Millar’s 25-year career has been defined by outrageousness, right from the start: His first comic, published at age 20, was about a superhero who turns out to be the antichrist. “There's part of me that wants that outrageousness.” “These are the best first comics you could possibly have!” he said with a laugh. “And in the other, Norman Osborn was killed by Spider-Man, and Spider-Man has accidentally killed his girlfriend, and then he goes home and finds his best friend out of his mind on LSD.” “The Superman comic, the front cover was Clark Kent leaving Superman and walking away like, 'I'm not gonna do this anymore,’ and that was a quite shocking image,” he recalled. In a phone interview from his home in Glasgow, Millar said his provocative approach stems from a pair of comics he read when he was six: one starring Spider-Man and one starring Superman. The movie’s violence even brought premature publicity in June, when Carrey announced he wouldn’t promote the film out of respect for victims of the Sandy Hook massacre. The silver-screen adaptation of the second volume-starring Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Chloë Grace Moretz, and Jim Carrey-is nearing the end of a month-long publicity blitz from Universal. The first volume of the story hit shelves in 2008 and became a runaway hit, spawning a very profitable film adaptation in 2010. Mindy is prone to calling people “cunts” and decapitating them, the bad guys are prone to gunning down children in the middle of the street, and an eager public watches it all in viral YouTube videos. It follows the adventures of protagonist Dave (aka Kick-Ass) and his partner in crime-fighting, a prepubescent girl named Mindy (aka Hit-Girl). Even by Millar standards, it’s a gory shockfest. What if all the Marvel heroes had a zombie virus? What if all the DC supervillains teamed up and actually succeeded in taking over the world?Īnd what if a real-world teenager, one with no superpowers whatsoever, decided to don a costume and fight crime? That’s the setup of the Kick-Ass franchise, Millar’s golden goose. government started giving away superpowers as a recruitment tool? Check out 2008’s War Heroes and see the carnage that ensues. What if Superman’s spaceship had landed in Soviet Ukraine and he’d become a Communist? Read 2003’s Superman: Red Son to find out.

Millar’s most successful books are built around provocative elevator pitches. “But I always like to push it and see something I've never seen before.” “It would be really easy for me to write four or five books every month where it's the same thing every month: villain drops in and Spider-Man beats him up,” Millar told me.

Kick-Ass by Mark Millar