Mark Millar Interview, Part 2: On Being Punched in the Face

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LEV: I think that if she’d even twitched or blinked a tiny bit before she says “cock,” then it would have completely not worked. But as it is it’s just cold steel.

MARK: Oh, it’s amazing. The thing that I loved — I mean, we looked at loads and loads of kids, and everyone else seemed like child actors. Some of them were quite big ones, that had been quite big in other movies — the usual three or four kids about that age — and it was unconvincing. Like, you’d seen them in something else already, and you just thought, she could never pull that off.

I think it would have been the same as casting a name actor as Superman at the time instead of Christopher Reeve. You bought Christopher Reeve as Superman because you’d never seen him anywhere else before. If we’d gone with Dakota Fanning or someone like that as Hit Girl, I don’t know if you would have bought into what she was doing.

LEV: For me, Watchmen was just such a seismic event. It realigned how I read comics and looked at comics. How big an influence is Watchmen on Kick-Ass?

MARK: Not much actually. I absolutely love Watchmen, it’s one of my three favorite comics of all time, and it’s influenced other things that I’ve done. But I would say Dark Knight was more of an influence on me. Dark Knight is like a forgotten masterpiece, always, because Watchmen is a more sophisticated piece of work, but I actually think that Dark Knight, the lineage is definitely closer to Kick-Ass in the sense that it’s a gritty, urban, sort of Scorsese thing that’s very cartoony in places and very emotive. Alan Moore I think writes to the head and Frank Miller writes to the gut, and I think that Kick-Ass, even by the very title, is much more to the gut.

LEV: There was a moment when I read Watchmen where I though this is it, man. Nothing will ever feel realer than this. But, Kick-Ass is real in a different way — there isn’t any difference in the world that it takes place in and our world.

MARK: That’s the silly thing, because people keep saying to me, “Oh, rubbish, there’s been loads of comics that’s taken place in the real world, like Watchmen.” Watchmen, I mean I love it and I absolutely don’t mean to put it down, but by page 20 you’ve got a guy’s big, giant, blue dick hanging in front of you, and he was 50 feet tall, and he was fighting the Viet Cong. It was a realistic take on an unrealistic subject.

Whereas Kick-Ass is absolutely the world outside your window, and I don’t think there’s ever been a superhero comic done like that before. I’ve never seen one. Even Batman has his morphing cloaks that let him fly across Gotham and all that. He has all that daft shit that doesn’t exist really. Whereas Kick-Ass just has two iron bars.

LEV: After I closed the book, the making-of book, the one question that stayed with me was, there is a point where you say you’ve been punched in the face twice in your life. What can you tell me about that experience? Was it comic-book-like in any way?

MARK: Actually it was quite interesting, because you see it in movies and comics where people get punched. Like Batman gets punched in the face 20 times and he still looks handsome the next day. But no matter how many pushups you’ve done, if you get punched in your face, your face changes shape for about three days.

The last time I got punched in the face, I think I was at university, about 19, and then when I was at school, about 17, and both occasions I was drunk, which didn’t help. I was really, really, really drunk, hammered, walking home with my friends and both times we got attacked by gangs and we managed to get away. We struggled slightly and fought back a little, but we were so drunk — even with our superhero training from a couple of years before.

Both times I was punched in the face and my lip. I couldn’t believe it, how big my lips went. I looked like a Disney cartoon character or something. That made me think, that’s quite interesting, because we’d never really seen that in a super hero comic before. So I love the idea of, after one fight scene you could be in the hospital for six months. If you’re doing realistic superhero comics, that’s the logical conclusion of it.

LEV: But it’s harder to make it work dramatically.

MARK: Well, that ‘s why, those six months, I just had four panels, one page of a comic, you know? So I had psychological rehabilitation, physical therapy and so on, and then cut to six months later. I like the idea that when I’m writing the sequel, he could spend two years in the hospital, but he’s a little kid and he’s so determined that he just get’s up and keeps going.

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