The Four Color Media Monitor

The British website The List runs a short profile of the overrated Mark Millar, and predictably, they sugarcoat and sensationalize his career at Marvel in the past couple years:

Millar himself was ‘poached by the Americans’ to co-write Swamp Thing with Grant Morrison at DC. However it was with The Authority (a subversive take on the Justice League of America) that he first realised his potential. ‘To me March 2000 with The Authority was the first page of my career.’ It’s also where he perfected his take on ‘widescreen comics’, vast action set pieces grounded with a dark intelligence and pitch black humour. It was a move to Marvel launching Ultimate X-Men, followed by The Ultimates, that saw his career go stratospheric. ‘I just instantly felt at home at Marvel, particularly with the two guys that run the place, Joe Quesada and Bill Jemas. They said: “The company is just coming out of bankruptcy; we’ll maybe get another 18 months so let’s just do something nuts.” So they took somebody like me, who was an incredible risk, and put me on their most valuable franchise. It could have gone absolutely belly-up but it was a big hit.’

It was a massive hit that, alongside Brian Michael Bendis’ Ultimate Spider-Man, helped save Marvel from the brink of destruction. Then there was the gigantic Civil War, a crossover that effected the entire Marvel universe. ‘It was actually the most difficult assignment I’ve ever had. It’s the bestselling comic of the last 15 years, yet when I see it sitting on my shelf I actually feel a bit sick. I just think of how much time it took up and how much re-writing I had to do just to co-ordinate everything with the other writers.’

The Newsarama blog asked in response to this:

Is Millar and Steve McNiven’s Civil War “the bestselling comic of the last 15 years”?

Theoretically, maybe, but I think the best answer to this is "no". How much did it sell? Around 200,000 copies, but that's far from what sales were like up until the early 1990s, when some comics could sell almost a million, and since then, they sell barely 200,000, which is a far cry from what sales were like years ago. In fact, as of now, they may be selling even less than 150,000.

And I think Millar is boasting just a little too much, because since then, Ultimate X-Men isn't selling like it used to, and they forgot to mention that Millar just might've subtracted from his credibility after he wrote the Marvel miniseries called "Trouble", which tanked both critically and in sales. What made that happen was that apparently, it was meant to be a take on the elder Parkers from Spider-Man in their younger years and how they met their future wives. It even featured Mary Jane Watson's famous opening line from 1966 ("face it tiger, you just hit the jackpot!") as a deliberate swipe at Spider-Fans, and when the word got out, reaction was swift - it got shunned.

They really shouldn't gloss over that.

Predictably, The List fails to discuss the political overtones of Civil War, and how Millar may have found Quesada and Jemas good company because they doubtlessly represented his political viewpoints, some of which were the basis of Civil War too. And he says that he feels sick these days seeing it on the shelf? What about the fanbase? To think of what awful things the miniseries led to as of now, that is what's sickening.

Labels: dreadful writers, marvel comics, moonbat writers, msm propaganda