Kick-Ass 2: Mark Millar’s superhero powers

The night before our interview, Mark Millar was drinking his way through his hotel suite’s minibar. “There goes your budget, Universal Pictures!” he tweeted, later adding, “If I get drunk enough and run out of nuts I’m going to eat those minibar condoms.” But when I meet the 44-year-old the following afternoon he is incredibly chirpy, enthusiasm unfettered, words flying out at 100mph. He discusses the Kick-Ass films, adapted from the comics he authored, with childlike glee. Next week the sequel is released, and this time there are whole armies of costumed cohorts, Aaron Taylor-Johnson’s eponymous DIY vigilante leading the charge against Christopher Mintz-Plasse’s vengeful Red Mist, now reborn as The Motherfucker. It’s a big bundle of fun, and with its $28m budget (low compared with its costlier cousins), Millar hopes it will enjoy even greater success than its predecessor, which made $96m in cinemas.He brings up Jim Carrey early. The actor plays Colonel Stars and Stripes, a gun-toting patriot amassing a team of superheroes, but recently U-turned on the film, tweeting that he was not ashamed of it but, in the wake of the Sandy Hook shooting, was withdrawing support due to its “level of violence”.“You should never give actors Twitter,” laughs Millar, who says the argument that cinema causes gun crime is “preposterous”. Kick-Ass 2’s violence is indeed brutal, and a sizeable chunk of it is dished out by Carrey himself. His about-turn was sudden; perhaps Carrey did not want to seem hypocritical after months of anti-gun lobbying. “I think that’s exactly what happened. I think he got boxed into a corner,” says Millar. “The image that was online prior to this was a photo of him pointing a gun, laughing, with headlines like ‘Jim Carrey slams gun violence.’ So I think he felt, well, checkmate, and he had to bail on some level.”Last weekend Millar tweeted a doctored photo of Carrey from the film, his gun replaced with flowers. He’s enjoying the heat Carrey has generated. “I went ‘Yes!’ when I heard it,” he says, “because I knew we were gonna get amazing publicity. Universal estimates we get $30m worth of advertising out of it, because it was on Good Morning America and all that stuff. So I think he’s weirdly done us a favour. It worked out great.”Millar’s profile is also high. Born in Coatbridge, Lanarkshire (he still lives in Glasgow) in 1969, he began on Britain’s 2000AD aged 20, moved to DC Comics, then in 2000 was headhunted by Marvel, where he reinvigorated many of its titles. In 2004 he began creating characters for his own Millarworld company – Kick Ass and Wanted have spawned highly profitable films, and there are more adaptations on the way.He’s particularly adept at genre subversion. “I started writing comics for me instead of what I thought an audience was going to like or what a publisher wanted,” he says of his first hit for DC, The Authority, in 2000. “My idea was to do a superhero book that was the complete opposite of any superhero book I’d ever seen. It’s the philosophy I’ve applied to everything since, to break new ground instead of ‘Green Goblin busts out of prison and Spider Man fights him’. So I wanted to have the two lead superheroes as a gay couple, I wanted them to adopt a baby, I wanted to have a drug-addict superhero, just mix it up a little and throw real life in there.”

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Kick-Ass 2: Mark Millar’s superhero powers