Mark Millar’s Childhood TV Favourites: “SHAMELESS?: THE COMICS OF MARK MILLAR”

1. In order to break up the text of Shameless? and, periodically, to give readers a little breathing space, in addition to hopefully providing a measure of fun too, the book’s chapters are broken up by what I’ve called interludes, or short pieces on different aspects of Mark Millar’s tastes and experiences. It’s amazing how […]

“Like BILKO in colour!”: another chapter from “shameless? – the comics of mark millar”

“I only had a plan in comics to do the stuff I loved growing up“. Mark Millar, Cartoonist Kayfabe podcast, 17th May 2020 At first, the young Millar was a Marvel fan. On Twitter in 2020, he recalled Marvel UK’s “huge range” of weekly titles in 1976 and how it enthralled him. In that year, […]

“Coatbridge, Scotland, where super-heroes are just part of the landscape …” – AN extract from ‘Shameless?: The Comics Of Mark Millar’

Thank you for popping over to this blog. Below is another extract from my book about the comics career of Mark Millar. As work-in-progress, I place it here in an attempt to clear my head about a section I’m a touch concerned about. For ease of reading, I’ve removed the references & footnotes which will […]

“Advice From Galactus” – AN extract from ‘Shameless?: The Comics Of Mark Millar’

Comics, wrote Marvel editor Tom Brevoort in 2007, “tend to be a young man’s game”. It was true, he contended, for film and TV production, and comics were no different. And even more so than for artists, Brevoort added, it was writers that were most likely to fall foul of premature obsolescence. One day, they […]

“Shameless?”: New Found Lands

In this extract from “Shameless?: The Comics Career Of Mark Millar”, I’m sketching out Millar’s remarkable success as an independent comics creator and publisher. To do so, I’ve taken one of the early chapters of the book and jumped ahead to 2012, an absoluely key year in Millar’s career. The intention is to introduce a […]

Another Glimpse Of “Shameless?”

Chapter 2 It’s far too good a story not to be treated with suspicion. Asked to recall his first comic by Lee Randall of The Scotsman in 2009, Mark Millar declared that he could remember it “exactly”. (*1) Despite the passing decades, this life-transforming event would always remain eidetically vivid in his memory. Time and […]

On Pages 11 to 15 of 1973’s The Defenders #4: One Page, One Thought, More Or Less. (3/4)

Continued from here: Page 11: Even at my most shamefully contrarian, I’d struggle to argue that the scene of The Enchantress’ violating transformation of Barbara Norris into The Valkyrie is anything other than fabulously well-worked. If the preceding pages could be said to suffer from the over-simplified designs and the sparsely detailed artwork, the very […]

On The Defenders #4 Pages 6 to 10: One Page, One Thought, More Or Less (2/4)

continued from the post discussing the first five pages of Defenders #4 here And so to page 6, which reveals little that’s new and absolutely essential bar the Executioner’s identity and his somewhat amped-up power set. Yet if the plot is little advanced, it is a sequence that sees Englehart and Buscema reconciling Namor’s fiercely […]

One Page, One Thought, More Or Less: On 1973’s The Defenders #4 (1/4)

In which the blogger does something he’s always wanted to do, namely, working through a comic and offering one brief thought, mostly, for each of its pages. Page 1: The splash of The Defenders #4 is a prime example of how colour can inadvertently diminish the virtues of black and white art. By this, I […]

On “New Gods” #7: 10 Key Superhero Titles From 1971/2: What Else Was Around When The Defenders First Saw Print? (3/4)

By chance, as I was rereading New Gods #7 for this post, some stills from the upcoming director’s cut of 2017’s Justice League by Zack Synder were released. Several of them featured the new version of the film’s take on Darkseid and his court: All of which prompted me to post a brief Twitter thread,: […]