WRITER EXCLUSIVE
Mark Millar is crossing over nearly all of his Millarworld characters in Big Game
TO MARK THE 20TH anniversary of his comic book company Millarworld, Mark Millar is bringing his numerous series together in this summer’s crossover, Big Game. Drawing on almost everything from 2003’s Wanted to this year’s Night Club and Nemesis Reloaded, the five-parter is something he’s had in mind for many years.
“I’ve wanted to do it for a long time, but it would have been a logistical nightmare as the rights to all the different properties were co-owned by all the different artists,” says Millar, who sold Millarworld to Netflix in 2017. “It was going to be impossible otherwise, but it’s been worth the wait because I’ve built up around 25 franchises in that time. It also feels like a decent amount of time because if I had done this early on, it wouldn’t have felt so monumental, as several of them have since become live action films. So to pull it all together into one story, it just felt like a good time to do it.”
As readers of Nemesis Reloaded have already discovered, Wanted’s Wesley Gibson plays a pivotal role in Big Game, as it’s revealed that he is at the centre of a far-reaching conspiracy, which has seen supervillains secretly take control of the planet. “Wanted and Big Game are like the two bookends of this big storyline,” explains Millar. “I’ll continue to fill out some of the stuff in the background but they’re very much the first book and the last book and they’re like the alpha and omega of the whole thing, as there’s a beginning, a middle and an ending to this story. I like the idea of doing a self-contained universe, as Stan Lee once said to me that one of his great regrets was having to pass on the Marvel Universe to other writers. In his dreams, it would have just been him, which obviously would have been financially unviable for a comic book publishing company. But I’m really lucky because I can actually have that. And just as The Lord Of The Rings was three volumes, I like the idea of having 50/55 graphic novels that make up this whole meta-world of stories, so you can collect them all.”
With Unfunnies and War Heroes the only absentees, Millar was able to weave nearly all of his various characters into Big Game’s labyrinthine plot, with licensing deals having been agreed with John Romita Jr and Dave Gibbons respectively for non-Netflix properties Kick-Ass and Kingsmen. “With Kick-Ass and Hit Girl, I pick up from where they would be in the real world, as Dave Lizewski was a 16-year-old boy when we did the first series in 2008 and now he’s 31,
