Big Game #1

[cyberghostface]

"Wanted is the cornerstone of what I guess is a universe of titles, but it's also actually our world we live in now. The big plot point of Wanted, the basic concept, is that all the superheroes we read about or see in movies were real until 1986, and our obsession with them is just humanity trying to remember what was taken from us when the supervillains beat them and made us forget their existence. The villains all slipped out of their costumes and into regular clothes, and now they engineer the wars and the famines and all the things they use to control us, ruling the world from behind their puppet politicians.

But my plan over these years was that, like weeds, the heroes would start to come back in new and unexpected ways. Dave Lizewski's Kick-Ass was the first, inspired by the heroes he didn't even know were real, and this kicked off a whole chain of these guys like the Chrononauts, the Night Club, and most recently, the Ambassadors. It's all a big grand 50-volume plan with this very definitive and special story that pulls it all together." -- Mark Millar

Comments

[beyondthefringe]

I dunno, Mark. I've always felt like a lot of these titles were intentionally designed to be stand-alones (and more importantly to sell the movie rights to) and this Grand Plan is a little... loose around the edges.

Kick-Ass sparking a wave of "Real world" superheroes while Kingsmen do spy stuff around the edges, while there's this whole all-powerful fraternity of secret super-villains lurking around the edges and snickering to themselves, even as you get the completely wacky time travel hijinks of the Chrononauts and so forth?

Ehhhh. The connections are there in retrospect--the end of the original Kick-Ass trilogy -did- acknowledge the events of some other series just starting up in the background (MPH, Nemesis, Kingsmen) but still, the thought of Kick-Ass and his pals operating in a world with Wesley Gibson and friends casually murdering and raping behind the scenes (and not showing an interest in this new wave of heroes and villains?) is a bit much.

Points to Millar for ambition though, and I am interested to see how he plans to revisit some of these properties in Big Game. Dave pitching to become an Ambassador has potential. (Since apparently the whole cop thing didn't work out--I wonder if he's still with the girl he met in Kick-Ass 3, who he quit heroing to be with...)

[cyberghostface]

Yeah and I think stuff like the Night Club works better in its own self contained world.

[laughing_tree]

"I've always felt like a lot of these titles were intentionally designed to be stand-alones (and more importantly to sell the movie rights to) and this Grand Plan is a little... loose around the edges."

So just like all the other big superhero universes, then. :)

(Minus the designed to sell movie rights, part.)

[full_metal_ox]

In short: the Villain Stu-niverse.

[tripodeca113]

Is this the culmination of a decades long master-plan OR was it made up for the twentieth anniversary of Millarworld?
I know which one I believe.

[cyberghostface]

Except Millar first mentioned this idea a decade ago.

[skjam]

So made up for the tenth anniversary! :-P

[tripodeca113]

Guess I was wrong then. Though calling it a '50 volume plan' does sound a bit hyperbolic.

[informationgeek]

If this means the end of the Wanted and Nemesis characters, I'm fine with this.

...so, does this mean Superior and Huck are canon?

[beyondthefringe]

Yup. Your guess as to how, exactly, they fit into things, but they're all part of the same master plan.

The only things which aren't are the Unfunnies (something about being so offensively awful even Millar disavows it), War Heroes (unfinished), and the original Nemesis (something about movie rights?).

[morallyambiguousscience]

wait how the hell does Supercrooks fit into this, those guys were way more sympathetic than the wanted villains

[lordultimus]

I believe they're part of the Jupiter's Legacy verse, which I guess means they were only active before they got erased.

[roguefankc]

That's actually good to hear! I loved Huck and Prodigy so to see them both in this would be a treat! Hopefully, they don't get killed.

[mazway_75]

Whenever I see the "villains team up to wipe out heroes," I remember the fun turn in the X-23 "Old Woman Laura" story where they did it...and failed because it's impossible to get a few thousand self-serving criminal sociopaths to be an effective unit. So while heroes took losses, their superior teamwork and trust won in the end.

[blueprintstyles]

I just really want Wesley Gibson to lose in the end.

[shakalooloo]

I can't see this book going for long before Nemesis shoots him in the head to take over on the last page of an issue.

[goattoucher]

Millar is the king of the profoundly unlikeable protagonist. The bad guys will take losses, to be sure, but trust the ending to be deeply unsatisfying, but "edgy".