Mark Millar, MBE, is a Scottish comics writer who was born on Christmas Eve in 1969 and is not yet dead. He has four brothers, a sister and a website, and claims that Alan Moore and Frank Miller are "my Mum and Dad." Millar is a practising Catholic who as a child was influenced by Spider-Man to draw a spider-web on his face with indelible pen, which his parents were unable to scrub off before his Holy Communion photo (although if they really were Alan Moore and Frank Miller it's hard to see why they'd want to).
His first work in the medium was writing Saviour with Daniel Vallely, published by Trident, while he was at secondary school. He then went to Glasgow University to study politics and economics, dropping out when he ran out of money. Millar is probably best known for his work for DC/Vertigo and Marvel, but he has also written extensively for 2000 AD. This is odd, because he says that "I hated 2000 AD growing up. It just seemed too dirty and dangerous to me. 2000 AD was the opposite of what drew me to comics so it didn't appeal to me as a teenager. I had no idea what the characters were about or even really the tone of the book until about halfway through my couple of years there."1
Millar's scripts include four episodes of Tharg's Future Shocks, Silo, Red Razors, Judge Dredd (his Dredd was a total jerk who broke someone's nose because they offered him a Christmas kiss), Tales from Beyond Science, Tharg's Terror Tales, Spider (before the publishers found out they didn't own the rights to the character), Rogue Trooper, Purgatory, Maniac 5, Canon Fodder, The Grudge-Father, Babe Race 2000 and Janus: Psi-Division. He also wrote the Judge Dredd Newspaper Strip in the Daily Star for a time.
Grant Morrison and Millar co-created the character of Big Dave. Dave has been described as "controversial," "infamous" and "puerile rubbish," but he isn't half as controversial as Millar's reboot of Robo-Hunter, which left some people doubting if he'd read the original story. Oh, and that reboot, described by Alan Grant as "the abomination" and "a pile of crap,"2 also contained the apparently deeply homophobic character Ducky Leatherpants, whom Millar created. It's unlikely we'll be seeing a reprint collection anytime soon.
In 2015 on Twitter, Mark Millar had this to say about his Robo-Hunter reboot: "This is like how Martin Clunes feels when he sees his 1980s Doctor Who appearance. Those lovely editors were too kind to me... That said, it was amazing to have the work and I don't think I've worked with nicer folk since. Awesome, very forgiving guys."
Millar has also worked for Crisis, Revolver and Sonic the Comic. He founded a British comics magazine called CLiNT,apparently in the deluded belief that this title was funny. Allegedly, Millar's favourite food is human flesh and chips, his favourite obsession is Kirsty Wark ("the thinking man's crumpet"), and he got into comics by joining the wrong queue at the job centre.3 In 2000 AD prog 725 Tharg described him as "a deeply demented, twisted mind" and "a pathetically disabled psychopath."
In London in 2011 Millar helped to set two Guinness World Records, 'Fastest Production of a Comic Book' and 'Most Contributors to a Comic Book'.4
1Thrill-Power Unleashed by David Bishop.
2Ibid.
32000 AD.
4Along with artists David Baillie, Douglas Braithwaite, Ian Churchill, Oliver Coipel, Duncan Fegredo, Simon Furman, Dave Gibbons, David Lafuente, Jock, John McCrea, Sean Phillips, Frank Quitely, John Romita Jr., Liam Sharp and Leinil Francis Yu.