As has been widely covered in the industry news, Avatar Press is pleased to be publishing The Unfunnies, a creator-owned project from the acclaimed writer of best-selling titles such as Ultimate X-Men and The Ultimates, Mark Millar. Much more news about this ground-breaking project will appear in the coming weeks, and for now here's the press release about this and Millar's big industry-wide December comics launches.

Official Press Release from Mark Millar:

Some interesting news for December. As you may have heard whispers about these last few months, I've been putting together art teams for my long-promised creator-owned projects. I've also been talking to various publishers about a pan-industry initiative I've been developing where each book appears from a different company, but gets linked together by a little www.millarworld.biz logo in the corner of each cover. Although each of these titles is creator-owned and independent of the others in a story sense, there are little hints that connect the titles and what I've essentially done in this sense is create the first industry-wide crossover.

December is going to be a big month with regard to my new Marvel project, but I think they're holding off until Wizardworld before making any kind of announcement. On the creator-owned front, the companies I selected for each of these projects are Top Cow, Dark Horse, Image and Avatar. Each project, like I said, is self-contained and can be read on their own, but the link goes beyond the little story hints mentioned earlier. In what I suspect is a unique move, each of these projects will be carrying ads for the other projects in the line even though they're all coming from several different comic-book companues. Obviously, an Avatar book isn't going to sell as much as a Top Cow book, but hopefully the advertising in both will bring new readers to both companies.

When you're writing books like The Ultimates, Ultimate X-Men and so on, it's easy to play it safe and just write top five titles all the time, but I think that's slightly immoral when you've come from the small press scene and worked your way up through smaller publishers. What I'm trying to do with the Millarworld line is balance my career in the same way George Clooney did by balancing Ocean's Eleven with his own projects like Confessions of the Dangerous Mind. I'm not interested in creating something nobody's going to read. These titles are the kind of superhero and horror comics I've always wanted to write, but I want to own them too and also produce the kind of material that might be impossible from the big two. The learning curve that began for me with The Authority and was carried through Ultimates kind of peaks with the books I've got planned here. WANTED, from Top Cow, is the superhero book I planned to follow The Authority with before I went to Marvel and I've been plotting it for three years. Similarly, the content for THE UNFUNNIES (from Avatar) is just so extreme that neither of the big two publishers would be allowed to print something of this nature. (...continued)
[ posted Thursday, July 31, 2003 9:21:28 PM  |  permanent link to this item ]