4. Mark Millar
IconAllow us to recycle something we wrote previously about the universally acclaimed writer of Kick-Ass, Wanted and Ultimates: Mark Millar is a sad, small man. Mark Millar is The Narrator from Fight Club, a man who has bought into the idea of the emasculated modern male, who has to reassert his dominance by indulging in crass violence, language and treatment of women. Mark Millar is also fantastically rich, and doesn't care what we write about him, which means we can keep calling his manhood and/or sanity certainly his good taste into question as much as we want and it doesn't matter. Just so you don't think we're being totally lazy, that's actually an incredibly post-modern and meta criticism of Mark Millar in and of itself. Because along with writing comic books that are incredibly cynical in their use of violence, sex and misogyny in place of actual maturity (this is all sounding a lot like Ennis...) Millar's writing is also incredibly cynical in that pretty much every creator-owned work he's produced in the past ten years has been done explicitly to try and get a movie adaptation made. That's where the real money is these days, after all. We truly believe that Mark Millar doesn't care about comic books. He cares only about how much he can make from the film rights, which is why ever since Wanted and Kick-Ass became box office gold he has focussed on creating new series after new series, with self-contained plots that would just be perfect for a ninety minute run time. Plus there's the fact that his stories are frequently totally tedious and include lashings of sexism, racism and homophobia. Still, see you all at the premiere of Kingsman: The Secret Service, eh?