynical, but it is highly political. I don't necessarily mean he's making Cap into a Republican, but he does give his characters a type of politics or philosophical outlook. This makes the characters less than ideal. His violence is less "angry gruesome violence porn" that is Garth Ennis. It isn't the "bad-ass smarter than-thou" violence of Warren Ellis. Millar's violence always seems tied to political arguments in tights. Civil War, Wanted, Authority, Red Son and the Ultimates are all about political disagreements with violence put behind it,

I'm not saying this is a good or bad thing. I think he deconstructs things and puts them back with political agendas attached.

Haven't read Trouble or Superman Adventures, and don't remember much about Marvel 1985 or Jenny Sparks. However, I interpreted his Marvel Knights Spider-Man run as a story of futility; how no matter how many lives Peter saves, he's ultimately just wasting his time by reacting to villains while the real evils of society run amok, and it's just a game that only ends when he dies.

Ultimate X-Men was a little more optimistic, since the teens in the X-Men themselves were decent people trying to do the right thing, even when all the adult figures (including Xavier) manipulated their every move. And his Fantastic Four story with Hitch portrayed the characters in a postivie light (and, perhaps Un-coincidentally, was one of his weakest works). But Wanted is one of the most mean-spirited things I've ever read, even before the last page. Kick-Ass basically ridicules the entire notion of the superhero vigilante as the self-aggrandizement of the deluded. Nemesis is just a celebration of the villain's excesses. Even the Wolverine stories he did fall squarely under the category of "bad protagonist, worse antagonists".




He used to, but stories like Kick-Ass and Nemesis take the political context out, and leave behind the violence porn attributed to Ennis. Except that Ennis understands when to use violence as black humor, and when to show its consequences.

Also, I'd hardly characterize Ellis' violence as "smarter-than-thou", because it's almost always undercut by the weight of the situation. In Transmetropolitan, Spider Jerusalem only resorts to live ammunition towards the end, when his deteriorating health and the Smiler's reign have become truly dire; before that, he just beats people up or shoots them with a bowel disruptor. In Stormwatch, it's clear that most of the characters don't take joy in killing, and the members of that book who later became the Authority are established as having been thoroughly hardened by necessity. Also, let's not forget Planetary, where Elijah Snow ultimately refuses to kill anyone...

I dunno, I think Millar genuinely believes that revealing Nemesis to be just some bored rich dude playing with the proles' lives for kicks is a political point. It's kind of striking how much of his work uses the "outrageously sociopathic billionaire manipulator" type as the main villains. They're in his FF, his Spider-Man, his Authority, the aforementioned Nemesis, and arguably all his Superman work (though Luthor came prepackaged with the archetype). And most of the time, he's playing it as a political statement. (Oddly, against this background Civil War reads like Millar trying to make that character the hero for once; that's a large part of why I don't think the ending works.)

Granted, almost all of Millar's villains are either ineffectual sympathetic sad sacks or outrageous sociopaths who only take breaks from cannibalism and child molestation to occasionally try and beat up superheroes, but he does really go back to the whole "rich and powerful people are ruining your lives for fun and profit" well rather often. It seems clear to me that it's meant as political critique, albeit the sort of critique that's largely uninterested in proposing alternatives or answers.

That's maybe where I disagree with little kon-el: Millar's not taking apart the superheroes and putting them back together with politics, he's taking apart politics and reducing it to an amoral violence fantasy that resembles a superhero story. All the people who hurt the world are comfortably, utterly, unsympathetically bad, and the only way to fight back is to become just a hair less cynical and ultraviolent than the bad guys. The alternative is that you're a nice guy, a chump, a sucker, a victim. That seems to be the message of most of his work.

- Omar Karindu
"For your information, I don't have an ego. My Facebook photo is a landscape."

I was thinking along these lines just when you posted this. I've been trying to figure out why Millar works and it is in a very rudimentary "High School/High Concept" sort of way. He takes apart superheroes and puts them back together with very banal politics. None of his characters are nuanced. They're either victims or psychos. It lacks finesse in the execution. I like the idea of Wanted and I like the series pretty well, but it lacked the more satirical moments of Fight Club (something it was obviously imitating). Fantastic Four as Harry Potter works as concept, but he never gives us the joy that comes from Harry Potter exploring the world and being awed by the magic.

It reminds me a lot of Geoff Johns, who does very similar with violence and evil like Mark Millar except Johns' overall message in all of his work is that despite all the problems and horrors that you face, you can make it through. Millar's overall message seems to be "no matter how hard you try, rich people are psychotic and will take advantage of you." As long as Millar is just the idea guy, playing with the concept but not the overall message, I think it can work. I think this is why I liked him better when he worked with Grant Morrison (on work like Aztek the Ultimate Man and The Flash...both works I still recommend to people) because at least Morrison is upbeat/optimistic and ends on that note.

If so, he probably believes it only in the broadest sense of the term. I think Millar's too savvy to think that he's making something genuinely deep and thoughtful in Nemesis. It's more likely that he's capitalizing upon the hostility towards the 1%, as well as the popularity of the Dark Knight movie.

Millar's efforts nowadays seem based on making properties that he can sell to Hollywood, characters who have a high concept hook that appeals to what's currently popular, but aren't so radical that they'd alienate any potential buyers. To his credit, he does this very well. I hope for his sake that Millar continues to have his finger on the pulse of popular culture, because at the rate he's going, his work is going to be just as dated and ridiculous as the Bob Haney Teen Titans.

Except that while Haney's Teen Titans remain endearing in their pitiful attempt to imitate young people, there's nothing endearing about a comic with the phrase "Booby-Trapped Womb".