Mark Millar is giving Stan Lee a run for his money in terms of sheer number of irons in the fire. KICK-ASS hasn’t even been released yet and he’s already talking his own directorial debut and the prospects of his upcoming project with Leinil Francis Yu. And lest we forget that NEMESIS is still up in the mix as well.

Hear it from the man himself in his recent interview at MTV at SXSW… 

For those of you can’t view the video, here’s a transcript of what he said.

"[KICK-ASS director Matthew Vaughn] and I are going to do two new projects, and they'll be quite interesting for people who are looking for us to get together and do a big, widescreen superhero picture… This is an adaptation of a book that Leinil Francis Yu and I are doing. It will be out in September as well. I can't divulge the name yet. I don't want it to get lost in the 'Kick-Ass' publicity, but this will be the next thing after 'Kick-Ass.' Nobody knows any of the content yet. Even the publishers don't know. We're keeping it quiet and we're walking on the project independently. I think we've just had a little taste of how cool it is — instead of doing other people's characters and characters that have been around 40 or 70 years — to create something for this generation. There's a gap in the market. It's been a long time since someone created a new superhero. Already we have directors lining up for 'Nemesis,' the book that's out in a couple of weeks' time. It's very exciting. It must be how Stan [Lee] felt, I suppose, back in the early '60s. He's creating all these books and luckily people are liking them."

He’s echoing sentiments Erik Larsen expressed last week in my interview with him. As a creator, I’m definitely rooting for Millar’s success with all his properties and the precedents they can potentially set in the business. I thoroughly agree with him about new characters and titles tapping a lot more directly into the zeitgeist. KICK-ASS, itself, speaks to the “You Tube” generation of having a lot of crazy individuals getting in front of the public with some truly brazen, and probably too dangerous, stunts that beget an entire community of copycats. Like he said, it’s more thrilling to see new creations rolling out with the same kind of spirit of invention we saw in the Silver Age.

It’ll be good to see Yu on another creator-owned property, as it’s been too long since we’ve seen him drawing his own characters.  He did that World War II romp HIGH ROADS with Scott Lobdell about ten years ago and the cyberpunk Yakuza saga SILENT DRAGON with Andy Diggle about five years back, so this has been too long coming.  We’ve still yet to see Millar’s answer to the question of “What if Batman was the Joker?” in NEMESIS with Scott McNiven, of course, so I’ll be curious to see if this will be another super-hero title or something with a more loosely-derived “superhero sensibility.”

-- Tom Pinchuk is the writer of UNIMAGINABLE for Arcana Comics and HYBRID BASTARDS! for Archaia Comics.   Watch out for the HYBRID BASTARDS! hardcover collection this March - - available for pre-order now on Amazon.com.

I think this is too early for this to become a movie. The first comic did not come out yet to see how well its going to do first in the comic medium. I was thinking of getting this series because I like the idea of a white costumed psychopath that resembles both batman and the joker, but its early for a movie thou. 

He should wait alittle longer, not every comic book makes good films.

seriously when is the first issue of Nemesis coming out? Every website I go there is a different release date and it's beginning to piss me off having to keep asking the nice guy at my comic book shop over and over again if he's got it in. Get the damn thing out already!!!

no clue how to feel about this. like eserrano, i havent seen Kick-Ass!. also havent read Nemesis.
also havent seen Wanted, though from what ive heard it was stale and only ended up loosely based.
 
as for the notion here about it being to early, no its not. Kick-Ass! was done the exact same way.
i think the comic was only two or three issues deep when they started the film. right now Hollywood
is looking over comics big time, and looking for stories. any current writer will tell you they are doing there best to shove as many storylines out there and way in advance as it is just with the hopes they will grab Hollywoods attention (and sorry to my fellow comci fans, but id rather sell something to 50,000+ people
in one day rather than 20,000 over a month, and make alot less money and fanbase, whereas a movie is worldwide. just the way it is. there is an economic crisis at hand that hits comcis as well right now)
fact of the matter as well is alot of comic scripts and outlines are written long before we actually even see the comic. dont you remember hearing about Millars new project almsot a year ago? i do. lastly if Hollywood pays me for a movie based on my work, man, im not going to say no no matter what. the fans will have to live with it. if they dont like it thats bad but theyll live, and they can still enjoy the comic (and if thats not present their opinion doesnt really matter to me, my work isnt for them in that case). eitherway
i stand to grab a larger viewing audiance than the comic. i can guarentee anyone for example that the amount of fans of the Kick-Ass! movie thast there will be will not only outnumber the amount of people that read the comic in large volumes, but most of those people likely wont be comic readers at all. fanservice is really just courtesy to us, and we should be thankful in ways that they even try to do it, since the films actually arent for just the fanbase, and they have a larger group of people to meet the dem,ands of, most specifically, sad as it is but the way it is, the shareholders.