Mark Millar, the famed comic book writer behind Kick-Ass, Superman: Red Son, Old Man Logan and more, sat down for a two-hour talk with Jim Viscardi for Jim's Let's Talk podcast. They spoke of his early life, his troubles breaking into the industry and his entertainment success, but the most interesting part of the podcast centred around Millar's Civil War. The groundbreaking 2006 event involved most of the Marvel Universe, but the writer's original pitch had the concept as an X-Men storyline with artist Bryan Hitch.
At the time it was going to be something quite different, like, in 2004 I pitched Marvel a thing called X-Men: Civil War, a couple of years before Civil War, it was just going to involve the X-Men, and my idea was to take the mutant split between Charles and Erik forward one generation, like Bryan Hitch was going to do it, we were going to follow the Ultimates with this, we thought for forty years they’d been doing the same story in X-Men with Charles and Erik, well to have two best friends falling out who we never quite saw at the time falling out isn’t as powerful as two guys now falling out, my idea was Professor X dies at the hands of humans, that causes a massive split between Wolverine and Cyclops, and Cyclops goes off and becomes the Magneto essentially and half of the X-Men go with him and become the new Brotherhood of Evil Mutants. Bryan started doing designs but Bryan is ten times slower than he always thinks, Bryan says “I’m going to have Ultimates finished in six months” and three years later still going on shelved never got around to doing it…
That might sound pretty familiar to readers of current X-Men books, where Charles Xavier is dead, and Wolverine and Cyclops leading their own mutant factions after Avengers vs. X-Men. Millar's project never culminated as Hitch was falling behind on The Ultimates, but the concept did resurface at a Marvel writers retreat. Bleeding Cool managed to find a snippet of Millar's deleted interview with Newsarama in 2006, where he discussed the concept with current X-writer Brian Michael Bendis at that retreat.
That night, we all went out and again me and Bri quietly expressed our concerns that the project they were talking about was a good story, but didn’t feel like a crossover. It just didn’t feel big enough. So next morning, we’re heading out shopping and BB looks kind of excited, saying he thinks we should do something totally different. He suggests we do something he’d been setting up a little in New Avengers and Secret Wars with a Superhuman Registration. He had this notion of S.H.I.E.L.D. hunting the heroes and making them all give up their secret IDs for the S.H.I.E.L.D. database. I thought this was great and Brian pitched it at the meeting. Everybody liked it, but my only concern was that S.H.I.E.L.D. had been over-used lately (especially Nick Fury) and suggested we make it heroes versus heroes.
I was actually pinching from the concept Bryan Hitch and I had been developing (the original title of which was “Civil War”) and brought this ‘brother versus brother’ idea into the mix. People were getting more and more excited as we all started talking, guessing who’d take who’s side and so on. But Jeph Loeb really crystallized it all when he stood up and said “Who’s Side Are You On?”.
As Bleeding Cool puts it, "how much you believe is up to you."
Check out the full Jim's Let's Talk podcast below.