Is Millarworld's creator the Tarantino of comics?

With the recent sale of the Millarworld imprint to Netflix, comic book writer Mark Millar has fully stepped into the big leagues as a truly significant film and TV player.

In the statement announcing the acquisition, Netflix's chief creative officer Ted Sarandos described Millarworld founder Mark Millar as “as close as you can get to a modern day Stan Lee."

The parallels here are pretty straightforward: Both Lee and Millar come from the writing side of the comics business, and they've both had a hand in creating popular comics characters who have gone on to even greater success when adapted for the silver screen. Furthermore, with Disney possibly pulling its product from Netflix in favor of its own as-yet unannounced rival streaming platform, it is easy to see why it would be so tempting a comparison. Quite reasonably, Netflix want to have a suite of popular comics-based intellectual properties that it owns, and it wants them to be of equivalent longevity, prestige and value as those co-created by Stan "The Man" Lee back in the 1960s.

But it does seem that comparison misses a key component of Millar's appeal. It is not so much that he has created, along with his various artistic collaborators, a string of new intellectual properties – ones that have proven successful at both the comic book store and the box office. It's more that he's generated a body of work that is positively marinated in his love for the conventions and lore of comics themselves, and superhero comics in particular.

In this manner, Millar's output would seem to have more in common with the work of that other follower of genre fiction, Quentin Tarantino.

Tarantino is no stranger to comics himself, of course; the central crime boss in his debut feature Reservoir Dogs is even described by Tim Roth's character as looking like The Thing from The Fantastic Four - but his principal passion focuses on exploitation cinema more than the more broad pulp entertainment world.

Drawing from his background as video rental clerk and his own fannish enthusiasm, Tarantino established early in his career a reputation for crafting films that heavily referenced the exploitation genre alongside various other elements of popular culture.

There are a whole heap of articles to be found across the web cataloging the myriad film references made in various Tarantino films; the writer/director has freely admitted in the past, "I steal from every movie I see." The aforementioned Reservoir Dogs alone borrows the criminals' colorful codenames from the 1974 hijacking exploitation thriller The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, while Pam Grier, star of a string of '70s blaxploitation films, is mentioned prominently in a piece of dialogue. Grier would go on to star in Jackie Brown, Tarantino's 1997 adaptation of the Elmore Leonard novel Rum Punch.

Aside from his love of, and continental references to, film and a wide range of pop culture, Tarantino's most prominent motif is probably his taste for the excess associated with exploitation cinema. Indeed, his films wear their abrasiveness with pride. The torture scene in Reservoir Dogs dares the audience to keep tapping their toes to Stealer's Wheel while even the camera's unblinking gaze shifts away from Mr Bonde's ear-hacking blade. From the bondage rape scene in Pulp Fiction, to the scalpings in Kill Bill and Inglorious Basterds, Tarantino's exploitation instinct is to shock and ensure his audiences don't get too comfortable.

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Like Tarantino, Millar Enjoys his Success - and Excess

Likewise, Millar has repeatedly demonstrated a similar appetite for all things over-the-top throughout his career. Initially, this demonstrated itself as a talent for slightly irreverent re-invention, recasting Superman, the very epitome of truth, justice and the American way, as a Soviet superhero in Red Son, or reimagining The Avengers as one-note joke villains in The Authority. And years before the advent of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, relying heavily on the detailed art collaborator Bryan Hitch, Millar reworked "Earth's Mightiest Heroes" as widescreen blockbuster action heroes in The Ultimates.

When Millar moved on to crafting his own superheroic and supervillainous creations under his own Millarworld banner, placing the various series with different publishers, he pushed his ideas even further. Tapping into a similar vein of excess as Tarantino, many of Millar's original creations, from Kick Ass to Nemesis, combine extreme violence, not a little bit of vulgarity, and a vicious, often cruel humor. This is particularly present in the case of Fuckwit, a superhero clone with Down syndrome in Wanted, who winds up as a member of the supervillain group The Fraternity.

According to Millar himself, Marvel Entertainment President Dan Buckley once described him as “the master of the stupidly simple idea," and nowhere an this be seen better than in Nemesis. Created with artist Steve McNiven, the story was pitched as "What if Batman was the Joker?" Or, as Millar himself put it in an interview with CBR, "What if Batman was a total cunt?"

Outside of the stylistic similarities of their respective creative oeuvres, Millar and Tarantino also share a healthy talent for self-promotion, working hard to build their own personal brand identities to help promote their own creative endeavors. Millar, however, through his Millarworld forums has probably maintained a closer active connection to his own fanbase.

A further area of commonality between the two creators is their commitment to working with a consistent pool of talent. Tarantino is widely credited with breathing new life into John Travolta's acting career through his role in Pulp Fiction, a film that also significantly lifted the profile of Samuel L. Jackson. Indeed, Jackson and fellow Pulp Fiction alumnus Uma Thurman have become part of a consistent crew of A-list talent that has followed Tarantino from project to project. Millar has achieved something similar through his commitment to creative rights, sharing ownership for each of his Millarworld series, including film rights, 50-50 with its respective artist, people with whom he has often worked with on multiple projects throughout the years.

From Netflix's perspective, the most important way in which Millar is like Tarantino is that he is a known quantity with significant track records of success behind him. This isn't limited to making critically acclaimed and financially successful comics, but in crafting narratives and intellectual properties that Netflix can now own outright. Contrast this with Netflix's various Marvel superhero series, which the streaming service co-developed and thus only shares a portion of the profits they generate.

With Jupiter’s Legacy, Millar's collaboration with Frank Quietly now fully serialized and just begging for adaptation as a TV series, and a raft of "new projects" apparently underway, it seems Netflix audiences will soon get to further explore Millar's passion for all manner of superhero stories played out across a number of new series. What remains to be seen is the extent to which Millar's continued take on the form, like Tarantino's approach to exploitation cinema, will become an adjective for fans and critics alike in the future.