MARK MILLAR
1 Captain America’s Stark armor. Cap’s been through some weird stuff in his career. He fought Hitler, got frozen in ice, and briefly became a werewolf. But the thing that really sticks in my head as the weirdest Captain America idea has to be the Stark armor he was given in the ’90s. It’s not that the idea was especially ridiculous. He’d been poisoned by his own supersoldier serum and immobilized in a hospital bed, prompting his dear friend Tony Stark to build him a cybernetic suit that would allow him to keep fighting crime. But the fact that this suit that lets the crippled walk again has been retired to Stark’s personal collection is beside the point. The thing that makes this weird for me is that Cap still carried a shield despite wearing bulletproof armor. What the #@*&?
2 Supermobile. The weirdest moments in comics always seem to come when superheroes lose their powers and need some kind of technical assistance. Spider-Man got the Spider-Mobile under such circumstances back in the ’70s. The Supermobile had buttons for heat vision, microscopic vision, and even superbreath. And just in case the man needed to beat the shit out of someone, there were two big fists at the front, literally intended for pounding people. As a kid, I had no idea that these storylines were crude tie-ins with toys being released and the concepts forced upon the otherwise brilliant creative teams. We didn’t get the toys here in Scotland and so it just seemed like, very briefly, the writers and artists had lost their minds.
3 Green Lantern as a toy salesman. Spider-Man is a photojournalist and Daredevil is a lawyer. But, really, who does the same job their entire life, never mind wearing the same blue suit and red-striped tie Clark Kent has been wearing since about 1945? In real life, we change jobs all the time and some of them are crap. I like the fact that as well as being a cool, Chuck Yeager–style test pilot, Hal Jordan has been a truck driver, insurance adjuster, and toy salesman. I guarantee that if he had been a toy salesman in the Ryan Reynolds movie it would have made more money than Harry Potter and sucked exactly 18 percent less.
4 The Spider-Man/Power Pack Child Abuse Special. Nothing could possibly match the madness of the now-legendary Marvel sex abuse special, paid for by a children’s charity in a bid to reach victims of child sex abuse. This comic was a master class in how to have the best of intentions and yet somehow turn it into something schoolboys would read aloud in class to impress their friends. The Power Pack segment featured an attractive babysitter trying to touch up a boy with the line “You know what you have to do if you want to see Star Wars,” a piece of dialogue my friends and I still use in the pub at least once a week to this day. But the most insane moment surely belongs to Spider-Man and his disclosure to a young boy that he was nipped by a creepy teenage neighbor long before any radioactive spiders got their teeth into him. Flashback to an inexplicably white-haired boy named Snowy, who interrupts a game of pool with some porn mags, suggesting he and young Parker touch each other “like the people are touching each other in the magazines.” It’s bona fide bonkers and how anyone cleared this storyline is a mystery beyond even the pyramids. Surely, it’s only a matter of time before Marvel brings him back as a new villain in The Amazing Spider-Man. The Buggernaut, anyone?
5 Lex Luthor beating Superbaby to death. Superman’s probably had more “What the %$#*?” moments than any other character in history. Before you and I were born, Red Kryponite had turned him into King Kong, an insect god, a small, mobile rock formation, and the former senator Jesse Helms (only one of these facts is made up). In the ’90s, they made him fat and gave him a ponytail. But surely the biggest WTF moment in comic book history is Action Comics #466 and Lex Luthor’s brilliant plan to finally destroy his hated enemy. Frustrated at not being able to beat Superman, Batman, and the Flash as adults, he turns them all into children…and beats them to death with a power glove. Just in case his bare fists weren’t enough against the superbabies. This was quite possibly the first DC comic anyone ever bought me and I’m still haunted by the image of Batman and the Flash as dead toddlers among wreckage, Superbaby screaming as Luthor laughs and donkey-punches him across the back of the head. It’s the most messed-up idea for a story in the history of the medium and, reading it at six years old, I was hooked for life.
If you want to be impressed, just check out what Mark Millar has been up to in just the current century: The Authority, The Ultimates, Marvel Knights: Spider-Man, Ultimate Fantastic Four, Civil War, Wanted, and Kick-Ass. That’s not even counting his new hits like Nemesis and Superior, or his work on Wolverine: Old Man Logan and Wolverine: Enemy of the State, or his acclaimed runs early in his career on Superman Adventures and Swamp Thing.