Write here, write now
I've been thinking a lot about the difference between who I am as a reader and who I am as a writer
Mark Millar is a hell of a writer. He’s also one of the most divisive people in the comic book industry today - a shameless self-promoter and huckster who frequently churns out some of the cringiest edge-lord shit this side of 4-Chan. He drops slurs and homophobia and misogyny throughout his books like he’s a lost child in a dark forest trying to find his way back home with breadcrumbs. His writing can be cruel and cheap and exploitive - sometimes all of the above all at once.
Did I mention he was a hell of a writer?
Millar’s work on THE ULTIMATES almost single-handily served as a blueprint for the Marvel Cinematic Universe during its first ten years. CIVIL WAR was the comic book event that had me visiting the local funny book retailer on a weekly basis for the first time in my life. CHOSEN and SUPERMAN: RED SON are books that reach a level of profundity that I don’t often experience in comics - a literary high that the chase thereof will keep me dipping back into the long boxes for the rest of my life.
Mark Millar is a hell of a writer. He’s also exactly the kind of writer I will never be - nor want to be.
For the last twenty years, Millar has been releasing creator-owned books with a bevy of extremely talented artistic collaborators through his Millarworld label. Many of the books have become popular Hollywood franchises - KICK-ASS, THE KINGSMAN, WANTED, JUPITER’S LEGACY, etc. With the exception of the first wave of books, I have not read any of these titles. I could chalk it up to time and expenses (reading comics is pricy, yo!) but the truth is that at some point in the last decade, I began to feel icky reading Mark Millar books. Casual references to rape, incest, pedophilia, racial slurs and just, in general, juvenile posturing left me feeling like maybe I didn’t need to read every new book Millar was churning out. The fact that his books were existing in their own little corner of the comic book world - separate from the monthly superhero titles I was reading - made them easy to ignore.
But then came BIG GAME. Hitting comic book stores this summer, BIG GAME is a massive crossover event that will bring together almost every character from the last twenty years of Millar’s creator-owned work, and goddangit, I’m a sucker for crossovers.
Like a glow-in-the-dark proboscis on a deep-sea fish, Millar’s BIG GAME has lured me back into the writer’s fold and I have decided to read the last twenty years worth of books from Millar over the next few months. This past weekend I re-read WANTED and CHOSEN (recently retitled AMERICAN JESUS). I also read the two sequels to AMERICAN JESUS: CHOSEN. I’m going to hop around the various series, instead of trying to read them in chronological order, but my goal is to try and read everything in the Millarworld line-up by the end of August. I even ordered a copy of THE UNFUNNIES, a book that is allegedly so offensive that even Millar has disowned it.
Millar exceeds at incredible concepts - imagine a world where supervillains won and made society forget that superheroes ever existed, imagine a world where a teenager tried to turn himself into a real-life Batman with zero money or training, imagine a world where James Bond cussed a lot and liked anal sex. Millar also knows how to pull those concepts off - his books are rivetingly executed - paced like a blockbuster movie and told with a widescreen cinematic style thanks to the superstar artists he frequently works with. You can almost ignore the wall-to-wall edge lord shit crammed into the margins. Almost.
Reading Millar’s work makes me realize that who I am as a reader and who I am as a writer are two very different people. I love reading big-bombastic action comics and a cast of thousands. I like reading comics that are mean-spirited and needlessly violent. I don’t think I’d ever want to actually write one of them. If Millar writes Michael Bay comics, I want to write Andrew Bujalski comics. I like writing dialogue and characters reacting internally to external forces. I like writing small moments of contemplation and discussion. I like writing puns.
Coming to this realization was, at first, confusing. I would have assumed that I’d want to emulate with my writing the things that attracted me as a reader - an extension of writing what you know would be writing what you like, right? Interestingly enough, it was something Mark Millar wrote in the back of one of the volumes of AMERICAN JESUS that helped me realize what was going on.
Millar was talking about how he only really reads books or watches movies when he’s not writing. His brain receives a certain endorphin from stories - he can get that endorphin from writing and creating new stories but he can also get it from experiencing other people’s stories. If he consumes too much media, he doesn’t feel pressure to write himself. I think this explains why there’s such a clear divide between the stuff I like to read and the stuff I like to write. I get my blockbuster endorphins from comics and I get my exquisitely written-prose endorphins from novels and that allows me to focus on getting my dialogue-heavy comedy-horror endorphins from my own writing. This actually makes a lot of sense since the only reason I started writing fiction in the first place was because I ran out of new FLETCH novels to read during COVID and I wanted to try my hand at writing something in that same vein.
God, I hope no new Gregory Mcdonald FLETCH novels are ever discovered…