The Big Smoke

Buy this title! Drop whatever you’re doing and just go out and buy it.

I know it hasn’t been that long since I last raved about The Fantastic Four, but damn, the series is awesome.

A lot of comic book writers struggle to make earth-shattering events seem earth-shattering, but Mark Millar has always been able to present large-scale action in believable ways. It’s a gift that made him the perfect choice to take over writing The Authority when Warren Ellis left the title.

With The Ultimates, Millar developed the epic approach to storytelling he used in The Authority and it became deliberately cinematic. Millar’s writing style combined with Bryan Hitch’s naturalistic art produces a sort of comic book hybrid. It’s so easy to imagine the pages transferred to the big screen.

Most comic books require a massive suspension of disbelief. Those of us who read comics regularly are able to suspend disbelief without even thinking about it. When we open a DC or Marvel comic, we enter a different universe – a universe where lots of crazy things are the norm. This is why the translation from comic to film is often quite painful.

With that in mind, I can’t stress enough how refreshing Millar’s approach to comics is. I honestly believe it has to be the future of writing about superheroes, because it allows you to take them more seriously outside of the the sphere of comics.