First Prog: 643
Final Prog: 1030
First Meg: 1.07
Final Meg: 1.15
Total appearances: 218
-including a huge amount of
work in various 2000 AD specials and annuals. But not including his long stint writing Daily Star Dredd epsiodes. Which I have neither read nor even seen any of. I wonder if they'll ever be reprinted?
Creator / co-creator credits:
Silo; Red Razors; Insiders* Big
Dave; Purgatory**; Canon Fodder; Babe Race 2000; The Grudge Father
Other writing credits:
Judge Dredd
Robo-Hunter
Rogue Trooper (Friday edition)
Janus, Psi Division
a fair number of future shocks
/ one offs
 |
| Actually, the Maniacs were misunderstood Art by Steve Yeowell |
Notable character creations:
Red Razors
Maniac 5
Big Dave
Canon Fodder
Notable character destructions:
Sam Slade, Hoagy and
Cutie
Mega City Justice
Department
The meaning of the
word ‘satire’
Notable characteristics:
Ultraviolence; pitting
main characters against powerful villains that are ultimately solved by hitting
them hard enough; poking fun in every possible direction; embracing bad taste;
being incredibly prolific
 |
| A cool death needs a pithy one-liner. Making sense is optional. Art by Mick Austin |
On Mark:
Millar is one of a
small coterie of people widely considered to be 2000 AD’s worst regular
writers. Which is kind of surprising, given how much work he saw printed in the
comic over a fairly swift 5-year period – and even more surprising in light of
the fact that he went on to become one of the best-selling writers in comics
generally.
 |
| Millar's plan for conquering American comics. Art by Carlos Ezquerra |
One can’t help but
feel that some of the antipathy towards Millar – by comics fans at large, not
just 2000 AD fans – is partly the result of his success, but also his very
public persona, which may or may not have anything to do with his actual
personality. Simply put, Mark Millar is very good at self-promotion, and at
talking up the strengths (and huge popularity) of certain parts of his output.
Why this makes him come across as objectionable, I’m not sure. But it really
kind of does.
Anyway, let’s get back
to the point – what did Mark Millar do for 2000 AD, and how is this best
celebrated? Well, to begin at the beginning, no one could accuse Millar of
conning his way in. He wrote his share of Future
Shocks (and, later, other one-offs), the traditional training ground for
new creators. And honestly, his efforts in this arena were generally perfectly
good. There’s a level of craft involved in the mechanics of a Future Shock: introducing characters,
describing a situation, letting a story unfold to an inevitable twist,
followed, ideally, by some sort of ironic counter-twist or at least a cruel
joke. And Millar nailed that craft right from the start. Unlike some of his
contemporaries, Millar is a pretty linear storyteller, with narratives that are
easy to follow.
Occasionally, a Future Shock hits upon an excitingly
original idea, or is in some way bizarre. Series creator Steve Moore is a rare
writer who nails this tone as often as not. I don’t recall any Mark Millar Future Shocks breaking the mould, but,
as I say, they were often simple and effective – harder than it might look.
 |
| Millar embraces meta-fiction Art by Keith Page |
Presumably on the back
of his Future Shocks, Millar was able
to pitch a short, one-off series: Silo.
Elevated by some wickedly atmospheric Dave D’Antiquis art, this creepy
thriller, set in a nuclear missile silo, was well-liked at the time, and is
still held as one of Millar’s best 2000 AD efforts – with one major
reservation.
As pointed out by a
reader letter at the time, and indeed as noticed by almost anyone who reads Silo, there’s a sequence in it lifted
from the film Die Hard. The villain
makes a point of noticing that the hero is bare-footed, so he deliberately
shoots out some windows, and the hero is forced to run, barefoot across the
broken glass, and then to tend to his wounds.
 |
| Plagarism or pop art? Art by Dave D'Antiquis |
I’m bringing this up
in excruciating detail to make a point: Mark Millar has some brass balls. This
is probably going to come across as a really horrible thing to say, but for me,
Millar epitomises that old saying ‘no one ever lost money by underestimating an
audience’. My perception is that Millar knew full well he was lifting a scene
from a film to use in his story. A such, it is technically plagiarism, but it’s
such a small part of both works that I’m not overly offended by this on moral
grounds. (After all, anyone is allowed to photocopy and distribute 5% of a book,
although you should of course acknowledge your sources!). The objection is more
along the lines of ‘how could he think people wouldn’t notice’? And I think the
answer is that he didn’t care – because he’s canny enough to judge that,
chances are, as many as 50% of the readers really wouldn’t notice, and would just think it was a cool action
sequence. Die Hard is (and was at the
time) an incredibly popular film. But there are always more people who haven’t
seen it, even among a limited audience of people who also read 2000 AD. So,
Millar gambled that the inherent cool of the idea would outweigh the inherent
uncool of copying.
 |
| Not a Terminator Art by Jose Casanovas and son |
And, if I’m honest, a
lot of the things about Mark Millar comics that put me off do seem to come down
to his somewhat mercenary attitude of ‘more people will find this cool than
will find it irritating’. Time and money have shown Millar to be a good judge
of this! I might find some of his work derivative (if not outright
plagiaristic), and I might find some of his themes to be a bit trite or
obvious, but a heck of a lot of readers don’t. Not because they’re stupid or
anything, but because they just haven’t read many comics / seen many films
before. And Millar, laudably, is after a readership of people who are new to
comics, and not bothered one jot if the small handful of comics superfans like
his work (especially since that exact audience is probably going to buy his comic anyway, even if only to
moan about them on the internet later!).***
Part of the price paid
for this is that when Millar comes across something that is incredibly popular,
he is willing to channel that more or less directly into his own work. And it
gets results! Just as 1988’s Die Hard appears in Silo, so did 1991’s Terminator 2 appear in his first RoboHunter story.
And this attitude, I
think, is true of his 2000 AD work. He was writing it with almost no eye at all
to what had gone before, and what he thought might please the fans. He surely
noticed that at the time, writers enjoyed a certain amount of cachet through
being cynical, and having supposedly ‘nice’ characters being horrible. Picking
up this baton, Millar thought he’d see how far he could push it. And that’s why
he wrote a story about Santa Claus being taken off benefits. There’s something
funny in there, but it’s fighting to get out around the extreme unpleasantness,
one feels.
 |
| Santa at the employment bureau Art by Ron Smith |
Of course, the most
egregious example of this tendency was his RoboHunter.
Just as newcomer Garth Ennis was put to work on Judge Dredd and Strontium
Dogs, Mark Millar was tapped to have a go at bringing Sam Slade back to the
Prog. Where Ennis was, if anything, too respectful to what had gone before,
Millar went the other way. I’m sure he did go back and read some old RoboHunter stories, but there’s little
evidence that he absorbed much of it.
 |
| OK, I admit, this made me laugh Art by Anthony Williams |
Instead, he wrote a large number of
stories about violently murderous robots. Much as I hate his first story in
particular (not sure if it has its own name), I can’t deny he wrote some decent
panels that allowed for cool Casanovas art. It’s even true that the story has
an honest-to-goodness theme! Much of the world of RoboHunter is about robots doing human jobs. So unemployment is a
problem. Millar poses the question of what happens when even the human
robot-hunters become replaceable. I’m not enamoured of his answer, but I can’t
fault the question as a good fit for the series. Later Slade stories involved
more murderous robots with humour provided not by robots-acting-like-human
quirkiness, but Slade fumbling around on bad sitcom style dates and
unintentional gay-bashing. Oh, Mark Millar, your heart is clearly in a liberal
place but your pen keeps slipping.
 |
| Slade's old robot becomes a vicious torturer. Art by Casanovas and son |
 |
| Slade fights a mass-mudering robot version of himself Art by Anthony Williams |
When Millar turned his
hand to Judge Dredd, the same sort of thing happened. He’d obviously read enough
older stories to get a basic idea of the set-up. He’d even more obviously
worked out that what readers really liked was when Dredd was a) an utter
bastard or b) a beat-all-the-odds hero. So he pushed both of those measures as
hard as he could.
 |
| Dredd is harder than a 3,000 year-old Mummy. Co-scripted with Grant Morrison Art by Dermot Power |
And, enough times,
this worked for me. Dredd is a sufficiently strong character to function as a
repetitive gag strip comic, with the gag being that he is a bully, utterly
righteous and also utterly ruthless. The best Judge Dredd stories go way beyond that very simple dissection, of
course, but it’s not Mark Millar’s fault that a lot of his stories were
published over a short space of time.
Of course, this
ignores the issue of plot. And while Millar, I think, is great at coming up
with situations and even characters (derivative thought they may be, at times),
his 2000 AD work didn’t show a great deal of flair when it comes to the actual
plots.
Here’s a breakdown of
a typical Mark Millar story, Judge Dredd:
Frankenstein Division
Stage 1: meet the
unstoppable foe.
 |
| Look, he even SAYS he's unstoppable. Art by Carlos Ezquerra |
Stage 2: meet the
hardman hero.
 |
| Not entirely out of character, but usually when he goes it alone he's making a point about the system. Art still by Carlos Ezquerra |
Stage 3: set them
against each other.
 |
| Because this wouldn't kill either of them. Honestly, if you can't recognise Ezquerra's work at 10 paces, why are you even reading my blog? |
 |
| Seriously, that's all it takes. A big punch. I don't think Ezquerra understood it, either, which is why he has Dredd's fist sort of disappearing in some unexplained face mush. |
This story is all the
more frustrating because I actually like the premise (dead bodies made up of Sovs killed during the Apocalypse War, reanimated by pure hatred of Dredd), and think Ezquerra did a good
job designing the hilarious villain. Is it really that hard to come up with a
way for Dredd to win the fight without just punching him? That’s all the story
would have needed, if you ask me. (See also: Ace of Slades; Book of the
Dead; Crusade and probably many
others).
 |
| Is this Millar being self-aware? Or just playing his own plot super straight? Art by Steve Yeowell. |
Some other Millar
efforts with solid premises that didn’t quite go anywhere:
Maniac 5 – human soldier with tragic past stuck inside a robot killing machine
in some kind of war with aliens in future Europe.
Awesome Steve Yeowell art.
 |
| What's worse than Maniac 5..? Art by Richard Elson |
 |
| Red Razors was angry a lot. And had a talking horse. Art by Steve Yeowell |
Purgatory – incredibly angry ex-Judge organises a prison break.
Ultra-ultra-violence coupled with ultra-OTT personalities suggest fun times,
but never quite convince. Ezquerra obliges with steroidal characters and
continuous grimaces.
 |
| A villain-as-protagonist needs an even viler villain to fight against. Just don't ask how Kurtz got appointed in the first place. Art by Carlos Ezquerra |
Babe Race 2000 – all-girl biker race across Europe
with points scored by killing each other and any bystander. As touched on in
the Anthony Williams post, this was notionally a satire on the idea of
male-gaze-y obsessions with fetish wearing buxom ladies with big guns. Only
Millar kind of forgot to provide characters, plot or any satire beyond actually
making the series happen at all. There was some potential there, though.
Big Dave - more satire that was light on the satire. One gets the impression that Millar, co-writer Gratn Morrison, and then-editors Alan McKenzie and Richard Burton all thought it was terrifically funny as the scripts were coming in, but it's such divise stuff. Honestly, I applaud its inclusion in the Prog, but I never really got the joke.
 |
| I think you're meant to laugh both at the filthy foreigner AND at the idea of finding that sort of thing funny AND there's supposed to be another level, too, maybe? Art by Anthony Williams |
This leaves a couple
of odd ones out. I’ll leave the Grudge
Father aside for now, as it was, after all, “based on an original grudge by
Jim McCarthy”, so it’s not entirely clear how much of it was Millar’s work,
although the flimsy plotting ending with the ‘hero’ winning by, basically,
punching the ‘villain’ is classic Millar. I actually like the Grudge Father as a work of extremely
gory body horror. It is very weird, in a good way.
 |
| The GrudgeFather has religious overtones. Sign of a good Millar story. Art by Jim McCarthy |
And then we have Canon Fodder, probably the most beloved
of Millar’s creations. This is a story heaving with fantastic ideas, intriguing
characters, the start of a plot, something of an interesting resolution, and
something of a mess hiding beneath a surface of genuine 2000 AD cool. In case
you don’t know, Canon Fodder is a priest, only he’s a ‘priest’ in the same way
that Joe Dredd is a ‘judge’. His job is to bring the law of God to the teeming
masses of people who have all been resurrected at the Day of Judgement, only to
find that the ‘Day’ has spun out into decades
because God has buggered off without doing the ‘Judgement’ bit.
So what you get is a
semi-futuristic world populated by literally everyone who has ever lived,
including a bunch of fictional people who really should have lived, e.g.
Sherlock Holmes. When you have an artist with the boundless imagination of Chris
Weston let loose on this kind of setting, you get heavenly results.
 |
| What a way to start a story! Art by Chris Weston |
 |
| Meet the Devil Art by Chris Weston |
Now, I don’t know if
anyone could really make this premise work, but Millar wisely doesn’t even try
to show what life is like in this world. Instead, he sends the Canon off on an
adventure to find God. And it’s a fun romp, marred only by some slightly odd
jokes and a certain failure to make sense. To be honest, it shouldn’t have to
make sense, but Millar’s general mode of storytelling is clarity rather than
Smithian obfuscation, so the reader expects it to be more coherent than it
actually is. No matter, it’s a delight of silliness.
In general, Millar is
likely to be better when he’s got a religion theme going on, as this seems to
be something he has actual opinions about, rather than when he’s trying to
guess which pop-cultural references his audience might be tickled by.
By the time he got
onto the Friday incarnation of Rogue
Trooper, and the Janus, Psi Division
stories he co-wrote with Grant Morrison, Millar had found something of a solid
groove, if a not terribly memorable one. And, yes, a few more unstoppable
villains who need a good punch.
Mark Millar – not as
terrible as his rep, but with few big, memorable hits to his name either.
 |
| More self-awareness..? (ho ho ho) Art by Paul Johnson |
Personal favourites:
Silo (that sequence aside, this is
a neat little chiller)
Future Shocks: Nightmare on Ses*me Street (incredibly cynical,
but I’m no Sesame St fan so that didn’t rouble me)
Judge Dredd: the Great Brain Robbery (not a popular opinion, but I liked seeing the
villain here get his ludicrous comeuppance)
Purgatory (for whatever reason, the outrageousness seemed to work in this one
instance)
Maniac 5 (I wish it had more of a story, but the art and basic premise carry it
through)
Cannon Fodder
(It says a lot that
I’m having to justify the list of stories I like!)
 |
| Murder of letters: genuinely witty. Art by Brian Williamson |
More on Mark Millar
By the far the most
detailed analysis that will ever be researched and written comes from the
keyboard of comics blogger extraordinaire Colin Smith. He’s undertaken a career-spanning review of the man’s work, which is still ongoing. The 2000 AD bit starts here.
The Hipster Dad touches on him here
And a recent interview at Big Glasgow Comic that is mostly about his successes today
*I’ve read a bunch of
Crisis, but haven’t come across Insiders. I love a bit of Paul Grist so it’s
probably worth checking out
**Purgatory is a
Dreddworld story, its main character an old Judge Dredd antagonist, not created
by Millar. But it feels like its own thing, really, so I’d cite it as a new
creation.
***Arguably, no less a
creator than Pat Mills is guilty of the same thing - only when he appropriates
ideas, he takes them in his own mad direction rather than regurgitating them
wholesale. Certainly Mills doesn’t care what his readers think of him!
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