Mark Millar Book Quotations

Would you rather see a super soldier battling Nazis or something more serious? Or lesbians down a coal mine? Generally, the films are engaging in the same way as the comics are. It's no coincidence that the biggest movies are genre-related, whether it's Lord of the Rings or comic books.

I just noticed I've been writing lots of female-led things. Two of them haven't been announced yet, but the big Greg Capullo book I'm doing is a female-led story, and I'm doing another series with John Romita which is a female-led story as well.

Oddly, I think if you look at comic books, you look at the shelves in the store, it's predominantly male characters, historically. But if you look outside the window it's 52-percent female, and something odd is going on there. So I do think it's your responsibility as a writer, really, to create stuff that little girls can get into too. I want my daughters to have role models that are female.

There's almost a universe as big as the Marvel Universe with X-Men. I mean, Deadpool is something I think everybody was taken surprise by, except for the people who read the comic book.

I just trust the people involved. Marvel and DC for the last 16 years - is that 90 percent of the time it's incredible top talent. Like, this is what makes it different from the pre-2000 superhero movies. I would say, except Tim Burton and Richard Donner, it was generally, comic book movies were done by guys who weren't that into the material and people who didn't really respect the stuff. But as everything, whether it's Wolverine, X-Men, Avengers, Batman, all these things, it's just been done by top-tier people. I have total confidence that they'll continue that tradition of being great.

Matthew Vaughn phoned me up and he said, "Hey, listen, the movie has just done gangbusters. We've got to do the second one." And I was like, "Matthew, I have no second book. Dave and I haven't done it," and he's like, "You're kidding!" He said, "This movie's just made $420 million!" I was like, "...We've got nothing." So the amazing thing was, because we own the rights, we still get paid and everything, which is fantastic.

At the moment, I have it planned as a six or seven year experiment, but the books will only ever appear in bursts like this every couple of years and only with the best quality artists.

The success [of the X-Men], I think, is for two reasons. The first is that, creatively, the book was close to perfect ... but the other reason is that it was a book about being different in a culture where, for the first time in the West, being different wasn't just accepted, but was also fashionable. I don't think it's a coincidence that gay rights, black rights, the empowerment of women and political correctness all happened over those twenty years and a book about outsiders trying to be accepted was almost the poster-boy for this era in American culture.

The books are all very, very different so the publishers really had to be different too.

I always think it's a mistake when you actually have to set books aside and actually sit down and research something. I always think they've got to come from within.

The animated books pay the lowest rates at the Big Two and you can forget about royalties.

Marvel books also feed into the smaller publishers and the fact that this is happening in the same month we're launching Ultimate Fantastic Four is no coincidence.