Mark Millar's big crossover series, Big Game, is a sequel to Wanted.
CBR can exclusively reveal brand-new cover art for the first two issues of Big Game, a new crossover miniseries launching in July 2023 that's written by Millar and illustrated by Pepe Larraz. Larraz's Big Game covers feature not only Nemesis but also Wesley, Fox and the Fraternity from Wanted (a series that launched in Dec. 2003 that was written by Millar and illustrated by JG Jones), while Jones' Big Game #1 variant also stars Wesley and Fox.
The Fraternity -- a powerful organization of dangerous, highly-skilled assassins -- made their official return at the end of Nemesis: Reloaded #5 (by Millar, Jorge Jiménez, Giovanna Niro and Clem Robins), which released on May 10, 2023. Millar exclusively told CBR about his reasoning for revisiting Wanted and bringing the characters into Big Game, "This year is the 20th anniversary of Millarworld, which kicked off in December 2003 with Wanted. I had absolutely no idea this would be an Angelina movie four years later or a big company we would sell to Netflix. I was just writing my first creator-owned comic book on the advice of Stan Lee, who said he thought I'd be pretty good at it. I always had an idea for a sequel, but I wanted to use all the characters we'd been building up over our 20-plus franchises. I never thought it would be possible as they were all at different studios and owned by different people, but now everything is in-house at Netflix it's the perfect time to do it. Wanted and Big Game are perfect compliments to one another, revisiting these characters after 20 years where they aged in real-time."
Big Game Brings All of Millarworld's Franchises Together
The synopsis for Big Game #1 reads, "MINISERIES PREMIERE. The comics event of the summer is here! Okay this is so top secret we can't even show you the main cover because it spoils something MASSIVE. Just trust us when we say that this is going to be the comic book event of 2023-and it's NOT what you're expecting. Does the crossover really go that wide? Yes it does. BIG GAME pulls together KICK-ASS KINGSMAN NEMESIS THE MAGIC ORDER and ALL the Millarworld franchises in one special event. This must be ordered like CRAZY!"
Millar told CBR, "Wanted was about a guy who finds out that superheroes and supervillains were real and when the supervillains took over the world they made us forget the heroes ever existed. The sequel, Big Game, is about those same villains watching the heroes re-emerge like weeds again and deciding it's time to nip this in the bud. We only remember the original heroes though movies and comic books and the first of this new wave of heroes to emerge was Kick-Ass.
"Dave Lizewski was so obsessed with comic books he started dressing up and trying to fight crime. But since then probability had bent and new heroes are emerging all the time. We have Hit-Girl, The Ambassadors, The Chrononauts, the Kingsman organization, guys coming back from space like Duke McQueen and so on. As you saw at the end of Nemesis: Reloaded, there are a lot of super-people for Wesley and Nemesis to go out there and destroy and that's exactly where Big Game kicks off in July. We've never crossed these characters over in 20 years so this feels like Secret Wars or Crisis. It feels like one of the genuinely SPECIAL summer events."
Big Game releases on July 19, 2023, from Millarworld and Image Comics.
Source: Millarworld