Kingsman creator Mark Millar: Why Netflix splashed the cash on Britain’s answer to Marvel legend Stan Lee

In 1989 a Glasgow University dropout sold his first comic book script for £240: three decades on, Nexflix paid considerably more for his Millarworld company in a deal reminiscent of Disney’s acquisition of Marvel. David Barnett on the creator of ‘a next generation comics universe’

New signing: Millar’s lucrative deal is the first company acquisition in Netflix’s history (Rex)

Later this month cinema audiences will be flocking to their local multiplex to see the latest instalment in the action movie franchise Kingsman. And that’s not just hyperbole; The Hollywood Reporter has crunched the numbers and reckons The Golden Circle, the follow-up to 2015’s surprise hit Kingsman: The Secret Service, will rack up around $45m (£34) in its opening weekend.

After the movie’s premiere in London on 18 September (a planned New York gala opening has been put aside for a charity telethon to help victims of Hurricane Harvey), the spy caper is expected to beat the first film’s worldwide box-office takings of $414m.

Which is all very good news to a 47-year-old man in Glasgow. While the big names on the opening credits of the movie belong to director Matthew Vaughn and stars Colin Firth, Taron Egerton, Halle Berry and Channing Tatum, it is the creative mind and business acumen of Mark Millar that is the spring from where the franchise and its attendant big figures wells.

Taron Egerton, Colin Firth and Pedro Pascal in ‘Kingsman The Golden Circle’ (2017)

We all know that cinematically we live in the age of the superhero. Leading the pack is Marvel’s sustained assault on the box office with movies ranging from the Avengers series, solo films starring Captain America, Iron Man, and Thor, plus ratings smashes featuring its characters beloved of comics readers but not previously household names: Ant-Man, Doctor Strange, Black Panther. Marvel’s publishing rival DC, after a couple of sombre missteps with its Batman and Superman movies, rallied with Suicide Squad and then won global applause for this summer’s Wonder Woman, with its ensemble answer to the Avengers, the Justice League, due out next.

Perhaps the Kingsman movies, featuring a working-class kid from the wrong side of the tracks inducted into the high-octane, high-tech and highly sexed world of the James Bondian super-spy, might not trouble the big Marvel movies takings-wise, as impressive as the critical and financial reception to Vaughn’s movies has been.

But Kingsman is only one piece in the puzzle Mark Millar has been carefully assembling for the past 30 years, which is now taking shape and presenting a picture of a man who could very well be Britain’s answer to Stan Lee, the Marvel comics maestro who ushered in a new age of comics back in the Sixties with creations (alongside a phalanx of artists and co-creators such as Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko) including Spider-Man, the X-Men, and the Fantastic Four.

Millar is a comic book writer, but one with an eye on – quite literally – the bigger picture. Several movies apart from Kingsman have already been based on his works, including two Kick-Ass films, and Wanted, starring Angelina Jolie and James McAvoy.

Channing Tatum and Halle Berry in ‘Kingsman: The Golden Circle’

And last month he set out his stall to audaciously take on the superhero big boys of Marvel and DC by announcing that his properties, collected under the Millarworld banner (he’s not shy about getting his own brand out there), have been sold in a multi-million deal to the streaming TV service Netflix.

This is big news – as Millar puts it, “I’m still blinking. This is only the third time in history a comic-book company purchase on this scale has ever happened.”

The other two times are when Warner Bros acquired DC comics in 1968 and Disney bought Marvel in 2009. That Millar happily puts Netflix’s purchase of Millarworld up there with those universally-recognised names is an indication of how you could never say of the man that he’s backwards at coming forwards.

Millarworld was set up 13 years ago as a creator-owned comics imprint. This means that unlike, say, Marvel, where writers and artists are employed to work on characters and series that are owned by the parent corporation, and get paid a work-for-hire rate for doing so, with Millarworld (and similar publishing models such as Image and IDW’s forthcoming Black Crown imprint) the creative teams retain control and ownership of their work.

Colin Firth and Samuel L Jackson meet Taron Egerton, left, in ‘Kingsman: The Secret Service’ (2014)

This has mainly meant, in the writing seat, Millar himself, but along with a wealth of comics book talent who have all worked for the big companies. That means they all took a share of the profits from comic sales… and the Netflix deal, which means Millar’s announcement made a number of comics artists very happy indeed.

Artists such as Dave Gibbons, Greg Capullo, Sean Murphy, Johnny Romita Jr and Millar’s fellow Scot Frank Quitely – big names among the comic book cognoscenti (Gibbons drew Watchmen, Romita Jr has illustrated a wealth of Marvel characters; indeed, his father was one of the best-loved Spider-Man artists of all time). And now they’re going to reap the rewards of their own creations hitting the big time.

Millar said, “We’d all had success at DC and Marvel, but this was a chance to control the characters created and reap the rewards from any future movies, TV or merchandise that ever came from those characters and books. Over the years, Millarworld has amassed 20 different franchises working with the world’s greatest artists and now Millarworld has been bought by the hottest, most exciting entertainment company on the planet. To say this is the best thing that ever happened in our professional lives would be an understatement.”

There’s no news on which of those 20 or so Millarworld comic series will be the first to get the Netflix treatment. What’s definitely known is that there won’t be a series based on Kingsman or Kick-Ass – those have existing Hollywood deals, of course.

But that still leaves a wealth of properties, including time-travelling adventure Chrononauts; Reborn, which features an old lady transposed into the body of an alien princess; Huck, in which a gentle, Forrest Gump-like superhero tries to do a good deed every day; and Jupiter’s Legacy, about the children of a pantheon of ultra-powerful superheroes who rebel against the old folks.

Kick-Ass, along with Kingsman, are franchises not included in the Netflix deal

Each of the Millarworld titles stands alone, but forms part of a wider, inter-connected tapestry, sometimes subtle, sometimes more overt. Millar himself is keeping mum on which of these, and the many others (Super-Crooks, Starlight, American Jesus) will be the first announced, telling me that more will be known in the New Year, though there might perhaps be some teasers later this month.

So in the absence of any firm announcements, let’s take a look at the man himself. What is the secret origin of Mark Millar?

He was born on Christmas Eve in 1969, in Coatbridge, Lanarkshire. He was born into a family with five siblings, all vastly older than him – the eldest 22 years his senior, the youngest 14 years older. It was a brother who introduced him to comics, when Millar was four, and he was hooked from there on in. But that age difference with his four brothers and one sister meant he was born to older parents, and when Millar was just 14 his mother died of a heart attack, aged 64. Four years later his father died at the age of 65.

Millar always had a knack for art, and wanted to draw comics. But he was also very academic, and his parents had thought he should pursue something more concrete. When his father died he was studying at Glasgow University, reading politics and economics. Suddenly there was no money and he dropped out. And returned to his first love of comics.

He interviewed fellow Scot Grant Morrison, a comics writer, for a fanzine and not only forged a friendship but got some good advice; Morrison told him to concentrate either on art or writing, not both, and Millar plumped for the writing side of comics. He knew there was money to be made, knew that comics companies paid per page of script. His first sale was in 1989 to the short-lived British publisher Trident, a six-issue series called Saviour, about the second coming of Christ in the form of a TV personality. He was paid £240 for his first script and realised this was the career he was going to pursue.

Millar followed what would become a well-worn path for British comics writers; first cutting his teeth on the UK science fiction weekly 2000AD, then graduating to work for Marvel and DC in the US. He first went to DC, working on Swamp Thing, initially co-writing with Grant Morrison, then on to Justice League of America and The Flash. It was when he took over the reins of superhero title The Authority, in the year 2000, for DC’s side-imprint Wildstorm, that his career really took off… and things began to change.

Polarising character: Millar has always prompted strong feelings among the comics community (Rex)

The story goes that Millar, suffering a bout of illness, had asked Morrison to write an issue of The Authority, incognito, to help him catch up. That – possibly when it came out that Morrison had done this – for some reason seems to be the trigger for the break-up of their friendship. In 2010, when interviewed about a Grant Morrison documentary that was being made, Millar said that “There’s no enmity or anything like that. I always enjoy his comics, Grant’s always been good fun. There’s no hard feelings whatsoever.”

Morrison was less charitable in an interview the following year, he said, “I wish him well but there’s not good feeling between Mark and myself for many reasons, most of which are he destroyed my faith in human f***ing nature.”

Millar has always prompted strong feelings among the comics community. There are those who think of him as some god-like genius; equally many don’t seem to like his comics, nor his overt business model of writing comics that seem ready-made for movie adaptations before they are even published.

Millar left DC in 2001 and started working for Marvel, and it was there that the synergy between his work and the movie industry seemed to be born. He wrote The Ultimates, a kind of mature-readers version of the Avengers, and his comics formed the basis for the first big Marvel movie, Avengers Assemble (as it was known in the UK). He created the concept of an aged, ailing Wolverine which was the template for this year’s hit movie Logan. He wrote the comics series Civil War, which has formed the basis for the recent plot thread across all the Marvel movies.

Having had enough of working for corporate page rates, and scenting that there was something in his writing that might have legs beyond the page, he set up Millarworld in 2004, bringing in comics artists he’d worked with and admired to bring to life his own characters and creations… now with one eye on Hollywood.

The first movie based (albeit loosely) on one of his own comics was 2008’s Wanted, followed in 2010 by Kick-Ass, directed by Matthew Vaughn and cementing a professional relationship between the two that’s led to Vaughn directing his first ever sequel in Kingsman: The Golden Circle. Millar has a cachet far beyond his comics now – he launched a British comics magazine called CLiNT, which featured strips by mainstream personalities such as Jonathan Ross and comedian Frankie Boyle, both huge comics fans – and Jane Goldman, who is married to Ross, was the screenwriter for the Kick-Ass and Kingsman films.

‘Wanted’ (2008) starring Angelina Jolie and Morgan Freeman, was the first of Millar’s creations to make it to the big screen

It seems that studying economics wasn’t wasted on Millar after all, nor perhaps the politics he read briefly at Glasgow. He takes to Twitter regularly to offer his views; he’s pro-Brexit and a staunch Corbyn supporter. He’s outspoken, often divisive in the comics community, and I doubt he’d be offended by the suggestion that he’s possibly one of the top five self-promoters in the world.

He’s also now, along with Lucy Unwin, who runs Millarworld with him, very rich. Millar and Unwin married last year, and they have one child together (he has a daughter from a previous marriage). They live in Glasgow and Millar credits her with doing the hard work on getting the Netflix deal signed.

The deal will bear fruit soon enough. Neflix’s chief content officer Ted Sarandos said that “Mark has created a next-generation comics universe, full of indelible characters living in situations people around the world can identify easily with. We look forward to creating new Netflix Originals from several existing franchises as well as new super-hero, anti-hero, fantasy, sci-fi and horror stories Mark and his team will continue to create and publish.”

And there, perhaps is the key for many comic fans; Millar might have sold up to Netflix, but the intimation is that he’s not doing anything like putting his feet up and getting out of the comics game that has captivated him since his brother bought him a Spider-Man comic when he was four years old.

He’s already hinted at plans for a charitable foundation to revitalise parts of his hometown, Coatbridge, and says he and Lucy have been in talks with the local authority about the proposals, which he says will be announced later this year. A lesson learned from that first comic, perhaps? With great power (and wads of cash) comes great responsibility?

For the future, though, he says, “Comics have been my passion my entire life. I started working with them as a teenager and I’ve never been more excited about where we’re going next.”