From comics to Hollywood

Would you pay to watch a movie which had its script written by your favourite comic book creator? I would. Just see how Sin City turned out!

Wizard Universe interviews five comic book creators who may be making the move to Hollywood!


FROM COMICS TO HOLLYWOOD
A quintet of comics’ biggest creators talk about making the move to Hollywood

By Ben Morse

Posted December 18, 2007 5:00 PM

ROBERT KIRKMAN
The writer of Marvel’s surprise hit Marvel Zombies as well as enduring cult favorite The Walking Dead from Image, Robert Kirkman signed the film rights to his self-created teen superhero comic Invincible to Paramount in 2005 and came on board to write the movie’s screenplay a year later. “Transformers” producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura has also signed on.

“I have turned in the second draft [of the ‘Invincible’ screenplay] and it’s being looked at right now. I haven’t really had to fight the studio or anything. So far any changes they’ve asked for have been minor things that make sense and that I agree with. It’s been a pretty good experience so far, but the movie hasn’t been made yet, so I’m sure it’s coming. So far, they haven’t wanted any talking dogs—and I already have one in the comic anyway. Either they come back and say, ‘Hey, this is awesome, we’re shooting it,’ or ‘Hey, this is awesome, but we’re getting somebody to rewrite it anyway,’ or even ‘Hey, this is awesome—so awesome we want you to write it again.’

“I think I’m pretty good at writing comics, but writing screenplays is new to me, so there’s definitely a learning curve. I didn’t read any screenplays growing up so it’s a completely alien art form. When I get to page 22, I’m usually done. There’s definitely something difficult psychologically about not being able to believe you just wrote 60 pages and then realizing you’re only halfway through.”

BRYAN HITCH
Best known for his collaborations with writer Mark Millar on Ultimates and their upcoming Fantastic Four run, artist Bryan Hitch has worked quietly behind the scenes in both Hollywood and for his native England’s BBC: He’s a designer for the pending “Star Trek” movie directed by J.J. Abrams and the “Dr. Who” television series, respectively.

“My first real design job was on ‘Dr. Who.’ I was musing with a journalist who had interviewed [series writer/producer] Russell Davies that I’d kill to design the TARDIS set, so I had him e-mail Russell assuming he’d have no idea who I was and then he sent back, ‘The Bryan Hitch? Oh, I love him!’ I had a hand in the redesign of the Daleks, though it was more just scribbling over other people’s designs. The last [‘Dr. Who’] work I did was a two-parter from series two because I owed the [executive producer] a favor after she got me tickets to a BBC concert series.
“[Producer] Damon Lindelof and I started talking about ‘Star Trek’ way back. I was involved in the early discussions and was going to get to do the fun stuff like the Enterprise, then Paramount pulled the plug temporarily. When it came back, there had been a script leak so nobody ‘off the lot’ was allowed to work on sensitive material.

“Mark Millar and I are working with Joe Ahearne, a highly respected writer/director, about developing a new BBC series. Joe would be the lead writer and director with Mark as a writer and me as lead designer. There’s been discussion of me directing as well. Stylistically, working on BBC shows is similar to American TV because stuff like ‘Dr. Who’ is an attempt to replicate what [America] is doing with genre family entertainment. The difference between comics and television or film is that while with comics Mark and I are lucky to be almost completely autonomous, the film stuff is about servicing somebody else’s vision. I can’t see why I can’t do both, do a six-issue comic and then direct some television or make a film. It’s all telling stories, and that’s what I want to do.”

GEOFF JOHNS
Before writing comics like Green Lantern, Geoff Johns earned his college degree in Media Arts with a minor in Film Theory from Michigan State University and spent four years working under legendary director and producer Richard Donner. Johns served as a writer on the “Blade” TV series and currently works alongside “Robot Chicken” creators Seth Green and Matt Seinreich as a producer, writer and director on their upcoming stop animation feature film “Naughty or Nice.” He also has a film based on DC’s Metal Men in development.

“It was a hard decision to leave Donner, but there was so much going on for me in comics. I could have spent another year at the company working in development, but I like being on set. Matt and I sold two pilots to Fox after I left and when the crew from ‘Robot Chicken’ wanted to do a movie, he and I pitched this idea for a Christmas movie we’ve had since 2002 and Dimension bought it. We’re in preproduction, we’ve got test puppets made and in a perfect world we’d like to see this movie out Christmas 2009. It’s a lot easier to get what you want out of a comic book since with a TV show or movie you’re limited by budget and by all the other people working on it. I remember my first episode of ‘Blade,’ I wrote this huge fight scene with vampires literally throwing cars around and being told, ‘You can’t do that.’ I had to cut it way back and even then they went ahead and choreographed their own fight. Donner, even with his status, had to go through that stuff. With movies or TV, there are a lot more people involved, a lot more money involved, and a lot more time involved than with a comic book. But it’s also fun! Hollywood isn’t some huge, crazy maze; it’s just a bunch of people trying to make movies.”

J. MICHAEL STRACZYNSKI
A six-year veteran of Amazing Spider-Man and the current writer of Thor, Straczynski made a name for himself in television, most notably creating Emmy-award winning sci-fi series “Babylon 5,” before comic fans had any idea what the initials “JMS” stood for. At present, Straczynski has several film projects ongoing, including: a Silver Surfer feature spinning out of “Fantastic Four 2: Rise of the Silver Surfer,” which he will write the screenplay for; “The Changeling,” a thriller directed by Clint Eastwood and starring Angelina Jolie; and “World War Z,” based on Max Brooks’ bestselling novel. He’s also developing a script for Paul Greengrass based on a story the director wrote called “They Marched Into Sunlight.”

“[Film] is a field I’d actually gone out of my way to avoid for 20 years since it’s so much of a crapshoot in terms of what gets made. But thanks to ‘Changeling,’ I’m working with directors and studios at a much higher level than a development deal, and the road to production is much shorter. I have to say there have been very few hurdles or problems. When you’re working with directors like Greengrass or Eastwood, or with Brad Pitt’s company, which is doing ‘World War Z,’ it makes all the difference in the world. The hardest thing for me to get past as far as writing comics was getting used to the fact that the pictures don’t move. Otherwise, consider everything else the same.”

GRANT MORRISON
One of the most well-respected comic book writers of the last 20 years, Grant Morrison’s credits range from seminal tales like Arkham Asylum to current works like All Star Superman. In 2006, New Line optioned We3, Morrison’s quirky miniseries about robotically enhanced killer animals with the creator attached as screenwriter. Paramount recently hired Morrison to adapt the “Area 51” video game into a film.

“I met [‘Transformers’ producer] Don Murphy back in the ’90s because his wife was a good friend of mine from Glasgow. He got me started with my first official work in Hollywood, which was a screenplay for a film called ‘Sleepless Nights,’ which is stuck in development somewhere. When New Line wanted to make ‘We3,’ they asked Don to produce since he knew me and asked me to do the script. I think what I turned in is better than the comic. I’m always the guy who is saying, ‘Don’t change my work, I’ll cut your head off.’ I like listening to people’s suggestions, but if I don’t agree with them, I’m quite boorish about it. They’re currently looking for a director and they’ve got one great name who I think would do a great job. I’m used to comic books that come out three months after you write them so I just want to see this movie now!

“Hollywood is worse than comics—they don’t want you to talk about anything. Comics are all about explanation and exposition. Movies are a lot more direct. They have to play to the audience in middle America as much as in China. I enjoy doing something I can focus on for 120 pages and craft into something great. There are all these rules and everything is very specific. Comics are much more seat-of-the-pants improvisation, which is fun as well. Movies are hardcore.”

Our Final Story

This interview with the creative team of The Ultimates, Mark Millar and Bryan Hitch, was on Wizard Universe:

OUR FINAL STORY
Millar and Hitch on 'Ultimates'

By Danny Spiegel

Posted October 15, 2007 9:35 AM

Mark Millar: The 26 issues took about five and a half years [2001-2007] to come out, which is an incredible length of time. But the weird thing is if they had come out every month, it wouldn’t have been as good.

Bryan Hitch: Seeing the responses to what I was doing kind of threw me off the deep end. When people like Neal Adams, Alex Ross and Dave Gibbons are telling me that they think it’s one of the best comics they’ve ever seen, there’s an awful lot I feel I’ve got to live up to. I think I got stage fright, and it paralyzed me for a long time.

Millar: I was rewriting the whole time Bryan was drawing. It’s not as if I wrote 26 issues and put them in a drawer. I was reacting to what Bryan was drawing on one page and then a few pages later tweaking little bits of dialogue and so on.

So even though Bryan had been drawing [the last issue] since October of last year, I probably just finished my final dialogue about a week before it went off to press. It was a constant work in progress. I was quite sad [writing the final pages]. These characters took up a huge part of my life.

Hitch: Up until last Christmas, my wife had never known me not working on Ultimates. Neither had my children. It’s a horrifying thing to think that when I was drawing issue #1, I hadn’t even met my wife, let alone had my first child. [The book] has done a lot of good [for my career], but I think it’s also done it a bit of harm, too. My reputation for delivery is not at its best, and there’s certainly some justifiable criticism about that. But at the same time, I lost a lot of money doing it because I was working at about half the speed I should have been. One could argue that it might not have been as good if I hadn’t been fueled by all of the neuroses. We’ll never know.

Millar: Bryan and I both said from the start that we’d love to come back some point in the future, but it’d have to be years down the line. Our idea was to do it for the 10th anniversary of The Ultimates. It started in 2002, so we’d do it in 2012 maybe. We had an idea for a book set 10 years on from where we started with The Ultimates and where they all are.

Hitch: There is one big story we haven’t done, and we might have done it in Ultimates 3 if we’d stayed on.

Millar: I’ve already started putting notes together for it. I look forward to coming back to it at some point. But I’d only do it with Bryan now.


As late as the book shipped, Millar and Hitch at the VERY least finished the series (unlike some other series which just ended prematurely *cough*Battle Chasers*cough*). And the series was well worth the wait...heck, because it was so long in between issues, I could hardly remember what had happened in issues past. So I was forced to re-read the old issues again...and reading everything at one go makes the series all the better!

I do hope they come back to The Ultimates again in the future. Perhaps Season 5, after Joe Madureira and Ed McGuinness have finished their runs!

First Look: Millar and Hitch's Fantastic Four

It's coming! It's coming! What's coming that's making so excited, you ask? Well, anything new in the Ultimate universe, for one. I just can't wait to read the first issue of Jeph Loeb and Joe Madureira's The Ultimates Season 3 when it's released in December.

I love seeing old Ultimate-universe teams being reunited too. Former The Ultimates collaborators, Mark Millar and Bryan Hitch, are making the jump to the normal Marvel Universe when they take on Marvel's first family, the Fantastic Four, next year.

Wizard Universe has some previews!

WIZARD FIRST LOOK: MILLAR AND HITCH'S FANTASTIC FOUR
Check out Bryan Hitch's brand-new art as he takes over Marvel's first family with Mark Millar

By Ben Morse

Posted September 26, 2007 9:00 AM

Why Fantastic Four?

After five years and 26 issues of bloody fights, politics, sex and other mature themes in Ultimates, why would writer Mark Millar and artist Bryan Hitch choose the one Marvel title that screams “family friendly” more than any other for their next collaboration?

“The honest reason is that it was my favorite Marvel book as a kid,” admits Millar. “Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s first 100 issues were just perfect. Every Fantastic Four story since has been a retread. The idea of trying to add to that brilliant legacy is a poisoned chalice in a lot of ways because the book has never touched those heights again.”

Hitch, like his partner, relishes the challenge of returning the one-time “World’s Greatest Comic Book” to its early peak.

“High concept and characterization is something Mark is excellent at, and the big-scale science fiction and quiet character moments are things you can happily throw at me,” expresses the artist.

With the Millar/Hitch regime set to kick off with January’s Fantastic Four #554, both men have been working overtime to put things in place for the grand opening. Over the next few pages, enjoy the fruits of the duo’s labors thus far.

NEW FRIENDS
MILLAR: “An ex-girlfriend of Reed’s shows up and brings basically the worst news possible for the FF at the end of our first issue. She needs Reed’s help, and Reed will have to leave the team and go off with her. To me, the FF was always at its best when it took stuff that happens to real families to that fantastic level, and here it’s an old love threatening the family.”

HITCH: “The most fun character for me has been Ben’s new girlfriend, Debbie, a schoolteacher and essentially the replacement in the family for Alicia Masters. She provides that completely human voice and perspective to these bizarre lives the FF lead but which they think are perfectly ordinary.”

NEW FOES
MILLAR: “Johnny’s dating a supervillain. There’s a scene where he’s fighting this girl who is robbing a place, but she’s hot so he starts kissing her and can’t help himself. He figures she didn’t kill anybody. [Laughs] There’s also a guy named Cap who I won’t get into details about, but he’s the villain of the first four issues.”

MOVING FORWARD

MILLAR: “It’s the classic FF better than you’ve ever seen them drawn. Bryan is taking it to a new 21st century level.”

HITCH: “Everything I did on Ultimates I had to learn from scratch because I didn’t feel a natural affinity for drawing real-world stuff. I learned to draw off the weird, silly stuff. Fantastic Four works very nicely because I have all the elements of big-scale stuff and then intimate character stuff at my disposal. It’s more fun, it’s more fluid and it’s faster because it’s nowhere near as dense or saturated as Ultimates.”

DOCTOR DOOM
MILLAR: “You always think of the FF as a family structure, and to me Doctor Doom is the weird uncle. He’s the one who shows up drunk at Christmas. We’re going to bring him back, but the plan is to use him in a way that has never been utilized before.”

HITCH: “Doom really is the first member of Reed’s family, his evil half-brother. Right now, apart from several covers he’s featured on, I haven’t really gotten to delve into Doom as a character yet. We’ll absolutely be keeping the classic armor; it’s the only way to go. It’s great for what it is. I could put in more detail or make it more form fitting, but it’s Doctor Doom.”

MR. FANTASTIC
REED RICHARDS

MILLAR: “Reed is really Marvel’s George Clooney. He’s clearly the world’s smartest man, but he’s also fantastically handsome and an amazing adventurer. I really want it to be like all the girls are reading the National Enquirer and being like, ‘Oh my God, Reed and Sue’s marriage is on the rocks—wouldn’t it be great to f--- Mr. Fantastic?’”

HITCH: “Indiana Jones is an archaeologist, and on paper that sounds dull, but look what they did with him. I’m equating Reed with guys like Harrison Ford or Pierce Brosnan.”


THE INVISIBLE WOMAN
SUE RICHARDS

MILLAR: “What would it take to capture the heart of the world’s smartest man? It can’t just be that she’s beautiful. She isn’t a scientist and can’t talk with Reed about a lot of what he’s interested in, so there must be something wonderfully charismatic about her. To me, they’ve got the most interesting relationship in comics.”

HITCH: “I thought there was no reason the suit couldn’t be a little sexier to show a bit of skin, but not too much. When she’s not in costume, I like to have her with her hair down and no shoes on because she’s very happy and comfortable in the Baxter Building.”


THE HUMAN TORCH
JOHNNY STORM

MILLAR: “He’s probably the most fun character to write. He’s a male Paris Hilton. He would totally be in a club with friends one night and say, ‘Dude, we should make an album,’ spend six months as a rock star, have his record bomb, then move on to something else. He’s got a good heart, but he’s also incredibly superficial.”

HITCH: “The guy doesn’t feel cold, so I gave him short sleeves and a costume that’s more like extreme sports wear. The fire effect will be rendered several different ways by [colorist] Paul Mounts, and we’ll be doing things like using the flame as a light source.”


THE THING
BEN GRIMM

MILLAR: “In the ’60s, pre-Wolverine, he was the Marvel badass. The guy you didn’t want angry at you was Ben Grimm. But also, he’s the heart of the Fantastic Four, the guy that grounds them.”

HITCH: “I was determined to make [Ben] more socially expressive and human under there. He’s almost like a burn victim physically, but the eyes are still human, not cartoon circles. In the [‘Fantastic Four’] movies, you can’t see any of Michael Chiklis [the actor who plays the Thing] under that makeup, so he had to act with his eyes.”

Ultimates team to do UFF!

Yay! One of my favourite creative teams of the 00s is reuniting in the Ultimate universe! While they won't be doing The Ultimates anymore, they WILL be doing Ultimate Fantastic Four. Wizard has this report:

‘FANTASTIC’ NEWS
‘Ultimates’ team of Millar-Hitch tapped for ‘Fantastic Four’

By Ben Morse

Posted September 2, 2007 11:30 AM

Fantastic Four gets a truly “ultimate” creative team when the acclaimed Ultimates duo of writer Mark Millar and artist Bryan Hitch comes on board in 2008 as the new regular creators chronicling the adventures of Marvel’s First Family. On the heels of the official announcement made at Wizard World Chicago, Millar talked about taking hold of the reins on “The World’s Greatest Comic Magazine.”

WIZARD: How did you and Bryan end up taking on Fantastic Four as your first post-Ultimates gig together?

MILLAR: We were actually going to take over Astonishing X-Men and had been talking about doing a big X-Men project for awhile. But that seemed like another monumental thing [coming off Ultimates], like we were jumping into a project even bigger than [the one we just did]. [Bryan] felt kind of wary about it, and I think he fancied taking it easy for a year and then doing something a bit lighter, self-contained and fun. Fantastic Four was the one.

What is the crux of your plans for the book?

What we’re doing is really a response to what happened to the FF during Civil War. Instead of a family breaking up, [our run will be] all about a family coming together.

How long are you planning on sticking around?

I’m going to do at least 15 or 16 issues.

Given that Ultimates had some trouble shipping on time, how far ahead are you guys on this one?

We managed to do the first issue in seven weeks. Everybody thinks that Bryan draws for two hours a day or something, but he’s sitting there for like 10 hours a day. He’ll spend a day just on a panel sometimes. But we’ve both agreed there will be no delays [on Fantastic Four].

How does Fantastic Four contrast to Ultimates for you and Bryan?

In a way, [Fantastic Four] is the antithesis of Ultimates. Ultimates was all about how real you can make superheroes, but I think you’re making a big mistake if you go in that direction with Fantastic Four. They’re not called the Mundane Four or the Ordinary Four. [Laughs] You have to make it almost a cartoon where anything can happen, and no idea is too silly.



I'm crossing my fingers and hoping that the issues will be on time, or at least NOT horribly late.

Millar and "Fantastic Four" get Hitched

OoOoo...this is bloody brilliant! I'm a big fan of Bryan Hitch as well, so I'd definitely be buying this when it comes out! Or I'll probably wait for the HC to be released...since it IS Bryan Hitch, it'll be a long wait in between issues anyway, so there's no reason why I shouldn't just wait for the TPB or HC to begin with.

The preview pages do look awesome...topping Hitch's work on The Ultimates, if that's even possible. I can't wait to see what his Doom looks like!


[WWC] MILLAR AND ‘FANTASTIC FOUR’ GET HITCHED
Marvel announces the reunion of its all-star ‘Ultimates’ team for 2008

By Brian Warmoth

Posted August 11, 2007 1:30 PM

Even as Marvel reflected on its violent past year at the hands of Mark Millar in Civil War, the bombshell of Joe Quesada’s Civil War and Remembrance panel at Wizard World Chicago today was a look into Marvel’s future. The company’s editor-in-chief announced that Millar will succeed J. Michael Straczynski writing Fantastic Four in 2008, where he will be joined by his former Ultimates partner, artist Bryan Hitch.

“Mark and I are definitely doing 12 [issues] together,” Hitch explained from his home in the U.K. “It launches in January.”

Though the two A-list creators have been busily working ahead on their first arc, which is still several months from shipping, both said the plan to place them on FF unfolded quickly enough to catch even them off guard.

“Our plan was to have Ultimates in 2002 and have it finished by 2004, and then our next thing was going to be X-Men,” Millar said. “As far back as 2004 we’d been planning X-Men.”

The plan to move the pair to X-Men was firmly in place by the time Millar caught wind of other events at Marvel and began to wonder if there wasn’t a more fitting title waiting for them.

“It was weird,” the writer said. “I just assumed that [X-Men] was going to be the next project we were doing, and then I just heard a rumor that JMS was leaving FF, and I suddenly got in the zone and I just couldn’t stop thinking about FF. I just thought, ‘I’ve got to get this and I’ve got to get Bryan to draw it.’”

When Millar brought his proposition to Hitch, his longtime friend was already several steps ahead of the decision. “I wanted to do it but I didn’t think Mark would want to do it because he’d done Ultimate FF and didn’t want to repeat himself,” Hitch said.

“’It took him about 3 seconds,” Millar recalled. “He said, ‘That would be great,’ because it suddenly seemed incredibly exciting—something we hadn’t anticipated yet—so we just started talking about it every day, and we phoned up Marvel and extricated ourselves from X-Men, which they were cool about.”

THE NEW SOAP OPERA
As one of Marvel’s in-house writers with a keen eye for long-term storylines, Millar’s vision for their upcoming run was already percolating prior to their move, and FF historically was a model for the kind of scripting he wanted to do next. “What I noticed was the best runs, especially the first hundred issues or so, are one continuous soap opera,” the writer explained. “It never really ended. I liked that structure because nobody does that anymore,” he lamented. “The thing everyone does now is 6 issues, decompressed 3-act structure, you know?”

Millar wants his run with Hitch on FF to be the exception to that norm. “What really impressed me when I looked at it was that it’s kind of structured like an HBO show and each episode is very satisfying and self-contained, but it all forms one big picture and it’s made up of lots of arcs that interweave with one another, so you might have the Inhumans for a 3-parter, but then they would maybe be hanging around for a few pages and then somebody else’s story and the next one, so the story flows very organically,” he outlined.

Millar and Hitch both cite Stan Lee’s advice, describing the type of everyday cosmic drama and absurdity that permeate the Richards family’s lives. “They do all the same stuff that ordinarily you and I do, but they do it on a cosmic scale,” Hitch asserted. “They could be decorating their Christmas tree, but when you look closer it’s miniature planets with a sun on top and you could imagine interplanetary warfare breaking out over Reed Richards’ Christmas tree, and it’s perfectly normal for them.”

FOUR NEW SUITS
Hitch, who shocked and awed with his costume designs in Ultimates, steps up to the plate again, this time in the real Marvel Universe and redesigning original long-established characters. “What always struck me about looking at the stuff was that they’re obviously wearing costumes,” Hitch observed. “You can’t be drawing them with folds in their clothes, they’re environmental suits. So I took that as an idea and added a model version of an environmental suit—a wet suit, an extreme clothing thing.”

Along with the costume touch-ups, Hitch wants to update Reed’s look to jibe with the eccentric energy that first launched him and his family into space. “I think there’s been a problem with Reed sometimes where he’s this stuffy old guy who smokes a pipe,” Hitch pointed out. “And he’s not a stuffy old guy who smokes a pipe. The guy’s about 40-45, so you want somebody who’s obviously good-looking and obviously charismatic and obviously attractive to a beautiful 28-year-old woman.”

The actor Hitch envisions for the role of Mr. Fantastic reflects not only those traits, but those of the artist whose visual bombast spread throughout the title’s cast early on. “You can begin with a character who would almost be played by someone like George Clooney, who’s an attractive, wealthy, successful, charismatic older man, but at the same time he does have this kind of hairstyle that looks like it belongs on Jack Kirby,” Hitch said.

“There were points when Reed started to look an awful lot like Jack Kirby,” Hitch said. “Reed looked like Jack, and Ben talked like Jack. These were aspects of Jack Kirby.” Hitch chuckled over the topic of the team’s lone female: “What part of Jack Sue represented, I’m not quite sure.”

“There’s the angry young man side of it, and reading interviews with Kirby you always got the impression that the emotional side of Jack was in Johnny—the pent-up anger and aggression and frustration,” the artist continued. “Using the George Clooney analogy, I wanted Reed to have at least a little bit more of a modern hairstyle. You can’t change the physical aspect of the character too much, but looking at it I thought the hairstyle that Reed had was always of the time he was created, but I wasn’t really [aiming for] a very modern thing.”

Of all the characters on the team, Reed’s haircut has remained one of the least tampered with. “Sue has always changed her hair, Johnny’s always changed his hair, so why don’t we give Reed a haircut? It’s a little thing, but it makes him a little more modern and a little better-looking,” Hitch assessed.

THE VILLAINS
The threats Millar has up his sleeve for the FF in 2008 are also rooted in Millar’s amazement over Lee and Kirby’s work. “The idea of a guy coming to eat the world, there literally had never been anything like that in a comic before,” Millar said. “But if Galactus hasn’t eaten the world the last 35 times he’s appeared, you’re going to probably relax when you see him on the splash page at the end of an issue.”

Trying to re-create the spontaneity and fresh mystery of the stories FF is best known for provoked Millar to focus on inventing new threats for them to dominate his year on the series, which will also feature appearances by a handful of classic foes like Doctor Doom.

“I’ve avoided using a lot of the clichés, because I think people use them as crutches,” explained Millar. “We can exist on the exhaust fumes of [Lee and Kirby], but at the same time it wouldn’t be the FF if it didn’t have a familiar touch to it. So some of the classic characters will be kind of weaved in and out of it, but only in a way that we’ve never seen them before.”

THE JANUARY 2008 LAUNCH
This year still has plenty of weeks left before Millar and Hitch hit the racks with their new blue costumes, but the series is already well under way on paper. “I’m so far ahead on FF. I’m like teacher’s pet. [Laughs] I’m like Brian Bendis,” Millar joked. “I’ve written 10 issues already, and for me that’s unbelievable. I’ll probably finish the whole run before the first one comes out.”

And Millar’s artist is right behind him. “I started issue #1 Feb. 15,” Hitch said. “I remember that because I remember being with my wife on Valentine’s Day thinking, ‘Oh I have to work on Fantastic Four tomorrow, hurrah!’”

Listening to their plans for Fantastic Four, the energy and common wavelength Millar and Hitch share is evident. And while the cultural cache of Marvel’s first superhero family attracted them both, their personal bond cinched the deal.

“We’re almost exactly the same age, and we both grew up in Northern Britain,” Millar said. “He grew up about 90 miles from where I lived. We read exactly the same stuff growing up and there’s a weird collective between us. It’s really strange; I almost don’t have to put in panel descriptions for Bryan—Bryan just gets it.” And the ease and understanding fostered by that relationship may underline everything else behind their latest announcement.

“There’s an intuitive thing going on between us that neither of us feels with other creators or collaborators,” Millar said. “It feels great.”