Audiences don’t want woke: comic-book writer Mark Millar interviewed

Mark Millar has a raging hangover but he couldn’t be more chirpy or enthusiastic. ‘People say they get worse as you get older but I get reverse hangovers where I feel amazing. I wake up at four or five and I’m ready to go!’

I’ve caught him on a Sunday morning, on his way to Mass, after an exhausting three weeks in which he has been doing up to 45 interviews a day to promote Jupiter’s Legacy, his blockbuster superhero series for Netflix. He ought to be nervous: this is his first big project off the blocks since (in 2017) the studio bought up his publishing company Millarworld for a reported $50-100 million. Instead, as ever, he’s fizzing with energy, enthusiasm and optimism.

The reason, he explains, is that he was born with a kind of superpower. ‘I’ve never felt I could fail,’ he says, comparing his boundless self-confidence to that of the second world war fighter ace Douglas Bader ‘who never felt like he was going to die up in the plane because he was Douglas Bader’.

Having a warm, loving, supportive family helped too. ‘Although we were from a poor working-class community [on an estate in Coatbridge, outside Glasgow] — Mum was a cleaner, Dad a steelworker — there was always an incredible optimism and joy in everything. No one ever said to me it’s time to grow up.’

Even his older siblings were like a league of superheroes, each with their own special power. ‘One has got incredible business acumen; another one loves showbiz; another is very, very social and everyone in town knows him.’ When Mark showed an interest in a career in comic books (he made his first ones at five), his family all rallied round rather than telling him to knuckle down and get a proper job.

So for ten years, from the age of 19, Millar worked as a writer for comics like 2000AD, earning just enough money to ensure he could party every night.