In this day and age of endless streaming content, it may seem as though new series on Netflix appear by magic. But when the incoming wave of comics-based shows arrive on the giant media service, it'll be because of what Mark Millar and his Millarworld team are doing behind the curtain.

And that journey begins in June with The Magic Order.

As the first Image-published Millarworld series since the imprint became a Netflix subsidiary, the comic also marks the first collaboration between Millar and the art team of Olivier Coipel and colorist Dave Stewart. To top it all off, The Magic Order's story of a hidden family of magicians keeping acient hellish threats at bay launches what the writer calls "Phase Two" of his own ever-expanding story universe.

RELATED: Meet Millar & Coipel’s The Magic Order in This Exclusive Preview

CBR spoke with Millar ahead of The Magic Order's release, and aside from sharing an exclusive first preview, the writer opened up about how Netflix has changed his creative process, the ways in which both Shakespeare and modern fantasy franchises have influenced the new book's outlook and what Millarworld series from Chrononauts to Empress may make it to your TV first or whether they'll crossover in comics instead.

CBR: The word "magic" has a lot of possibilities, especially when it comes to comics. There's the wonky field of superhero magic stories like the Doctors Strange or Fate and also more full-on fantasy stuff. But I get the impression the roots of The Magic Order are in the kind of classic Houdini-style prestidigitation. What made that world an interesting story platform for you?

Mark Millar: I love jumping around genres. Civil War and Kick-Ass are superheroes. Kingsman is spies. Chrononauts is sci-fi. Reborn fantasy. This is my magic project. I hesitate to say horror because it’s not got that sudden fright or gore tropes in the comic or our eventual show. It’s more like for the kids who enjoyed something like Harry Potter or that kind of genre growing up now having something that appeals to their adult sensibilities.

Tonally, it’s actually closer to The Sopranos in that it’s about a patriarch in an underworld family and his concerns about his children. King Lear is the basic structure, if that doesn’t sound too pompous, but with magic wands. And it’s dirty. It opens with a shagging scene, so you immediately know this isn’t Hogwarts.

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Of course, one element you've spoken about with this series is the "world behind the world" idea. This series takes place in a version of our reality, but there's crazy stuff going on under the surface that most people don't see. What's your "in" to that part of the series? Do we have an outsider character discovering this world, or would you rather start us off on the inside and explain it as you go?

Traditionally, there’s a Neo or a Luke Skywalker when you’re having a new world explained to you, someone you identify with and whose journey you can relate to. This is a little different because it starts when we’re already deep into it. The idea is that all those myths and monsters we heard about as kids were real, but they were pushed back into the darkness a thousand years ago. Now we’ve cemented over all the madness with cities and we live these lovely peaceful lives where nobody’s ever really seen a ghost, and these guys are the reason why. They do day jobs just like we do, but when there’s a problem they’re called together to take care of it. We’ve got three leads, the three children of the man who runs the Magic Order, and the one we identify most with I guess is the guy who’s turned his back on it and become a complete norm. He and his wife are just living a regular life for a very big reason we find out about in the first issue.

RELATED: Mark Millar’s First Netflix Comic Is a Fantasy Crime Series With Olivier Coipel

Stick with that family. The first evocative cover from Olivier shows off a quartet of characters who look like they're living pretty separate lives: classic stage magician, working class stiff, slick Rick and a street punk. What can you tell us about each these four and where they stand with each other as the story opens?

King Lear is obviously about an old man who’s worried about his kingdom and who among his three daughters is going to keep the shit together: Cordelia, Regan and Goneril. Our lead here, Moonstone the Magnificent, is a stage magician with three kids, and he likewise frets about their suitability to protect the world when he’s gone. They’re all very real people here in the real world with their own individual concerns. Regan is the most likely, but is a hot-head. Cordelia wants to please her father, but she’s a drug-user and an alcoholic who can always be counted on to make the wrong choices. Gabriel is the boy most likely to. He’s the Michael Corleone. But he isn’t interested. He walks away, and this is all part of a much bigger plot and a war that’s been going on in the shadows while we’re reading about the Kardashians or tweeting jokes about Trump.

With Olivier Coipel, you've got a collaborator who I'm shocked hasn't done more original work outside of the big two. And he's an artist you haven't previously paired with on a big series. What made him the right visual partner for this particular pitch? What was the big ask you had of him in designing the world and drawing the book itself?

Olivier is hands down the best artist working in comics right now. At any company. I’ve always admired him and been chasing him for years, but you’ve read the first couple of issues and seen the level he’s working at here. This isn’t hyperbole. Look at the work previewed on these pages. It’s just jaw-dropping. We created this internally with designers and a character design bible as we do with all the Netflix projects, but he’s just taken it to levels we couldn’t have imagined. He’s God, plain and simple.

Our numbers for this have exceeded even Jupiter’s Legacy, which came in just under 140,000 with a couple printings back in 2012. We’ve exceeded that already and FOC isn’t even until Monday so it’s BY FAR the best numbers ever on a Millarworld book. Netflix has a Hell of a launch here, and 99.9% of that is down to Olivier, who’s just a superstar. I love him.

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Obviously, this book stands apart just as the first Millarworld production with Netflix. Has the fact that you're doing this as part of their team changed your approach at all? Do you either view The Magic Order as the first in a new phase of comic storytelling, or are there even ways in which you can change what you do knowing there's a massive TV production pipeline chomping at the bit for the material?

Well, this is honestly the complete opposite of what I used to do. I left Marvel to start Millarworld, and we created comics with new characters, and the hope was we optioned and sold these projects to studios and gave the characters the steroid boost of a hundred million dollar movie ad. Kick-Ass was the perfect example. We sold one million book worldwide with Kick-Ass, which is insane, and the movie was an enormous factor in that.

With Netflix, I create these franchises in-house. After we sold the company and all the artists got very rich and are now sunning themselves on the Costa Del Sol, I signed up to become an executive at the company and create new projects which we’ll do as movies and TV shows. We look at all of these and work out if they’re best as movies or TV shows and what talent we want to attach to them. But I’m a comic-guy to my bone-marrow so I made sure I still get to do comics too, carving out a deal where I can translate my ideas into comics so I can still have something great for my shelves. Netflix were cool with this as long as I agreed to only work with the cream of the cream – the very best – so the brand stayed strong and this obviously appealed to me.

So I’ll still be doing three or four comics a year and poaching the greatest talent for these books. We signed up to the new deal in August when my wife and I went on staff, and I’ve created six franchises that time so far, three of which we’re doing as comics, too. The rest work better as TV shows or movies.

I know it's early in the game, but what can you say about the status of Millarworld Netflix projects for streaming? Are you guys looking to take one particular series out the gate first, or is it a much wider approach from the very jump?

I always liken Netflix to Hollywood in the '20s. There’s just so much energy and enthusiasm, and nobody’s scared yet. We’ve got over one thousand hours of original material to do this year, and even more next year. Compare that to the 25 hours on average a studio does. It’s mind-blowing. So we’re actually developing six different franchises right now, four from the sale and two new ones, and they’ll come out depending on schedules. There’s writers on screenplay at the moment for two, and directors we’re interviewing, but it really all depends when the people we want are available to shoot. It’s all about getting the right talent on things, but it’s moving so fast. This first year is the lull before the storm, like the sea going back before a tidal wave hits. It's incredibly exciting. My first real job.

To wrap it with the comics first and foremost, I saw the enterprising fan on Twitter who has been connecting the dots on the way all your creator-owned titles have fit together over the years. Surely, a lot of these characters don't fit together just in terms of the tone of each project, and I know some things are spread out a bit more since the Netflix deal. But overall, do you ever think about bigger story possibilities for Millarworld as a universe? Could there ever be a Millarworld event series?

They really do all fit together and it would really be fun to get them all together at some point too. But it’s basically very simple. They all take place here in the real world, and that’s that. They’re all here in a world like we inhabit, with the exception of Jupiter’s Legacy and Supercrooks, which are just entertainment. But the Chrononaut, Kick-Ass, Huck, etc. are all here and so are the Magic Order. I don’t think it’s wise to have them all meet anytime soon, though. Instead, I’d like to introduce them and maybe have them meet in pairs so everybody gets great screen time.

Empress is set on Earth 65 million years ago so that seems a great Chrononauts adventure. Nemesis fighting Hit-Girl would be great. There’s loads of fun stuff we can do. The plans are immense, and The Magic Order is where our Phase Two begins. Jump in on the ground level. This is the next ten years of what you’re going to be obsessed with.