Mark Millar talked to Comic Book Resources about the "making of" book, Kick-Ass: Creating the Comic, Making the Movie, coming in February from Titan Books:

Having already seen the finished "Kick-Ass" movie six times, Millar shared some details that will be found inside the Titan title with CBR News, like the fact that Daniel Craig and Mark Wahlberg were also considered for the part of Big Daddy and that Kick-Ass wasn't even the original star of the comic.

I can't even imagine Mark Wahlberg being able to take the role of Big Daddy seriously. And on balance, we're still pretty glad it's Nic Cage. Who else blends human psychosis and fatherly love ever so perfectly?

Millar also explained what the second volume of Kick-Ass (and possibly the second movie, if the first one does well enough) will be called, and when to expect it:

The working title is "Balls to the Wall," and we're thinking about launching it round about San Diego time, right around August. But to avoid delays, we'd like to stockpile a few issues, I think.

Plus they have a load of new Kick-Ass concept art from the new movie book, as seen above and below. More images at CBR.

[Comic Book Resources]

Nemesis, a new series created and owned by Millar and his Civil War collaborator doesn't just look like the Joker's smile painted on an all-white-costumed Batman's face, it's literally "What if Batman was the Joker." Millar explained to Comic Book Resources:

Yeah, a lot of people who've read it have been coming up with hilarious tag-lines. "What if Batman was The Joker?" is the tame one. "What if Batman was a total cunt?" is maybe my favourite, although it's hardly going to be an ad. [It's] is a reversal of the Bruce Wayne or Tony Stark archetype. What if this genius billionaire was just this total shit, and the only thing that stood between him and a city was the cops? It's Batman versus Commissioner Gordon, in a weird way. Or maybe a super-villain version of "Se7en." A billionaire anarchist up against ordinary people. The Joker's the best thing in the Batman movies, so this guy is a bit of an amalgamation of all the stuff we like.

Consider it a psychological thriller with an unlimited special effects budget, if Millar's description of the series is anything to go by:

All the cops are needed to go up against a guy as formidable as this. He's almost supernatural, he's so good. But he happens to just be in a costume. Hopefully nobody's ever seen anything like it before. We're so used to supervillains fighting superheroes, I just thought, "Imagine if there was only one person on the planet like this, and he was actually a bad guy." How would cops deal with him, even though he has no super-powers? ...Very simply, I wanted to do a book about the world's greatest villain up against America's greatest cop. I just liked the high concept of that - the idea of a villain going around from country to country and having a battle of wits with the best guy that he can get his hands on. And he sends them a little funeral wreath with the date and time of when they're going to die on it, every one dying at precisely that time. All these cops in the Pacific Rim are dead, and then we come in at the American side of the story and see the struggle of this guy in just trying to stop him.

(As much as this is so-obviously-they're-admitting-it-right-off-the-bat a Batman rip-off, am I the only person who got to "All the cops are needed to go up against a guy as formidable as this" and "I just thought, 'Imagine if there was only one person on the planet like this, and he was actually a bad guy'" and thought that it was Death Note?)

The series will debut in 2010, and yes, Millar admits in the interview that there's already Hollywood interest in a movie adaptation.

"Nemesis" Asks: What if Batman was The Joker? [Comic Book Resources]

MTV announced earlier this week that Marvel Comics writer Millar had other priorities besides a Superman movie - including, apparently, making money:

I don't think [DC Entertainment] could afford me now... I'll stick with Marvel.

On his own website, however, Millar disowns the quote:

I don't think I said they couldn't afford me now. If I did I was joking because writing Superman would be a massive payday so if I said that I was obviously laughing at the time. It's possible though as I like being glib.

He goes on to say that what little we know about his plans for a trilogy aren't enough:

Nobody has ever seen my Superman idea besides Matthew [Vaughan, Kick-Ass director]. We never pitched. I've never done a pitch in my life (it's demeaning) so all this stuff about people hating my Superman ideas, etc, is just bullshit. Nobody's seen it. I don't write or give ideas away for free and simply wouldn't. I mentioned a big epic idea to Empire in a Wanted interview which was a couple of lines long, but no story stuff at all. So the stuff about me pitching is nonsense. I don't and will never pitch. That's why I like working in comics.

Considering DC Entertainment's apparent lack of desire for a Superman movie, the idea of them asking someone working for their biggest competitor to write a trilogy without presenting a pitch first seems more than a little unlikely, but dare to dream, Mark.

Mark Millar interview with MTV's Splash Page [Millarworld]

According to Disney executives on this morning's investors' conference call, the House of Mouse initially reached out to Marvel "a few months ago," but Marvel creator reaction this morning suggests that it was kept a secret from the majority of people who worked for the publisher, something that Ultimate Avengers and Kick-Ass writer Mark Millar hinted at on his message board today:

I had no idea this was happening. I doubt even Joe [Quesada] would have known as this would have been between Ike, Disney and the Marvel board. If Joe did know he obviously wouldn't have been able to tell us but this is very interesting. I was just complaining to a friend that nothing had happened in a couple of years and now this.

But clearly, while certain freelancers only learned the news this morning, some of Marvel's creators must have known about the deal ahead of time, if they met with Disney/Pixar CCO John Lassetter to discuss possibilities, as per this morning's conference call. Suddenly, Avengers and Ultimate Spider-Man writer (and unofficial Head Writer for the publisher) Brian Michael Bendis' curious tweet from Saturday evening suddenly makes a lot more sense:

in other news- there's a very interesting comic pros conversation going on tonight. its the what if to end all what ifs.

Apparently, you should have included Mark Millar in that conversation, Brian.

Marvel declined to comment on this story.

Talking about the use of music in the movie, Millar told Comic Book Resources,

We're hoping to get other children's soundtrack stuff. You know when Darth Vadar appears in "Star Wars" you always hear the "Doom Doom Doo Doom...Doom Doom Doom"? That's his theme music, and we liked the idea of [kid assassin] Hit Girl – whenever she's killing people, you get punked up versions of children's television shows. So it may be "The Hair Bear Bunch" or "Scooby Doo" or something when she's cutting people's throats. We wanted to get The Killers or somebody to maybe record a punked up version of that so then you've got a great Tarantino-style soundtrack.

Tarantino-style indeed... Am I the only one who thinks this is reminiscent of Kill Bill using the Green Hornet theme version of "Flight of the Bumblebee"?

Later in the same interview, Millar promised more Kick-Ass sooner rather than later:

Inside a couple of volumes, you're maybe going to end up with 15 superheroes out there with superhero teams starting to form. I wanted it to feel organic and maybe like the early Marvel Universe that just starts off with a couple of guys and then gets bigger and bigger. So by the time you get to volume 3, you've got a couple of villain scenes, a couple of hero scenes. That kind of stuff... [I] want to do "Kick-Ass 2" because, my God, the movie's coming out and I'd be stupid not to capitalize on it. Also, it was always planned at three books, so I'm dying to get into the next one.

Kick-Ass, the movie, is due for release Summer 2010. Kick-Ass, the comic, reaches #7 next month.

Mark Millar on Making Movies [Comic Book Resources]

The studio is no stranger to controversy, having been responsible for the Saw series, but we're interested to see if mainstream audiences are really going to be prepared for what they'll get in Matthew Vaughan's adaptation of Mark Millar and John Romita Jr.'s Marvel comic, which has been praised for its realism and criticized for potential racism and it's c-word-using ten-year old girl assassin.

Variety describes the deal between Vaughan's Marv Films and Brad Pitt's Plan B - which co-produced and financed the production - and the studio as "big," and noted that Lionsgate plans to offer the movie on wide release next year.

Lionsgate grabs 'Kick-Ass' [Variety]

The Hollywood Reporter's Risky Business blog reports that fan reaction to the footage shown at Comic-Con was strong enough to attract sales attention from Lionsgate, Paramount and Universal. Currently, Kick-Ass is without a studio backer, having been financed and produced independently, following director Matthew Vaughan falling out with original studio Sony over potential censorship of the project.

According to THR, studios are expected to pay an amount somewhere in the seven figure region for the rights to release the movie, expected to reach theaters next Summer.

Matthew Vaughn and 'Kick-Ass' try to do same [THR Risky Business]

Stardust and Layer Cake director Matthew Vaughn and Mark Millar screened these clips at Comic Con, showing how Vaughn has tweaked the source material to give it a slightly funnier, more traditionally comic book-ish feel. But the live-action superheroes share their on-paper counterparts' propensity for misadventure, as in this intro, which mirrors the book's, but adds a tributary musical cue to comedic effect:

In the second clip, Kick-Ass takes on his first mission, with disastrous consequences:

Here, we get our first look at Nicholas Cage's creepy, sing-songy Big Daddy, engaged in a moment of questionable child-rearing with an uncostumed Hit Girl:

And, in the most violent sequence of the screened footage, we finally get to see Hit Girl in all of her purple-wigged, plaid-skirted, PVC-suited glory:

So yes, Fox shot herself (and a ton of other people) in the head at the end of Wanted. But that doesn't mean she can't return, says Bekmambetov:

We are working hard to wake her up. She was deadly wounded. The bullet's still there (in her head), and now it's a process of how to wake her up. There has to be a reason for that. We survive if we have a reason to live. She decided [to shoot herself], it's her decision. And now we are trying to figure out what's the motivation for her to resurrect. It's happening. I think we will make it happen.

So they're not undoing the gunshot wound to the head, or showing her in flashbacks, or bringing her forward in time or anything. Instead, they're sticking to the gonzo anything-can-happen, power-of-the-human-mind spirit of the original, by having her recover from a deadly bullet wound through sheer will power. Which, really, is as it should be.

Timur Bekmambetov was doing interviews for his stitchpunk movie 9, but we'll have plenty more on that later.

Superman He's Not

In the opening, we see the Empire State Building against a clear blue sky. The Superman theme starts to play in the background. In the voiceover, Dave Lizewski delivers an opening monologue similar to the one from the book. "I always wondered why nobody did it before me..."

As he continues his musing on why people don't become superheroes, we gradually pan down the building and we see the falcon-themed superhero from the beginning of the book posed like Superman. His metallic wings shoot out to the side and as Dave says, "We all planned to be a superhero..." he dives off the building...

...And lands headfirst onto a car. The music stops.

"That wasn't me, by the way," the voiceover assures us. As he briefly elaborates the mental health history of the now-deceased falcon man, we pan to a yellow taxi with the license plate, "KICK ASS."

No More Heroes

Dave and his friends are sitting in a diner reading comic books with his friends, asking why nobody ever tries to be a superhero.

"Well," says one of them, "there's the 'super' in superhero. They have powers."

Dave pulls out the Batman argument, but his friend shrugs. "But he had the money to buy all the shit that doesn't exist."

Dave laments that everyone today wants to be Paris Hilton and no one wants to be Spider-Man. "Spider-Man doesn't have a porn tape."

Dave's other friend asks, "You haven't seen 'One Night in Spider-Man?'"

Hit Girl and Creepy Daddy

Finally, we get our first look at Big Daddy and Hit Girl. Big Daddy is about to shoot Hit Girl while she's wearing a bullet-proof vest, so she'll be prepared if it happens in the field. Chloe Moretz's Hit Girl is true to the comic: a spunky daddy's girl who complains about getting shot the way most kids complain about cleaning the toilet. But where the book's Big Daddy is a brusque tough guy with a soft spot for his warped little girl, Nic Cage's portrayal is more like a sitcom father from a more disturbed universe than an ex-cop who hunts down drug dealers. He speaks to Hit Girl in an almost sing-songy tone, and it's apparent he's had no one else to talk to but his daughter in a long time. He explains with gee golly geniality that the gunshot won't be any worse than a punch to the chest. As Hit Girl starts to protest that she hates getting punched in the chest, he shoots her, knocking her backwards to the ground.

She's fine, of course, but when Big Daddy wants her to go again, she puts on a childish defiance. "I want bowling," she says.

"Bowling?" he asks, mock-incredulous.

"And ice cream."

He smiles warmly and a little creepily. "Well, young lady, you got yourself a deal." And, when she says she's going to get a hot fudge sundae, he replies with, "Good call, baby doll." Methinks there will be lots of cutesy nicknames for Hit Girl.

Bad Day

Now we get to see Kick-Ass's disastrous first foray into the field. This scene takes place during the day rather than at night, making his home-stitched hero suit look all the more ridiculous. He spots two guys trying to force open a car door and steps timidly out into the light.

One of them notices the fellow in the green and yellow suit just standing there staring. "What the fuck are you looking at?"

Kick-Ass looks away and stares at the ground for a moment in embarrassment, as if he only just realized how idiotic he looks. But he makes the decision to be Kick-Ass and calls out in a voice bordering on prepubescence, "Two shit-ass losers trying to steal a car someone probably worked their ass off to buy!"

As he talks to them, we see the baton he secretly grips behind his back. And, after exchanging a few heated words, he smacks one of them in the face with it. The ensuing melee doesn't last long, though, as one of the would-be car thieves pulls a knife and rather unceremoniously stabs Kick-Ass in the gut and runs off. Kick-Ass looks down at the bleeding slit in his costume as reality sinks in. He's still upright, but stumbling, trying to hold the wound closed. He makes it to the street, only to be smacked sideways by an oncoming sedan. The impact sends him flying over the car's roof and his limp body thuds to the street.

Saved by the 10 Year-Old

A woman has asked Kick-Ass to talk to her abusive boyfriend into staying away from her, so he's heading to Razoul's apartment for said talk. A big fellow wearing headphones stands guard outside the door. "What are you supposed to be," he asks the approaching Kick-Ass, "the Green Goblin?" But he lets him in to see Razoul.

Inside the apartment, Razoul is playing video games on a big screen TV while a girl in a trashy red dress sits on the back of the couch watching. His entourage sits around, a crew of big guys, any of whom look more than a match for Kick-Ass. "I'm looking for Razoul."

"I'm Razoul," says the girl. She puts her hands on each of her fake-looking breasts and rolls them together, "Can't you tell by my big titties?"

Kick-Ass' eyes momentarily follow the motion of her breasts. "I'm a friend of Katie's."

This prompts Razoul to identify himself and Kick-Ass explains, calmly and rationally, with no trace of bravado in his high-pitched voice, that Razoul can't see Katie anymore, what with all that roughing her up business. Razoul, incredulous, asks Kick-Ass what he plans to do about it. Kick-Ass replies if Razoul doesn't comply, "I'll come back and break your fucking legs."

"I'm here now," Razoul menaces. "Why don't you do something about it now."

So Kick-Ass tases him in the face.

As he recovers, Razoul pulls a knife, but as soon as we think we're in for a repeat Kick-Ass' first adventure, a knife blade appears through Razoul's chest. His body drops and we get our first look at Hit Girl in costume. This isn't the Zorro wannabe from the book; in fact, she more closely resembles Stephanie from LazyTown. She wears a purple bob-cut wig and a muted school-girl skirt over her PVC bodysuit. Her utility belt is pink and reads "HG" at the clasp, and in lieu of katanas, she wields a staff with serrated knife blades at either end. She's at the same time frightening and strangely adorable.

She pauses for a moment to select her next victim with a game of "Eeny meeny miny mo," and she's off, tumbling through the room and killing with incredible speed while a hyper twee chorus plays in the background. It's not as violent by half as the scene from the book. Even if more blood is added in post-production, there's more stabbing here than slicing, and the only body part that comes off is one fellow's leg.

One of Razoul's cronies, who's been in the bathroom this whole time, emerges and, spying the carnage, brings out his butterfly knife, flipping it around.

"Oh!" Hit Girl says brightly. "I have one of those!" Only, when she's done flipping hers around, she throws it through his chest.

The girl in the trashy dress is the last to go. Hit Girl pins her to the apartment door and from the other side, we see two bloody blade slide through the door. The door guard watches the blades in shock and pulls off his headphones. "What the fuck?"

The trailer gives us a few more glimpses of Matthew Vaughn's comic additions. Red Mist appears, not looking the serious, mature hero, but a guy who uses way too much hair gel (seriously, his red and black dyed hair defies gravity), and little lighting bolts hang from is mask. Hit Girl gets a few moments of bad-assery. She can change her gun clips with a flick of her wrists, and manages to kill a man by stabbing a knife attached to a rope through his gun hand and then pulling the rope so he shoots himself. And the fully costumed Big Daddy is an odd cross between Christopher Nolan's Batman and Christopher Nolan's Batmobile.

If the standing ovation Millar's fans gave is any indication, folks who liked Kick-Ass the book will probably enjoy the movie. But even if the Kick-Ass comic wasn't your thing, the adaptation may still be worth a gander, provided you can accept the basic premise that a kid from our world wakes up one morning and decides to be a superhero. Vaughn's additions, and casting choices like Clark Duke as one of Dave's foul-mouthed friends, make the Kick-Ass footage funnier and more visually interesting than the corresponding scenes from the source material. And Vaughn's movie has more affection for the superhero genre itself, while still demonstrating how unhinged people would have to be to try it out for themselves.

How's the con?

Con's good! I mean, it's day one, so it's fantastic. Ask me again at the end of Saturday night, and I'll let you know.

I was going to say, today's Mondo Marvel panel went really well. I remember last year, which seemed to be pretty much fans saying "You fucked up Spider-Man, so fuck you." It felt like every single panel turned into that.

Yeah, but you know what? That was totally expected. I was totally expecting that kind of stuff, and it was the kind of thing that I could've just not gone to the con, but I was like, you know what? We gotta talk about this stuff, and it's cool. But every con has a different personality to it, so you never know until you get that very first panel and I say, how's everybody doing. You know right away, [this time] there was an energy, it was a really upbeat crowd, and it was nice to see a full room because, lately in San Diego, it's become this multimedia experience so it's become less about comics. But that was a real, solid standing-room-only panel, so that was a good thing.

The bright side is, here we are, a year-plus later, after One More Day [the storyline that controversially undid Peter Parker's marriage to Mary Jane, courtesy of a literal deal with the devil. Or a devil, at least], and it's ironic, but I've been seeing all these emails coming through from people saying, begrudgingly, "I really like the new direction."

I think there're lots of arguments you can have with One More Day as a story, but Spider-Man is better because of it.

The thing about One More Day is, and I've always said this, "Were there better ways of skinning that cat?" Absolutely. The easiest thing to do would've been to kill Mary Jane. But then you've lost Mary Jane as a character.

And then you're stuck with a Spider-Man who's going to be grieving for x amount of months...

Exactly, he's going to be grieving, he's a widower, and being a widower [makes him seem] even older than being married in the first place. And then of course, you can't really lose her as a character, she's too important. We've got books that revolve around her, we've got movies that revolve around her. So you're going to have to bring her back, and then when you bring her back, you're still going to have to deal with the aspects of the marriage, so there was no clean way to do it. We did the best we could, and there are still some unanswered questions that we're going to get to, for the continuity-minded, the people who really wrap themselves around that, we'll answer a lot of questions. You'll be surprised how little Mephisto had to do with anything.

So when you have that kind of vocal fanbase, or with Captain America coming back to life, and you know that there is an answer six months down the line...

Suck it up.

Really? There's never a feeling of, we should rush this out, or we should try to deal with this sooner?

When I took over as editor in chief, Tom DeFalco, who was the editor in chief before Bob Harras, who I took over the job from, he came into my office, smacked me on the back - Tom's a friend - and said, 'I'm gonna give you some advice. From this point on, you have a very big target on your back. You're going to have to have very broad shoulders. If you're not going to do that, you're not going to like this job.' And at the end of the day, I'm making comic books. So I have some comic book fans that're making fun of me. I'm not trying to resolve the economy, I'm not trying to solve things between Palestine and Israel, you know, it's comic books and the worst thing we do is we kill off some trees and we piss off some fanboys. But as long as we do our jobs right, at the end of the day, I want to be able to look back when I either get shown the door or I walk out of it myself, I want to be able to look back and say, we gave everybody a great ride. The story's really good. It's all about story.

We know what's going to come down the line, we know how the Mephisto thing happens, and I gotta sell comics. It's serialized storytelling. They just gotta suck it up.

Now that you're coming to the end, with Dark Reign, of a story that you've been telling since 2005. Does that feel like the end of an era for you, to reach the end of a story that's pretty much gone across all of the franchises at the company?

It doesn't feel like the end of an era, it feels like it's going to be a chance to breathe. One of the things that I really do long for, I remember when we first started - or I first started - this crazy trip of being editor in chief at Marvel, we started by taking books and characters and focusing on creative. Saying 'Okay, Joe Stracynski, go - Tell the best Spider-Man story you can,' or 'Grant Morrison, go tell the best X-Men story you can' -

You broke everything up, to fix it.

We had to. We had to, because the characters weren't defined well enough to have them intermingle again. We had to - Obviously, when Stan [Lee] created the universe, he wasn't thinking this, but we had to recreate everything while still holding all the history. And then, once we'd done that, once we'd taken ownership of it, we were able to branch out and do bigger stories.

I'd like to see the star collapse a little again, and get back to smaller stories, Now that we've reset the pieces and everything's going smoothly, let's go back to basics again, let's tell smaller stories, more family-oriented stories, see where that takes us. And I'll be honest with you, that everything we've been doing at Marvel Publishing, it's always a risk, because fans are - and this is the thing about fandom, and I understand it, I'm not criticizing it, I've been a fan for years - you know, we'll sit there and complain. We'll go, 'Oh, everything's event event event event,' but the marketshare, the numbers... tell us otherwise.

People like the events. You own half the market out there currently.

So there's a lot of fans out there saying 'Go back to basics,' but it's a matter of necessity for us also. We're just exhausted, and we need to go back to basics, regroup a bit, let our writers also take ownership of their books for awhile, because it's taxing on them, and on our artists. You know, let them tell their stories for awhile, and run their books, before we say, okay, let's get the band together again and go a little crazy.

And the other thing is, it will make the day that we go back to another event special again. I think, if we did another event following this whole culmination of stuff, it's just going to seem like white noise. I do sense that it's getting to the point where it's white noise.

I know I live in a world of hyperbole, but there has to be a certain truth in the hyperbole. So, when I say that we're coming to the third act, I didn't say that with [Secret] Invasion, and I didn't say that with Dark Reign, although Dark Reign is the beginning of that third act, when we get there, people will see what we've done. And then they'll go, cool, now let's see what you guys are gonna do next. What we have to do is come up with something compelling enough that they're going to want to go to all of our titles without having to tie them all together.

The challenge to our writers in the last summit was, come up with - If you had twelve months to live and this was the book that you're writing, give us the stories - You know, "Matt Fraction, you're writing Iron Man, give us the best effin' Iron Man story you can come up with for those twelve months. Bendis, you're writing Avengers, give us the best Avengers story you can." That's the challenge, so that each title becomes must read. Hopefully, that works, and we're going to market each one as their own thing. It's a change of gears, and most people will think that we're crazy but, I've often, I've talked to our publisher Dan Buckley about it: It's like being addicted to heroin. Something you've just got to come off.

That's an interesting analogy, "Sometimes, you've just got to come off heroin, other times, hey, let's go heroin!"

[Laughs] But they pay us in heroin!

It's a little daunting when you look at the future and say, wow, what's gonna happen? But I trust our creators and our editors to knock it out of the park.

You said at the Mondo Marvel panel that Paul Tobin was "recreating the Marvel Adventures universe," which may just be a hyperbolic way of saying "We're relaunching the line," and you have the Ultimate line being relaunched as Ultimate Comics. Is this happening because people have become so focused on the "main" universe that the other lines need a push?

It's funny, because Ultimate is almost the exploratory mission for Marvel. Like, we sent the Ultimate books out there to do some insane stuff, when Mark and Bendis were doing those books, and they did things in those books that we never would have dared to do in the regular universe. But they planted the seeds. It was the same thing at [Quesada's first editorial line at Marvel] Marvel Knights, which was an exploratory mission that took certain Marvel characters into places that Marvel never would've published before, and then by putting me in charge of Marvel, kind of took the whole line there. And then Ultimate was kind of the next step, you know, 'Go out West, kids! See if there's Indians out there!'

Ultimate was Brian Michael Bendis and Mark Millar, and then they came to the main universe...

Yeah, so now this next push in Ultimate, we're taking the Ultimate universe to places where, again, the challenge was 'Where can we go that we just can't go with the Marvel Universe right now? How can we break these characters down, and what can we do with them, and see where that takes us?' And that's really the fun of it, because it's only three or four titles, and if you break them, you break them. Spider-Man in our universe is still Spider-Man, but we can look at Ultimate and say, 'You know, I think that was the line. We shouldn't cross it.'

Is that why the Ultimate line exists, internally? Obviously, it has its fans, and it's there as an entry point for new readers, but internally, is it 'The Place Where You Can Do The Crazy Shit?'

I think so, I think that's, internally, what our writers feel when we're working on this stuff. You know, the Hulk eats people [Laughs]. That's a line we're not going to go near in the regular books, but it's an interesting take on the Hulk, and we're able to do certain things to certain characters. And at the end of the day, I hate to become redundant, but to bring up the whole Spider-Man thing again, we - all of us, the editors in chief before me - felt like Spider-Man works better as a single guy. The storyline that Stan set off in the newspaper strip of Spider-Man getting married worked perfectly for the newspaper strip, but for Marvel's publishing division, I think that we needed to get him single again. And that was at the very beginning of my tenure, even as a freelancer I used to think that all the time. You know, he's kind of dull and Mary Jane was portrayed as not very nice all the time, because that would drive tension into the relationship. And then Ultimate Spider-Man comes along, and we're like, yeah, that's kind of the way it should be. So that really proved to us that that's really where it works best. If I could've put Peter back in high school in the universe, I would've, but it's cool with him being just out of college and this young man trying to make his way through life at this point as opposed to being in high school. Those are the kinds of things that Ultimate did that we thought, it works.

So, does that make Marvel Adventures the kids line? Earlier attempts, like Marvel Age have seemed more "aimed at kids," but there's something about the Adventures books that works on multiple levels.

My theory when it comes to kids books is that, if you write down to kids, you're doomed to fail. So, the idea behind Marvel Adventures, we live in day and age today where, if you say that a book is "kid safe," that's not a message you're putting out to kids, that's a message you're putting out to parents. It's parent safe, and as a parent, I understand that. We look back on Stan's era, those early mid-60s books, and they look very kid-friendly, and they look very kid-safe, and quaint and easy to follow and stuff, but putting it into historical perspective when they came out, they were incredibly edgy. I think it was 1966, 1967, the Hulk was on the cover of Rolling Stone, and the reason the Hulk was on the cover and Rolling Stone did a six or seven page expose on Marvel was because Marvel comics were huge with college students. But the reason that they were big with kids was, when I was a kid, my dad wasn't interested in what I was reading, he didn't look over my shoulder. I didn't wear a helmet when I rode a bicycle, okay? It was called Darwinism; if I stuck my finger in a plug... there were no things on the edges of tables, there was no cover on the television to stop me knocking my head into. But we live in a different day and age.

So now you progress in time, and what was edgy back then is quaint today, and I would argue that our books aren't necessarily more or less edgy than they were back in Stan's era, but the one thing I would argue that Stan did back in his day was that he never talked down to the reader, even knowing that kids were reading them. So, with respect to Marvel Adventures, they're not "edgy," but they're not stupid. And I think what Paul's going to bring is more of a cohesiveness between all the titles, whilst continuing the "told-in-one," which is, I think, a better approach for keeping kids interested. It's hard work to keep doing told-in-ones while keeping up a linear continuity, but now that I'm working in the animation world, it's something that I see in a lot of animated shows, where each episode is a kind of told-in-one episode, but there's a larger continuity that you see at the end of each season.
You're very involved with animation, but how involved are you in the films these days?

In the films, I'm part of something called the Marvel Creative Committee, and it's - I never count, but I think it's five or six of us, we are involved in every early aspect of the movie, from the proposal of what the story's going to be, to the elongated beat sheet, to the screenplays, we sit there and we just take it apart to ensure that our movies are... They can never be the same as what's on the comic page, but that the experience someone gets is the same as what they get when they pick up that comic.

Could you, or have you, completely derailed something at a late stage?

Oh, yeah. That's our job. When we're derailing, we bring it up and say, 'Okay guys, we're derailing here.' The big difference between doing a motion picture and doing a comic book is, putting out a comic book costs us thousands of dollars...

It's one thing to fail with a comic, and another to fail with a movie.

Yeah, and by the way, if I fail with that one issue, I can fix it in three months. There'll be another issue. These movies are forever, and you're spending hundreds of millions of dollars on them. So we're taking a very careful creative approach. And the beauty of things is, when we're sitting in these meetings, we're not just sitting there and going 'We need an Iron Man floating vehicle because we need a toy here.' That's not the approach we take at all. We're all about story, and character, and driving the movie forward, and driving it towards the inevitable Avengers movie.

Do you, through working on the movies, see the comics in a new way? As in, you see something and think, we should be doing it this way in the comics?

I think that the beauty of this whole thing, and I hate to bring up a stupid corporate word like "synergy," but there really is a lot of that going on. I was up at Marvel Studios three weeks ago, and I got to see some of the designs for Asgard [from Thor], and I sat there and I turned to Dan Buckley, our publisher, and Kevin Feige [Marvel Studios president] and said, 'Two years from now, this will completely affect the way that artists render Asgard.' Because it is completely unlike anything I've ever seen, but still has that essence of the [Thor co-creator, Jack] Kirby stuff that we all fell in love with. So I think that there's always that give and take. And, as we work on stuff in publishing, I'll send stuff to Kevin Feige, just preliminary stuff, pitches that we have on books that I think might make interesting sideline stories for a Marvel movie some day, so there's a lot of give and take, there's a lot of transparency right now.

I was thinking of something like Iron Man where the movie came out and generates a lot of interest, at the same time as Matt Fraction comes up with The Invincible Iron Man, and the portrayal is so close, and it's the best portrayal of the character in comics for years.

And because of that, Matt was just flown out to consult on Iron Man as well. So he sat down with Jon Favreau and Kevin Feige to discuss Iron Man 2, the ideas and concepts behind the second movie. So, yeah, all of that stuff is involved. The only thing that I can compare it to, I remember reading a great article on Pixar, and the way that Pixar makes their movies and I remember thinking, that's the way that we do it. In a perfect world, we'll continue to do that, and - especially being a fledgling studio - I think it's going to work. From what I've been seeing in the screenplays and what I've seen of the pitches... I mean, Iron Man 2 is gonna be a lot of fun. And those guys are having a good time making it, too. But something like Thor... I mean, this has an opportunity to be unlike any movie... There're grandiose elements that're akin to something like Lord of The Rings, but it's not really anything like that, and it's not going to look anything like that.

There's a lot of speculation about what Thor is going to be like. Any and every new piece of news drives the internet wild.

I love that stuff.

Does it drive you mad, do you think "I know what's really coming up, and you're all getting upset over nothing"?

I live for it, and anytime I can fan it, I will gladly fan it.

All that stuff is good. I really do believe that any of that stuff is good. Fans are passionate. If there's no chatter out there, I'm gonna get nervous. If the chatter's bad, you know that they care. All I have to do, and all Marvel Studios has to do, is deliver. They have to deliver the goods. Because if they don't deliver the goods and we have the bad chatter, then, okay. We had it coming. But speculation is just speculation, it's not going to hurt. It drives interest. Everybody that's chattering, they're going to pay to see it. They're going to pay to see it.

Is the same thinking what drives Marvel's internet activity? The company and creators are very active on social networking, you're all about Twitter, are you trying to push that kind of chatter?

To me, it's about community, and letting people see how the gears work. Even if they get rusty and something crush people between them, you know. It's letting people behind the curtain, and that's something that, when I was a kid reading Stan's Soapbox [A regular column where Stan Lee wrote about Marvel in the Marvel books of the 1960s and 70s]... I always say that Stan was the first mutant, he didn't know he was a mutant, but he did have a magical power, and that was, in a hundred words or less he would write that soap opera and me, reading it, would get to find out all about Marvel and I would feel like he was talking to me. Not to the kid over my shoulder, meanwhile, that kid's feeling the exact same thing. And that was Stan's magical power, a short burst of dialogue that just brought you into that world. I don't have that power. But I got the internet.

I can talk until the cows come home because I love the stuff that we do, and I love what I do for a living. Taking over as editor in chief, one of the things I wanted to do, I really felt that inclusiveness was missing. Including the rivalry with Marvel and DC. There was sort of a passive and boring détente, especially after [joint Marvel/DC project] Amalgam. I looked at it, and I thought, this sucks for business. You need that passion -

But fans take that rivalry much more seriously than you do. I mean, everyone at the two companies get along -

We do, everyone gets along for the most part, but the rivalry does very well. It's funny, but when I went to see McCartney on the street in front of the Letterman theater, the DC offices were right behind me. [DC art director and editor] Mark Chiarello sends me a text saying, dude, I see you, come on up, come on up and join us. And I'm like, I got front row! As much as I want to be with you, I'm here! I have great friends up there, and all this stuff is just poking at each other, and I think it's great for business. It's great to get fans riled up, get them passionate about something. Even if they don't buy a Marvel comic because they hate me, or they hate us, they're buying their team, you know?

I'm a New York Mets fan, and I have a daughter, and I've told my wife, I said 'Look, I'm a pretty liberal-minded guy. My daughter can, she can bring home an axe murderer. She can bring home Jeffrey Dahmer or something, when she's sixteen, and that won't be as bad as if she brings home a guy who's a Yankees fan.' That's what we're talking about here. It's that kind of thing. If fandom feels something, that's great. We're keeping them engaged in our books, DC's keeping them engaged, and it's our job to get the guys who're only reading DC to come over to Marvel. It's their job to pull our guys away from us. And by doing that, you raise the level of competition between the companies. And that was the hope, let's get paste the détente, let's get past the niceness, let's start competing. Let's do Coke and Pepsi and get into it. And I think it's been healthy for the industry.

But this goes back to the original question, and the original answer, which is how Stan made people feel. And I think, as a company, we've adopted a lot of that. I learned very quickly that the dumber the thing I said online, the more hits we got, and ultimately, the viral message will get carried by the fans who're irate about it. So if someone is pissed off at me because I said something ridiculously stupid about a character, they would then go to Bendis' board, or John Byrne's board, or all these other message boards, and say 'Do you believe what this jack-ass just said?' Now, all of a sudden, something dumb that I've said - "Dead is dead," [An oft-mis-quoted line attributed to Quesada by fans, saying that if a character died in a Marvel comic they would never be seen again] - is everywhere. It's not necessarily the quote, but it's everywhere. I'll take it, you're promoting my name, you're promoting our policies, you're promoting Marvel. So, I did learn to play with the internet in that fashion. And that's always fun to do, to say, 'Okay, what can I say today that will piss people off?'

You're just poking people with the internet as your stick.

It's fun. Look, you and I are having this conversation, and you can see that my tongue is firmly in my cheek, when you type it out, a lot of people don't see that. But it's all in good fun. You'll know when I'm deadly serious about something. It's comic books I'm deadly serious about, outside of putting out a good story, there's little else I'm deadly serious about.

Who is the one character that, for people, who don't really read comics that they should pay attention to in the next year?

I really do think, before Iron Man [the movie] hit... You know, Spider-Man, the X-Men and Wolverine are pretty recognizable, and were pretty recognizable before the first movies ever hit. Iron Man was a complete challenge to us because, not only was the character not really well known, but we were a brand new fledgling movie company, and it was a pretty big risk. So we put a lot of our time and effort into making Iron Man not only a popular character in comics, but we went out there and put out viral marketing and CGI animation on websites, and I think we did a pretty good job. I mean, Iron Man is a pretty damn recognizable character [now]. I'm not gonna say that he's at Spider-Man level, but he's pretty damn close. And now, as predictable as this answer may be, we're doing the same with Thor.

And Thor offers even more unique challenges at this point. I mean, you've got mythology and all these different kind of things. So how are you going to produce a Thor movie, but also a Thor that is uniquely Marvel, wholly unique to the idea of Norse mythology to the people who know Norse mythology. How do you make it interesting, and how do you tie it into the Iron Man movie and the upcoming Avengers. We've got a pretty intense plan around Thor, including the upcoming Thor (comic creator) team, who will take on [the series] sometime after our final third act soon.

Will they be announced here?

Not here. There won't be any post-JMS team announced here, but there will be some Thor news coming up within the next few months. I think fans will really, really, love the news.

But the focus right now is Iron Man, Thor - If you're not a Thor fan, you're gonna want to start picking up the books - and then focus, while it's kind of on Cap right now, it's going to intensify on Captain America as we get closer to that movie.

What happens after the Avengers movie?

We've been talking about things. This is really a question for Kevin Feige, and I don't want to step on his toes, but we've had some discussions, there's a lot of discussion and strategizing about the future of Marvel Studios... We have to [look beyond that]. We don't stop being in business after the Avengers movie.

What's the one thing you want to do, and haven't done, at Marvel?

[Deep breath] Wow. The one thing I want to do at Marvel?

Do you even think like that, or are you too focused on the day-to-day?

I'll tell you, I no longer think like that, because the beauty of my job is that I get thrown so many different things, no day is the same for me. For example, now being chief creative officer of animation. I did not see that coming. I didn't lobby for that position, I was just helping with animation and got, you know, a promotion to that position. Which is great, it's certainly going to be an education, it's a world that I'm not familiar with.

Does that mean you're going to step back slightly from the comics?

No. I also have the chief creative officer of publishing title, but I don't use it because it just makes the title look like a resume, and it looks ridiculous. But I get a lot of things thrown at me.

I can tell you that when I got started in comics, my one goal, my one aspiration was Watchmen. I got back into comics with Watchmen and through Dark Knight, and my goal was, someday, I want to write and draw that. It's like, as a musician, I was a musician before I was in comics, and as a musician I was like, someday, I want to write and perform Sgt. Pepper. I want my Sgt. Pepper. That didn't work out.

But even in comics, no-one's ever done Watchmen or Dark Knight again. They were Sgt. Pepper of their era. But it's what I aspire to. So, someone mentioned this to me, and it's hard for me to think about because I'm still doing what I do, but someone said that my Watchmen has been my ten years at Marvel, the body of work that we created here, and where we've taken the comic industry and Marvel as a company is one of those great stories. We were bankrupt, and now... we're not.

How does that feel, to have saved Marvel?

I was not in charge of saving Marvel, there was a team. I was part of a great team of guys and girls who've really put Marvel into a prominent position where we are now a movie studio, and that's a pretty spectacular feeling. When it's all said and done, I can look back and, I think the person that said it was right: That's my Watchmen. Nobody else can do that. Give it a shot. That's hopefully what I contributed, as well as drawing some funny books.

You're sticking around for awhile as editor in chief, right?

As long as it's fun. Because I was from the outside looking in, and I saw what Marvel went through when it was approaching bankruptcy, and I was walking through the halls when the pink slips went out, a terrible terrible time. And then, being at Marvel Knights when, overnight, 40-some people were let go. To this day, the attitude I adopted, and it's not something negative, but I never want to be surprised by walking into my office and seeing a pink slip there. I remember that look on people's faces, getting the pink slip and saying 'I can't believe it's me, I never thought this would happen to me.' Even in light of bankruptcy, the surprise was still shocking, it was daunting for people who must've sensed it was coming. And I don't even want that to happen to me. I never want to take any single day at Marvel for granted.

When I turn off the lights at night, I could come back here tomorrow and all my shit could be in boxes. It's the world of business and you can't take that for granted. So I've kind of adopted that, that little mantra for myself. But I've also said, at the same time, using a baseball analogy - My father got me into the sport, and used to bring up certain athletes like Joe DiMaggio and Ted Williams who retired before their skills faded. He used to say, 'Whatever you do, don't wait until your skills diminish. Leave on top.' I feel the same way; I'm still contributing to the company, but the day I feel like I can't contribute to the company, I'll be the first one to walk into my publisher's office and say, 'You gotta let me go.' Or, 'put me somewhere else.' Because there are people in line for my job, I'm not gonna have this forever who need to have it, who need to guide us into a different era. I never want to be That Guy.

You seem very aware of the history and the legacy of the company, and the position.

It's something that, in the very beginning of my tenure, especially with [Brian Michael] Bendis and [Mark] Millar, who I have a lot of affection for, because they sort of came up with me and helped build a lot of this stuff. We used to sit around and talk about all the mistakes that were done before us. Certain people that took their careers for granted, certain people who went in a particular direction, and not because they were stupid or anything, but because they were the first ones to do it. And we were sitting around saying, alright, we don't want that. We want to avoid these things at all cost.

And it's funny, because I was having breakfast with Mark this morning, and I said, 'You know what's really scary? We're kind of at a place where I think, twenty years from now, there're gonna be three guys sitting around saying "We don't want to do what Quesada did, that was a huge mistake.' I try to, at least, look forward. People always ask me, what was your greatest success and greatest mistake at Marvel, and I always stumble on that answer, I never look backwards, I can't answer it.

New comic site Bleeding Cool launched yesterday, by breaking news of the collaboration between Mark Millar and Dave Gibbons, which Millar — whose Kick-Ass is currently being filmed with Nick Cage and Superbad's Christopher Mintz-Plasse in starring roles — initially called "totally wrong" before admitting that the two are planning something for mid-2010:

Dave and I still in very early stages, but would imagine we'll do something for next summer, probably around six issues.

The comic will see something of a return to the mainstream for Gibbons, who has stayed somewhat away from high profile projects since his post-Watchmen Martha Washington series with Frank Miller. Maybe his experience with Zack Snyder got him interested in making more movie dollars. Expect us to give you more details if and when they're released.

Mark Millar And Dave Gibbons To Create New Comic Together [Bleeding Cool]

Don't get me wrong; I don't doubt that Furious scriptwriter Chris Morgan (also one of the writers of the original Wanted movie) can come up with a theater-filling idea, and I also wouldn't be surprised to see Evan Spiliotopoulos (former Disney scriptwriter of such movies as The Little Mermaid: Ariel's Beginning and Pooh's Heffalump Movie) turn that idea into something that won't stick in the brain too much. No, what I'm unconvinced about is how well either writer will come up with something in line with the original Mark Millar and JG Jones comic that this sequel is apparently still based on, despite the original movie pretty much throwing away most of it with glee.

Of course, with original director Timur Bekmambetov apparently on board to helm this sequel, the writing may be the last thing on anyone's minds.

'Pooh' writer tapped for 'Wanted' sequel [Hollywood Reporter]

American Jesus is the new official title for the comic trilogy from Wanted and Kick Ass creator Mark Millar, which started with 2005's Chosen (re-released this week by Image Comics). It was announced yesterday, as probably the next movie from Kick Ass director Matthew Vaughan. Millar explained the origin of his story to Newsarama.com:

When I was a kid, I read the Bible like everyone else, and I sort of hoped that the ending would happen in my lifetime. The Book of Revelation is just really cool – all the old stuff with the sandals just sounded less exciting than the returning Jesus versus the Beast at the end of time. I think everyone who reads it kind of assumes that it's going to happen in their lifetime, so just as a kid, it sounded great. So the idea has been percolating in me for a long time, and has actually appeared in a couple of projects that I've done over the years... As a kid, I remember watching a copy of The Final Conflict – the last Omen movie - and being so upset that it wasn't the big fight with Jesus. But back then, I suppose it would be too controversial to do something like that. But now, luckily we're in these crazy times where you can get away with anything, so God versus Satan gets a telling in American Jesus.

Of course, "everyone else" didn't read the Bible as a kid, despite what Mark thinks; Kings creator Michael Green, for one, said that his upbringing was "not very religious," despite being taught by rabbis in yeshiva. But is a religious upbringing the only thing behind these two high-profile Biblical genre stories? We're not convinced, and wonder if there's not some cynical grab for the Left Behind mass audience going on. It's something that Millar, at least, is open to:

I'd be comfortable with that, actually. I was going through the states a few months back, and all the places everyone said I would hate – all the flyover states – they were the ones that I liked the best. I mean, I'm a left-leaning Scot, and I'm comfortable with conservative Americans. I think America, especially during the Bush years, and even now, sees itself split into two groups, and I feel comfortable in both of them. The Left Behind audience is an audience that I understand because they embrace material that I'm interested in, so if they pick up the book, great.

The new culture wars may be about to invade your SF viewing pleasures. Be prepared.

Comic 'American Jesus' eyed for film [Hollywood Reporter]

Assassinated in the Act

The Jennifer Morgue by Charles Stross: Some people have a monkey on their back; Ramona Random has a succubus. If Ramona doesn’t have sex, the demon gnaws at her mind. If she does have sex, it devours her partner. It makes her questionable girlfriend material, but a highly effective assassin.

Goldeneye: Bond henchwomen often use their seductive powers to get what they want, and what Xenia Onatopp wants is a good orgasm. Unfortunately for her partners, she nothing brings Xenia to ecstasy quite like squeezing a man to death between her powerful gams.

Worshipping the Queen of Sheba (American Gods by Neil Gaiman): Bilquis, an incarnation of the Queen of Sheba, doesn’t get loving any more from the worshippers who once prayed to her and held sexy fertility rites in her temples. So she maintains her power the best way she knows how: by posing as a prostitute, having sex with her johns, and promptly devouring them with her vagina. Judging by the screams of ecstasy, it’s not an entirely unpleasant way to go.

Getting it on with Alien-Possessed Women

Torchwood “Day One”: Cardiff is ground zero for alien mischief, so when a beautiful woman leads you into the bathroom for some anonymous love, stay on your toes. She might have a fetish for sexy time in the stalls, but she might also be possessed by an alien gas that wants to suck the sperm – and all the energy – from your body.

The Outer Limits “Caught in the Act”: Chaste Hannah wants to wait until marriage before going all the way with her boyfriend Jay. When an alien lifeform takes control of Hannah’s body, premarital abstinence flies quickly out the window as she starts seducing every man on campus. But this isn’t sexual liberation; it’s a hunger for man-meat that goes way beyond genitalia. When Jay starts tailing his suddenly unfaithful love, he discovers that she’s absorbing men into her body during the act.

Death by Snoo Snoo (Futurama “Amazon Women in the Mood”): After all the men died out on Amazonia, the Amazon women devised a method of punishing male trespassers that fulfills the needs of the hetero sex-starved population: Snoo Snoo. Evidently, dying of a crushed pelvis only sounds like fun.

Alien Sex Vampires

Liquid Sky: The aliens who land on the roof of artist Margaret’s loft find human endorphins especially tasty. Initially, they’re content to nibble on the endorphins released during heroin use, but they quickly learn that the orgasmic variety is far more satisfying. So they start murdering Margaret’s partners at the height of their sexual pleasure, leaving Margaret behind to deliver avant-garde monologues in her neon makeup.

Lifeforce: When a beautiful naked woman found imprisoned in the tale of Hailey’s Comet crawls on top of you and starts kissing you wildly, it’s probably not because she thinks you’re neat. It’s much more likely that she’s searching for a convenient orifice through which to suck out your soul, leaving you a desiccated, undead ghoul.

Angel “Lonely Hearts”: Angel & Co. hunt down a demon that kills its host when close to another naked body. But it’s not looking to snag its host’s energy; it’s just leaping from body to body during sex, looking for the perfect body to inhabit forever.

Having Sex with Your Proxy Self (Kaiba): In a future where memories can be stored, traded, and implanted in someone else, having sex with someone who shares your memories can be a form of near-masturbation. But the experience is so intense that it can make your head (and the rest of your body) explode.

Death by Rapid Pregnancy

Fringe “The Same Old Story”: When you’re a human specially designed for rapid aging, and your sperm is similarly designed, it’s best to use protection when sleeping with a fertile female partner. But even condoms fail from time to time, and those rapidly gestating pregnancies tend to kill the mother.

Species II: The same rules apply to men infected with alien DNA. Female alien hybrids can handle nine months’ worth of pregnancy occurring in the span of a few minutes. Female humans just don’t have the wombs for it.

Magically Boinked to Death

Dresden Files: Storm Front by Jim Butcher: When Harry Dresden is sent to investigate a pair of lovers whose hearts exploded in the act, he comes across a wizard who draws his energy from sex and lust. The wizard sent his target a coital heart attack, and her unfortunate partner got his own dose of cardiac overload.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer “Where the Wild Things Are”: Buffy and Riley’s repeated and enthusiastic lovemaking literally wakes the dead, freeing a crew of sexually repressed poltergeists. Once freed, the poltergeists try to ensure that they’ll have a steady supply of sexual energy by getting Buffy and Riley to continue their round-the-clock shtupping until they die of exhaustion. Fortunately, the rest of the Scoobies come to the rescue with a spell to pry the lovers apart, at least temporarily.

Kryptonite Condom (Wanted by Mark Millar): Perhaps taking a cue from Mallrats’ speculation on how Clark Kent and Lois Lane might copulate, supervillain Professor Seltzer once devised a kryptonite condom to take down his own Superman-like nemesis. Apparently, the hero’s girlfriend never quite got the radioactive rubber on him, leaving us to wonder whether a kryptonite diaphragm would have been more effective.

The Classic Coital Coronary

Star Trek: New Frontier: Vulcans are known for their remarkable stoicism, which breaks down spectacularly every seven years during an individual’s pon farr, during which a maddened Vulcan must mate or perish. But not every Vulcan has the constitution for the intense consummation. The Vulcan Voltak had a heart attack while between the sheets with his new wife, Enterprise Dr. Selar, leaving Selar widowed and throwing off her pon farr cycle.

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine “Let He Who Is Without Sin…”: Curzon was a great diplomat and a notorious womanizer. So it’s apt that he irreparably strained himself with attempting the sexual ritual of jamaharon on the pleasure planet of Risa, although he didn’t give up the ghost (or, in this case, the symbiont) until several days later.

The X-Files “Gender Bender”: The alien Kindred lead a life of quiet isolation in a rural Massachusetts community. But when one of the Kindred ventures into the outside world, their intense alien pheromones both attract a constant stream of willing partners and give them coronaries in the throes of passion.

The Tick “The Funeral”: Many superheroes hope to go out in a blaze of glory, felled by some worthy opponent. Famed superhero the Immortal meets his fate on a mattress in Captain Liberty’s apartment, felled by her vagina. Although judging from the pending paternity suits, he died pretty much how he lived.

Powers “Little Deaths”: Philandering superhero Olympia has a similar exit, albeit accompanied by a literal blaze of glory. His alter ego's wife commits suicide over the ensuing tabloid coverage, but the woman who was on top of him at the time gets half a million dollars for the TV movie rights.

The story follows NYC high school student Dave Lizewski, who takes his love of comic books to a new level by following in his heroes' footsteps and fighting real crime on the city streets. It's a modern day superhero story complete with hero for hire, MySpace accounts, and lots of blood. Nic Cage plays the father to Hit Girl, his own daughter who he has trained to beat the piss out of drug lords (played by Chloë Moretz.)

For more Kick-Ass pics check out HitFix.

Talking to UGO, Singer was unforthcoming about where he stands in regards to any future Superman movie:

I love Superman and I can not tell you anything else... I am not officially involved in the talk [about a new movie], no. Well it’s, you know, I have relationships with Warner Brothers and with the character and, and, and, and it’s just the way things work out.

However, he also said that he was "not divorced" from Superman, which suggests that either he'll stay on as a producer (in name only, perhaps) for a new Superman movie, or that Lois has a bit of a surprise waiting for her when she comes back from the Daily Planet early one day.

Bryan Singer Is Not NOT Doing Superman: Man of Steel [UGO]

The new pics appeared on Newsarama.com, and are some of the first pics of Aaron Johnson in full costume as teenage superhero wannabe Kick-Ass, AKA fanboy Dave Lizewski. The costume looks impressively like artist John Romita Jr.'s original - despite the practical addition of a hole for his mouth - but we're most impressed with a pic that proves that the movie Lizewski will take on some white antagonists, unlike the comic book version's questionable targets.
Kick-Ass is aimed for an April 2009 release.

First Images from the Set of the Big Screen 'Kick Ass' [Newsarama]

The biggest challenge in writing a sequel to the first movie: Everyone dies at the end, except for Terence Stamp's gun-making monk and the main character, James McAvoy's nebbish-turned-superkiller, Wes. Morgan, who's going to work with Millar on the sequel's storyline, says that's a huge problem. But the answer is to "continue the journey that Wes started in the first film... It's time to move him forward." He also said the sequel is "going to be more global." Does that mean he'll travel around to different countries and meet a slew of hot, tattooed gun-slinging women with exotic accents?

I'm honestly having a hard time imagining a Wanted sequel without Angelina Jolie. And it didn't have to be this way. Jolie tells MTV (in a separate interview) that the first movie's original script had her survive at the end, and she demanded to be killed off.

“In the original, she doesn’t kill herself,” said Jolie. “I actually changed the ending. I said, ‘If she was to find out she had killed people unjustly and was a part of something that wasn’t fair, then she should take her own life.’”

It's true, by the way. If you ever find out you're a part of something that isn't fair, you should immediately kill yourself. [MTV and MTV]

Something you can't fault Millar for is thinking small, as he demonstrated to Empire magazine, explaining that his version of a Superman movies is actually an 8 hour movie split into three parts, each released a year apart, just like Lord Of The Rings:

It’s gonna be like Michael Corleone in the Godfather films, the entire story from beginning to end, you see where he starts, how he becomes who he becomes, and where that takes him. The Dark Knight showed you can take a comic book property and make a serious film, and I think the studios are ready to listen to bigger ideas now. The problem with Superman Returns was like releasing Star Wars in ’77, The Empire Strikes Back in ’80 and then waiting 28 years to release Return of the Jedi, it wasn’t relevant. I understand what Bryan Singer was trying to do, to pay homage to Richard Donner’s original vision, but I think you should pay homage by doing something completely different.

And if you're wondering what kind of "completely different" Millar is considering, he's willing to tell you how it starts... and finishes:

I want to start on Krypton, a thousand years ago, and end with Superman alone on Planet Earth, the last being left on the planet, as the yellow sun turns red and starts to supernova, and he loses his powers.

...Wait, so Superman... loses? And dies, because the world ends? Really? That's a surprisingly downbeat ending for a character that thrives in a more upbeat unreality... and also something that kills the franchise, as well.

We're also not convinced about starting the story a thousand years before Superman was born - Isn't the main thing about Krypton that it blows up, after all? Bringing in a vast millennium-old Kryptionian backdrop is either going to be gratuitous special effectery or a subplot that suggests a Smallville-esque direction for the trilogy.

Ultimately, of course, it's less about what we want, and more about what Warners thinks is right for the character - and it'd be hard to argue with the success of Wanted and excitement around Kick Ass. Here's hoping that Geoff Johns gets his pitch in first.

Exclusive: Mark Millar Talks Superman [Empire Online]