Famed comic book writer, Mark Miller sat down with Jim
Viscardi for the Jim's Let's Talk podcast, and spoke about his early life, the
difficulty he had to break into the industry, his success in movies, and
comics. The comic portion of Millar's career took center stage, when he
revealed that the original pitch for Marvel's groundbreaking Civil War was 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…
This storyline might sound familiar to readers of the
current X-Men title, where Professor X is dead and Wolverine and Cyclops, each
lead their own group. (Un)fortunately Millar's concept never took off, but at a
Marvel's writers retreat Millar, spoke with Newsarama, and said that he
expressed his concerns over the project not being made with current X-Men
writer Brian Michael Bendis.
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?”.
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