Mark Millar Nemesis Chat

Nemesis, I have to be careful here at one point because we can be vaguely -- with this property, the ideas. I mentioned the world’s smartest man, you know he’s like a brilliant martial arts expert. He’s traveled the world learning all these amazing martial arts skills, I also think he’s a brilliant detective, an amazing chemist, you know, can do anything basically and he’s also a billionaire playboy in his private life. But instead of being a good game, he’s actually like -- so instead of protecting us, he is like -- attacking them every night and the cops are the only thing that stands in their way. And every year what he does is he terrorizes one setting somewhere in the world and goes up against their best cop for 20 of these and then kills them at exactly the same time at the end of this and it’s just a tough challenge to them because he’s so good.

And he will be off in Tokyo where he takes on Tokyo’s best cop and kills him in the opening sequence and then he has his safe cell in Washington and he comes and he’s got a great playground there because he terrorizes, he’s got the White House, you know The Pentagon is just outside of Washington and everything and he’s got all these amazing statues he can blow up and everything all over the place. He’s got Washington’s chief of police that he’s having a cat and mouse game with for 28 years and that’s the format of it, kind of like seven with superheroes.

I like stuff about villains and it’s gunny I watch Goodfellas again the other night for the first time in a few years and I was amazed there has been so many superhero movies and a lot of super villain movies because sometimes -- Heath Ledger as The Joker and outshines Batman, Jack Nicholson is The Joker, outshone Batman and some things -- that one was the most interesting in a superhero story because -- he’s a bit more three-dimensional, he’s a bit funnier and they just thought, some things that would be quite nice to flatter and tell the story from the -- point of view. And Goodfellas and The Godfather, these are perfect examples even though the bad guy, you know the -- interest and they can go up to stuff that’s a bit more fun to watch.

His motivation will be partly a surprise within the comic but the very simple idea is he’s so smart, so brilliant that he just likes the idea of the challenge. You know -- somebody after that he looks for people who is could to see potentially, the chief of police or the head of homeland security, whatever and whatever country that he’s going to and then just tries to get a challenge, like the game of chess for four weeks in a country, one month a year he does it and the rest of the year he goes on holiday and has all his friends and then for four weeks every year he challenges himself because he’s -- to the limit, takes on 10,000 cops and steals as much as he can.

No he doesn’t have superpowers but he does like Batman and James Bond kind of stuff so he’s got amazing cars, he’s got fantastic gadgets, planes, all the stuff a billionaire would have. If he decided to be a bad guy, like if you can imagine -- Bill Gates getting buffed up and taking on -- he’s got six identities, all the trappings of a superhero, you get his origin, you have his love interest, you have all these things that you just see on a superhero story but it’s reversed and you get in the point of a villain instead. The -- draws Steve McNiven and Steve and I did a thing called Civil War together about three years ago and we did a Wolverine story called Old Man Logan last year and we’re really lucky, both ended up massive sales.