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Bouncing Cheques, Pay Cuts & A Campaign To Fire Mark Millar At Marvel
Bouncing Cheques, Pay Cuts And A Campaign To Fire Mark Millar At Marvel Comics
Mark Millar is synonymous with a certain post 9/11 period of Bill Jemasand Joe Quesada at Marvel Comics, including his work on The Ultimates andCivil War, which was heavily influential on the early MCU, before he took his creator-owned comics, got them made into films and then sold them all to Netflix. And he made his first appearance at a British comic con in decades, and his first actual comic con appearance in an age, at High Vis Comic Con in Kings Heath last month, with former Bleeding Cool contributor Olly MacNameeon hand to interview the man. And it seems those early Marvel Comcis days weren’t quite as carefree as they seemed. With Marvel close enough to the wall, when he and Bryan Hitch started The Ultimates, that a colleague’s cheque bounced and the office no longer ran to a coffee maker.
“Well, at the time we did, we had no idea when the Ultimates came out that there was going to be these movies. There was Spider-Man had come out. X-Men was out. Spider-Man wasn’t out yet, but it was in the works, I think, when we started. And it actually just seemed ridiculous, the idea there would ever be an Avengers film. I know it sounds crazy now, but Marvel were in such a bad financial state at the time. Didn’t happen to me, but one of my pals, his cheque bounced. And you didn’t get a coffee when you went up to the office because they couldn’t afford to have a coffee maker anymore. So we were just trying to stay afloat. You know, they said to us – one of, I won’t name names, right, but one of the guys said to us, look, I don’t know if we’ll even be here in two years. So just do what you want. And there’s nothing more exciting than a company in bankruptcy, because Marvel was filing for Chapter 11, because you can just do anything. And see, as a creator, as a writer, an artist or whatever, the idea of somebody saying do what you want is the most exciting thing in the world.”
Already working on Ultimate X-Men, Marvel did not ask Mark Millar for the Ultimate Avengers, which had to be renamed The Ultimates after complaints from those working on the regular Avengers comics.
“Sometimes in life the right pieces are in the right place at a particular time, and I just knew what I wanted to do with the Ultimates. At the time, the Avengers was seen as not as big as the X-Men, which is kind of weird to think now, because the Avengers is so huge. But they said, look, could you do a second X-Men book instead of the Avengers? And I was like, I’ve got an idea how to approach this. And they tried to talk me into doing Wolverine instead. And I said no. And I took a pay cut, they were already not paying me that much at the time, to do the Avengers. And it just hit. They wanted a different artist to draw as well. They wanted somebody who drew in this Marvel style, that more bombastic ’90s Marvel style, like X-Men, because that was the kind of art of the day. I said, there’s this guy called Bryan Hitch who’s just done The Authority.”
Bryan Hitch, he said, was already on his way to a salaried job at CrossGen in Florida. Marvel bought him out.
“But it turned out he’d signed this amazing five-year deal to move to Florida and work in this CrossGen thing. So this has never happened before. This billionaire guy kind of thing set up a comic book compound, and he got a lot of crazy… people don’t even talk about this anymore, but he got NASA to design a filtration system for them and things like this. And they were in this amazing place where they got to sleep, work, anything they wanted. Free food and everything. It was an amazing place. And Bryan was going off there. And that’s very rare, if you’re a writer or an artist, to be salaried. And they actually said, we’re going to pay you a really good salary, which was about three times as much money as he was making. So guaranteed money, a steady income every week, living in this NASA complex and everything. And I talked him out of it. I said to him, come and work with me instead. And he said, what security is there? And I said, I think the place might close in two years, but you’ll have a great time in those two years. And Joe Quesada, who was running Marvel at the time, was an amazing ally. And what Joe did was he got in touch with the CrossGen guys and bought them out of his contract, you know, like a footballer type thing. They just come in and bought them out. And Bryan came over and it was just like the pieces were all coming together.”
The brief, Mark Millar said, was to make a comic that felt like a film, riding the shift he had already seen in Warren Ellis and Bryan Hitch’s The Authority in 1999, which he had followed with Frank Quitely. He called that book the next seismic jump after Stan Lee in 1961, and said he and Bryan Hitch “rode in on the coattails of that a little bit.” The point of The Ultimates, he told the room, was to treat the team as people with ordinary flaws: Hank Pym as a wife-beater without a tidy Marvel-universe reckoning, Captain America starting out jingoistic because he was a man from the 1940s who still trusted authority. Not everyone wanted him there. He said a campaign to remove him picked up thousands of signatures, and that Bill Jemas waved it off.
“So they get together and they form the Avengers, to the point where there was a campaign to get me fired from Marvel. People forget all this now, but around that time there was, on Joe Quesada’s message… and also you’re not an American writer, wound a lot of people up. But Marvel were awesome. They got 20,000 signatures, right? They get 20,000 signatures, quite impressive, and they sent it. And Bill Jemas, who ran Marvel at the time, he was president, he said, I believe in the amendment that says you should have freedom of speech. He can say whatever he likes. Brilliant, I thought, that’s pretty cool. So Marvel stood by me, which was great.”
Twenty-five years on, Mark Millar said, people were still bringing Ultimates books to the table, and the film that once seemed absurd is full of the comic. Watching The Avengers again the night before the panel, with his 12-year-old, he told the room he was “shocked how much obviously is from Ultimates,” including scenes and lines of dialogue. Marvel, he added, has already filmed versions of The Ultimates, Old Man Logan and Civil War. The one he thinks they still have not used is Wolverine: Enemy of the State, his 2004 run with John Romita Jr.
“There’s another Wolverine story that sold well, but is kind of slightly forgotten now. I did with John Romita Jr. It was the first thing we ever did together, and it’s called Wolverine: Enemy of the State, and it’s really good, and I think it would actually work really well as a film. I’m sure that’ll be the next one they do probably. But the idea of Wolverine being brainwashed by Hydra and being public enemy number one, and all the Marvel universe are in danger because he’s the ultimate killing machine. I think it could be a cool movie as well.”
Mark Millar’s favourite page in that run, he said, is Wolverine ripping up a shark. Possibly because his eldest, then six, coloured a faxed copy of it sitting at the kitchen table…
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