The creator of comics such as Kingsman, Kick-Ass and now The Magic Order explains why he signed to the streaming giant – and how he did it equitably

“Pick a card,” I say to Mark Millar. “Any card.”



The man behind some of the best-known comic books of the last 30 years is sitting in a corner of a Glasgow pub reading a copy of the Morning Star, which he folds up to indulge me as I riffle a deck of cards in front of him.



This isn’t as random as it appears. Millar is the creator of – among many others – comics such as Kick-Ass and Kingsman, and his latest, The Magic Order. The latter is about a family of magicians who keep the world of the supernatural from impinging on the lives of normal folks like us. Millar describes it as “The Godfather or The Sopranos, but with magic”.

“Whoa,” says Millar, looking visibly impressed as I theatrically pluck out his chosen card. “Is this what you do? Magic?” (I have to confess it’s a loaded deck, a pack of Svengali cards bought just around the corner about 10 minutes earlier).

Millar himself is playing with something of a stacked deck at the moment. Although he’s written a wealth of comics in a career stretching back almost 30 years, The Magic Order is notable because it’s the first comic series to be released by streaming giant Netflix, which bought Millar’s own publishing operation, Millarworld, in a hugely lucrative deal last year.

“The structure is basically King Lear, if that doesn’t sound too wanky,” Millar says of The Magic Order, which is drawn by Olivier Coipel. “There’s a patriarch with three children, and he’s not getting any younger. Family structures make great stories. You’ve got relationships that really mean something, that’s why I always have a mother or children as the protagonists. Betrayals and slights mean things, everything’s heightened with family.”

Millar was about four when one of his five siblings in the small town of Coatbridge near Glasgow, where he still lives, bought him his first Spider-Man comic. At 13, he decided he was going to spend his life working on them, after reading Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing. His first published comic was Saviour, a superhero satire about the second coming of Christ. He worked on 2000AD, then went to DC Comics to write Swamp Thing, the title that had crystallised his ambitions years before. From working on Batman and Superman at DC, he went to Marvel, where he developed a cinematic style of writing that would be in demand later on. His series The Ultimates formed the basis for the 2012 Marvel blockbuster The Avengers, while his story about an ageing Wolverine inspired the critically acclaimed 2017 film Logan.

A movie’s like ​a $100m advert for your work. We sold 1m copies of Kick-Ass on the back of the film. Mark Millar

It was while he was working at Marvel that Millar set up Millarworld. Unlike the big studio publishers, here the writer – always Millar – and the artists would keep the rights to their own work and split all profits equally.

Millar’s unashamed pursuit of Hollywood has divided opinion, but he’s always been open about writing comics that could attract movie deals. (“A movie’s like a $100m advert for your work,” he says. “We sold 1m copies of Kick-Ass on the back of the film.”) And Millarworld published several comics that were successes on screen, too: the thriller Wanted, superhero satire Kick-Ass and gentleman spy caper Kingsman: The Secret Service. Other Millar creations, such as the Forrest Gump-esque superhero Huck, the supervillain-led Nemesis, and the superpowered family sagas Jupiter’s Circle and Jupiter’s Legacy have also been optioned.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Colin Firth as Harry Hart and Taron Egerton as Eggsy in the 2015 film version of Kingsman: Secret Service. Photograph: Allstar/20th Century Fox

Then Hollywood really came calling. With the success of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, studios were hunting for casts of cinema-friendly comic characters they could farm for films – and Millarworld was the perfect package. Multiple studios – whom Millar can’t name due to non-disclosure agreements – began to court him and Lucy Unwin, his wife and the CEO of Millarworld – until Netflix threw its hat into the ring.

“All the studios we saw were doing, on average, between 25 to 28 hours of material a year, two-hour movies,” Millar says. “Netflix does 1,500 hours of original material a year. It has an infinite amount of cash as well as an infinite amount of time, so it can just hire anybody. And it will take risks where a studio won’t.”

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He recalls admiring the posters for favourite movies of the 40s and 50s plastered on the walls at one studio he visited, then stopping short. “I suddenly realised they were celebrating the past,” he says. At Netflix, in contrast, “they were literally building their own studio. It looked like what an old Hollywood studio would have looked like in 1921 or something, when there were no rules and everything just happened. I thought, straight away, ‘It’s got to be here.’”

Netflix’s acquisition of Millarworld was announced in August 2017 – so how much did the $100bn company pay him? Millar roars with laughter, as though he can’t believe I asked. “It’s funny, me and my pals meet in the pub on Thursday nights and I walked in after the deal was announced and they all just said, ‘Come on, tell us, how much?’” he says.

Well, how much? Millions? Tens of millions? Hundreds of millions? “Let’s just say, we did all right out of it,” he says diplomatically. It’s certainly enough for his friends to constantly ask him when he’s giving up Coatbridge for LA or Barbados.

“I get asked it all the time,” he says, “and I just think, Barbados … well, you’re basically sitting with Philip Green on a beach looking at Simon Cowell on a speedboat: no thanks. LA is great but it’s too hot and far away from everybody I actually love.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Aaron Johnson and Chloë Grace Moretz in the 2010 film version of Kick-Ass. Photograph: Lions Gate/Everett/Rex

There’s also the matter of the Millarworld business model, in which he promised his artists 50% of all profits – even when the comics became movies. Almost startlingly, he stayed true to his word when the Netflix cash came through.

“This was always the plan,” he says. “But I thought it would take 20 more years! I always used to give the artist half my producer’s fee on the movies. When the Netflix deal came in, you’re talking about a lot of people, 15 artists. Someone said to me that I’d find it hard to hand over the cash. I was like, ‘It’s not my money, this was the deal.’ I didn’t draw the books. For me, it was very, very simple.”

Most of the artists have stopped working, which delights Millar. “I’m not even kidding! It’s really weird. One immediately jetted off to New York and when he came back went straight off to Vegas, and I realised he’s just on holiday all the time! Here I am, still doing a 40-hour week. But seriously, it was great to be able to do that. One guy hadn’t worked for five years. I was really pleased he had some dough. Other guys had health problems, so it genuinely transformed some of their lives. It was like being Santa for them.”

Millar is also playing Santa for his local community. He has financed local schools to send kids on summer trips and to the panto at Christmas, paid a slew of artists to put on variety shows in Coatbridge each month and, most impressively, set up the Millar Foundation to build affordable homes on brownfield land for local families.

Has he indulged himself at all? He shrugs. “We had a nice life anyway, that was the thing. I grew up pretty poor, but with the Hollywood films, I’d got a really good life. I’d love this to be a rags-to-riches thing but it’s a riches-to-riches story. It’s just nice to be able to help.”

Besides, there’s no time for lounging around watching Simon Cowell on a speedboat: Millar has a job to do. As an employee of Millarworld who now answers to Netflix, he has agreed to write four comics series a year, as well as seven TV or film concepts. Some comics will be made into TV or movies – The Magic Order is already optioned for TV – while others will be original, screen-only concepts. Kick-Ass, Kingsman and Wanted aren’t part of the deal, though, and Millar’s new contract means he won’t be writing more of those any time soon. For the first time, the notoriously protective Millar is allowing other writers to play with his creations: Steve Niles, writer of horror series 30 Days of Night, has just been announced as the new pen behind Kick-Ass.

It’s time to go. I put my cards away, I have no more tricks. But Millar has lots more up his sleeve: announcements for comics series (in the next three weeks) and a big TV production (about three months away). Leaving the pub, in his crisp shirt and trousers, he looks more like a businessman than stereotypical comic-book writer; perhaps he is, though he wouldn’t feel any shame about that.

A couple of weeks ago, Millar retweeted someone who wrote: “If Mark Millar was chocolate, he’d eat himself.” He laughs just thinking about it. “That was my line from Wanted. My mum always used to say it to us. Look, my view is, there will always be somebody more evil putting themselves forward. If you’re a creative person, you want as many people as possible to see your work. You don’t want to be a genius discovered 50 years after your death.”