Endnotes and digressions from the latest episode:
* The first thing we talked about was the new Lego Ultimate Home Wrecker Edition Millennium Falcon set. Depending on the state of your marriage, you can buy it here.
* Backing up for a minute to our micro episode on Bobby Heenan, if you loved the Brain, then you’ll enjoy his WWE Hall of Fame speech. It’s lovely.
* We spent the bulk of the show talking about Matthew Vaughn and Kingsman and, of course, Layer Cake. But somehow in all of that we managed to barely even mention Mark Millar. Huge oversight.
* For those of you who don’t follow comics, Millar is one of the five or ten most important creators of his generation. He started out doing traditional work for the big publishers, some of which is quite good. For instance, Millar’s Old Man Logan is fantastic (and serves as the backbone for the movie version of Logan). And his run on Ultimate Fantastic Four is my favorite FF arc, probably ever. It’s sensational. Red Son is a pretty nifty elseworlds-type story.
But then, thirteen years ago, Millar launched his very own imprint, Millarworld, full of his creator-owned stories. The first title was Kick-Ass, which became a big commercial success. Other new titles and characters followed: Nemesis, MPH, Superior, Jupiter’s Legacy.
Millar’s schtick is that he’s outrageous and over-the-top. He uses hyper-violence and naughty words and he uses them both for shock value. I don’t know what the best analogy would be for Millar; maybe you could see him as the Quentin Tarantino of comic books.
Except that might not be fair to Tarantino. Because underneath Tarantino’s shock value is some pretty serious narrative discipline. He knows how to conceive and tell a story.
And I’m not sure that’s how Millar really operates. Millar is great on concept. Nemesis, for instance, is a story that begins with a pretty awesome proposition: What if Batman was a bad guy?
But when it comes to telling a story based on that proposition and executing narrative with precision, Millar seems slightly less interested.
This isn’t meant to be a knock on Millar. He clearly understands how to do narrative when he wants to. His best stuff for Marvel and DC was story-driven and executed with verve and precision. But once he shifted into creator-owned work, he seems to have started paying much less attention to the stories and much more attention to the creation of ideas and intellectual property.
And it’s paid off! Millar has had three properties adapted into successful (or semi-successful feature films (Wanted, Kick-Ass, Kingsman). And recently Netflix bought the entire universe of Millarworld for an undisclosed sum.
Even without knowing the terms, we can be certain that the price was nothing like Disney’s acquisition of Marvel. But the deal does represent the first time that a corporate behemoth has purchased the entire IP output of a single writer. And that could change the way comic creators approach their work going forward.
I don’t know if that would be good or bad. Personally, I’d like to see HBO or someone back the Brinks truck up to Greg Rucka, who’s the best comic book writer on the planet and whose work—Queen & Country, Lazarus, The Old Guard—begs to be translated to the screen.
