‘What if Superman was your dad?’ Comics legend Mark Millar on Jupiter’s Legacy
Mark Millar is remembering one of the best bits of advice he ever came across, something he read as a teenager that was said by Alan Moore, the legendary creator of such milestones in comics as Watchmen and V for Vendetta. “Never believe that you’re a genius,” quotes Millar, himself the creator of such revered titles as Kick-Ass and Kingsman, “and also never believe you’re rubbish.” Speaking by Zoom from the office he keeps in his Glasgow home, Millar rounds this off with the words: “You’ve just got to do your best and enjoy it.”
It’s a healthy rule to live by, given the sometimes toxic fandom that surrounds the comics world. Millar, whose only dream as a five-year-old was to write superhero adventures, has experienced this vitriol a fair few times. That’s no surprise, considering the Scot’s habit of chewing up and spitting out the expectations of the genre.
For DC, he reimagined the origin story of Superman, crashlanding his spaceship in the Soviet Union rather than Kansas. He thinks Michael B Jordan, who was supervillain Erik Killmonger in Black Panther, would make a great Superman (Jordan’s also the favourite for JJ Abrams’ own reboot). Then, at Marvel, Millar helped pull the company back from the brink thanks, in part, to the success of his brutal reinvention of The Avengers as The Ultimates. This was as much a critique of superhero archetypes as it was a dig at American post-9/11 neo-conservatism, with the team reinvented as band of super-soldiers directing their fists at the war on terror. In The Ultimates 2, Bruce Banner is publicly outed as the Hulk and blamed for hundreds of deaths, while Thor is locked up after apparently developing mental-health issues.
Millar, a long-time Labour party member and a Brexit supporter, has often woven political commentary into his work, but he was rather surprised to receive thank-you letters from readers who were inspired to join the army and go off to fight in the Middle East. “People missed the entire point of the story,” he laughs.
If nothing else, this is evidence of how far Millar has come. “I started off doing stuff for seven-year-olds: Superman Adventures at DC. People were saying, ‘He’s the guy who does the junior stuff.’ So then I did something a bit more shocking to lose that repu