Mark Millar
If you want to build a high performance organization, you've got to play chess, not checkers.Collection: Play
I just love the fact that all my pals are basically looked after. You know, we have these amazing deals, these guys split 50 percent. We have ownership 50 percent, all the bonuses 50 percent, and everybody's going to be alright. So going forward into the future, every one of these Millarworld projects, as we call them, 50 percent partners on everything. So it's just a really happy environment to be working in.Collection: Guy
I've been doing the Millarworld stuff for decades, and everybody seems really happy that's working on it.Collection: Stuff
Matthew Vaughn phoned me up and he said, "Hey, listen, the movie has just done gangbusters. We've got to do the second one." And I was like, "Matthew, I have no second book. Dave and I haven't done it," and he's like, "You're kidding!" He said, "This movie's just made $420 million!" I was like, "...We've got nothing." So the amazing thing was, because we own the rights, we still get paid and everything, which is fantastic.Collection: Book
The lovely thing is, if Marvel had a Spider-Man movie over at Sony or something, they own the rights to the character, and the editors and producers make suggestions and get notes and things. But you're talking about Matthew Vaughn and Jane Goldman. They're two of the best people in the world. The notes are just things like, "This is absolutely brilliant."Collection: Character
I just trust the people involved. Marvel and DC for the last 16 years - is that 90 percent of the time it's incredible top talent. Like, this is what makes it different from the pre-2000 superhero movies. I would say, except Tim Burton and Richard Donner, it was generally, comic book movies were done by guys who weren't that into the material and people who didn't really respect the stuff. But as everything, whether it's Wolverine, X-Men, Avengers, Batman, all these things, it's just been done by top-tier people. I have total confidence that they'll continue that tradition of being great.Collection: Book
There's almost a universe as big as the Marvel Universe with X-Men. I mean, Deadpool is something I think everybody was taken surprise by, except for the people who read the comic book.Collection: Book
When that character and the X-Force appeared, they took the comic world by storm. You have to look at those numbers. And you see that that isn't Rob Liefeld's only creation. There's all these other things, like Cable and Domino. There's so many things that actually could be fascinating onscreen and unlike anything you've ever seen before onscreen. So I think Fox is in a really nice position where they've got something that feels as wide and different as the Marvel Universe.Collection: Nice
Ever since 1980, sci-fi has generally been more Bladerunner than Star Wars. People talk about Star Wars being the most influential movie of all time and creating the blockbuster along with Jaws and that sort of thing, but really there's not been a space opera that anyone can go and see.Collection: Stars
I just noticed I've been writing lots of female-led things. Two of them haven't been announced yet, but the big Greg Capullo book I'm doing is a female-led story, and I'm doing another series with John Romita which is a female-led story as well.Collection: Book
Even when I was a little boy, when I was seven, I absolutely loved Wonder Woman, and I saw her as one of the superhero greats with Superman and Batman, and I think it's because she was her own thing. She always felt like the real deal the same way that Superman and Batman did. Whereas the She-Hulks and Spider-Women and all that kind of thing felt like a continuation of a concept.Collection: Real
If I'm creating a new superhero, it shouldn't be any different from other superheroes in terms of the qualities. Obviously the personality can be different. I think traditionally in comics women have tended to be a girlfriend or the daughter of whoever, whether it's even Batgirl as Gordon's daughter, or whatever. There is that relation of the hero, you know, like Superman's cousin, Supergirl. And that's great. It's fantastic to have a link to these amazing characters, but I kind of like the idea of things being something in their own right, which is why I've always loved Wonder Woman.Collection: Daughter
Marvel movies, are seeming slightly less exciting now that Star Wars has appeared and everything.Collection: Stars
Maybe in this Star Wars world maybe subconsciously I was preparing myself. But I've just found all of my ideas I've been coming up with are big sci-fi things, and I wanted to do a big epic, a big space opera, and this is it. This is mine.Collection: Stars
The big thing is it's a domestic drama. Everything else in science fiction tends to be high-concept. Really for the last 40 years or so I think sci-fi's been a little cold and a little inhuman quite often - certainly since the 1980s - and I really wanted to do something that almost felt like a regular, real-life drama but just set it in a sci-fi setting. I think the best stuff is always like that.Collection: Drama
The highest form of leadership is one in which a leader raises up other leaders - not as an accident, but as a result of conscious effort.Collection: Effort
Leaders don't ever "arrive." If we ever think we're done, we are done!Collection: Thinking
When I was a kid growing up in the '80s, the BBC showed those old Buster Crabbe serials like Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers. So instead of ponderous sci-fi or depressing sci-fi or dystopian sci-fi and all the things we're kind of used to, where it's always raining and it's always dark, I thought, "Wouldn't it be nice to do something that was just fun and absolutely nonstop?" Like, I love writing action, and this thing is that. It's all action.Collection: Depressing
I'm a huge fan of the Rod Serling sci-fi, where they could take the most odd and enormous ideas but ground them in something very human.Collection: Ideas
You can lead with or without a title. If you wait until you get a title, you may wait forever.Collection: Waiting
I'm very lucky that I have this other career that runs alongside my comic career, which is a film career, and I've been given this really lovely setup where they seem to make the movies very quickly as well.Collection: Running
Others control our opportunities, we control our readiness.Collection: Opportunity
She was like John Rambo meets Polly Pocket; Dakota Fanning crossed with Death Wish 4.Collection: Wish
For years I've wanted to work with this guy, so to actually write at the top of my scripts "Empress, Script by Mark Millar, Art by Stuart Immonen" is an absolute pleasure.Collection: Art
Jesus, man. Why do people want to be Paris Hilton and nobody wants to be Spider-Man?Collection: Jesus
He [Stuart Immonen] and I have known each other over email for 18, 19 years or something, so to finally work with him is like kissing the girl that you always wanted to kiss.Collection: Girl
It didn't take a trauma to make you wear a mask. It didn't take your parents getting shot...or cosmic rays or a power ring...Just the perfect combination of loneliness and despair.Collection: Loneliness
The heart is a muscle, and you strengthen muscles by using them. The more I lead with my heart, the stronger it gets.Collection: Heart
Batman: a force of chaos in my world of perfect order. The dark side of the Soviet dream. Rumored to be a thousand murdered dissidents, they said he was a ghost. A walking dead man. A symbol of rebellion that would never fade as long as the system survived. Anarchy in black.Collection: Dream
What I wanted to do was drown something enormous, like a Star Trek or Star Wars kind of space opera-type thing, but actually make it about someone who was just married to the wrong guy, and that guy just happens to be this amazing dictator, and she has to get her kids as far away as possible from this guy. So something that could almost be a TV movie, if you'd ground it and set it in Wisconsin or something like that, but to give it this enormous setting.Collection: Stars
You kind of worry for the characters in a way that you don't normally in sci-fi, because sci-fi tends to be about the ideas, and this is about people.Collection: Character
It's been a very interesting exercise as a writer - writing a little family group, like The Incredibles or The Simpsons or something like that, and setting it in a big Star Wars-type setting. It's been really fun, definitely different from the kind of thing I normally do.Collection: Stars
What I do with everything is take things out of real life. You encounter all sorts of stories. It's a lot of your friends and family, sometimes there's quite sad episodes in their life and everything. So just little things I've picked up along the years always find a way into all of my stories.Collection: Real
I always think it's a mistake when you actually have to set books aside and actually sit down and research something. I always think they've got to come from within.Collection: Mistake
Writers are the most terrible kleptomaniacs.Collection: Terrible
The one thing we can all relate to is family, and family has its traumas sometimes. Sometimes things don't go well for people. Sometimes things are tough. So everybody kind of knows someone who's been in this situation before, and I think that's what makes it work.Collection: Thinking
One of the things that made Star Wars work was the kids didn't know who their dad was.Collection: Stars
I think most people know the concept of difficult family situations. So I try to just ground a very big concept in something we can all relate to on some level.Collection: Thinking
Oddly, I think if you look at comic books, you look at the shelves in the store, it's predominantly male characters, historically. But if you look outside the window it's 52-percent female, and something odd is going on there. So I do think it's your responsibility as a writer, really, to create stuff that little girls can get into too. I want my daughters to have role models that are female.Collection: Girl
I love the fact that they [girls ]are into Superman and Green Lantern and Batman and everything, and they really do have all those toys as well, but I don't want all their role models to be men.Collection: Girl
I think exactly the same qualities as men [women role model needs], exactly the same, which is kindness, courage and intelligence.Collection: Kindness
In the U.S., Superman or Batman or something, the law-enforcement people, are the most famous comic characters. Americans have a respect, I think, for badges and a respect for uniforms. I think that's, in some ways, quite a nice thing, but it can be dangerous, too, because it can obviously be abused.Collection: Nice
The weird thing is that Stuart's the one guy - Stuart [Immonen ]and Sean Gordon Murphy, they're the kind of guys you can trust, where you don't need to do that because those guys are so incredibly reliable. They're just like clockwork, they turn in the pages just so perfectly on time. But I'm so paranoid, because I've been burned so many times, that I'm still even banking these guys.Collection: Guy