The premise of Nemesis was simple.

“Nemesis is a reversal of the Bruce Wayne or Tony Stark archetype,” its author Mark Millar told an interviewer just before the comic came out in 2010. “What if this genius billionaire was just this total shit, and the only thing that stood between him and a city was the cops?”

The execution was as horrifying as the set-up was straightforward. The titular protagonist—a twist on a paradigm beloved by hundreds of millions of moviegoers and comics readers—spent four issues committing crimes that the Marquis de Sade would have been hard-pressed to stomach. Take, for example, what he did to the son and daughter of his rival, a big-city police chief. After Nemesis kidnaps them and releases them as part of a bargain, doctors find out not only did he impregnate the daughter with the son’s sperm but he also, as one doctor explains, “rigged your daughter’s womb to completely collapse if we attempt a termination.”

Welcome to the twisted imagination of Mark Millar, where all facets of the superhero genre are fair game for subversion. Right now, the 43-year-old Scotsman’s name means little outside the comics-geek world, but that’s likely to change as he devotes himself to superhero movies. The latest film adaptation of one of his comics, Kick-Ass 2, hits screens on August 16. The Avengers and the Iron Man trilogy were profoundly shaped by his work. And last year, he became Fox’s chief creative consultant for all of its Marvel superhero flicks, including the entire X-Men and Fantastic Four franchises. By decade’s end, he’ll have had more of his creations translated into movie form than any comics writer other than Stan Lee.





In other words, Millar has done something insanely rare for any medium: He has become its most shocking deconstructionist and its most successful advocate. Critics say he brings out the worst in his readers and viewers; champions say he’s a canny genius who has reinvented his genre.