Millarworld is a shared fictional universe created by Mark Millar.
List of works and adaptions
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Anime
Comic Books
- The Ambassadors
- American Jesus
- Big Game (2023)
- Chrononauts
- Chrononauts: Futureshock
- Empress
- Huck
- Jupiter's Legacy (two volumes)
- Its prequel, Jupiter's Circle (two volumes)
- Its sequel, Jupiter's Legacy: Requiem (one volume, with another one planned)
- Kick-Ass
- Its interquel, Hit Girl
- Its sequel, Kick-Ass 2
- Its second sequel, Kick-Ass 3
- The Magic Order
- MPH
- Nemesis
- Its "Soft Reboot" Nemesis Reloaded
- Night Club
- Reborn
- The Secret Service
- Starlight
- Supercrooks
- Superior
- Wanted
Live-Action Films
Live-Action TV
Tropes:
- Alternate Self: Superior is among the Jupiter's Legacy heroes that the Magic Order summons, implying that the reason why he's a fictional character in the Millarworld is because he exists in that universe, which itself is confirmed to be a Show Within a Show.
- Canon Welding:
- Mark Miller established connections between three comics published by different companies — Wanted, Chosen and The Unfunnies. The reason why at the end of the Chosen media doesn't report Antichrist's miracles is that they're controlled by supervillains from Wanted. And Troy Hicks from Unfunnies helped Satan rape Antichrist. Never published Run! was supposed to be set in that world too.
- Kick-Ass 3 ends with several references that imply Superior, Nemesis, The Secret Service and MPH take place in the same universe.
- The ending to Nemesis: Reloaded concretely reveals that almost all of Millar's creator-owned works are all in a Shared Universe created by the Cosmic Retcon by the Fraternity from Wanted.
- Captain Ersatz:
- Originally Wanted was a Legion of Doom Reboot and got shut down. So he made it Darker and Edgier and changed the names. It's really obvious who most of the characters are supposed to be.
- Big Daddy from Kick-Ass, is one of The Punisher, minus the skull. And tragic backstory, it turns out.
- Duke McQueen from Star Light is clearly an older Flash Gordon after retirement from space adventures.
- Cluster F-Bomb: A lot of characters swear like sailors.
- Comic-Book Fantasy Casting: Wesley and The Fox from Wanted look like Eminem and Halle Berry.
- The Conspiracy: A frequent feature in his works is the idea that either a cadre of Corrupt Corporate Executive types is just offscreen, enriching and entertaining themselves by creating a Crapsack World for the rest of us and secretly controlling world governments, the military-industrial complex is in bed with them or just doing War for Fun and Profit, or that the Generic Doomsday Villain works for or leads some form of Hollywood Satanism group...complete with real Demon Lords and Archdevils. Sometimes, the Hollywood Satanism folks are the Corrupt Corporate Executives.
- Crapsack World: The setting plays with this: the villains who finally beat the heroes changed reality to make it a Crapsack World... in other words, ours.
- And even worse, Wanted shares the world with two other comics - Chosen and The Unfunnies. So it means that the president of the United States is an Anti Christ and Satan is very real and actively trying to bring the Apocalypse and that people can enter the worlds they wrote by switching places with their characters, exposing completely innocent beings to general crappiness of their world.
- However, according to him, all of his works not for DC or Marvel coexist, which means somewhere out there is a genuinely kind and humble man named Huck who also has super strength and the ability to locate anything. Superior also shows that there are truly virtuous people still left in his world. It's not much, but this world is not entirely at the mercy of scum like the Fraternity, Nemesis, and Troy Hicks.
- Expanded on; Big Game sees the Fraternity try to wipe out the new generation of superheroes; while they initially succeed, Hit Girl is able to use time travel to undo their deaths, which ultimately results in the Fraternity finally being defeated (with most of their members either killed or jailed on alternate versions of Earth.) While Nemesis is still out there, the Fraternity's power has been broken, meaning that the world now has the chance to begin healing.
- Deconstruction: Kick-Ass:
- A teenager with no powers or special training decides to become a superhero. Especially when Kick-Ass fights crime for the first time he ends up getting stabbed by one of the thugs.
- Then subverted by... most of the comic after that point. To start with, getting stabbed and hit by a car gave him just enough, very specific nerve damage to stop feeling almost any pain.
- Unlike other Tykebomb-turned-superheroes in other media, Mindy is clearly damaged by her upbringing as Hit-Girl, escalating into disturbing hallucinations of her Father still giving her orders and advice.
- Dave's pretending to be gay in order to get close to the girl he likes works out improbably well for him in the film once he reveals that he's actually straight. Here, though, she is extremely pissed off to have been lied to and manipulated by what she thought was her Gay Best Friend, has her boyfriend beat the crap out of Dave in retaliation, and then later taunts him with pictures of the two of them having sex.
- The second issue of Superior has a kid testing out the superpowers of his favorite Superman Expy. He attempts to use his "super-breath" to put out a house fire, only to demolish the house and spread the fire over a much larger area.
- Disproportionate Retribution:
- In Wanted, Wesley Gibson gains the resources to do whatever he wanted. As an example, he deals with the frustration of a neighbor being too cheery with... a bullet to the face. BLAM.
- Kick-Ass:
- In Volume One, Kick-Ass leads with violence, in the face of non-violence. In particular, during his first foray into vigilantism, he brutally ambushes some young graffiti artists. Although he loses the battle, there's no indication that what he did was immoral. And this would lead to Unreliable Narrator - it's the perpetrator that's narrating the story. And the narrator is a supremely bored high schooler.
- What Red Mist does to destroy Dave in Volume Two. Unmasks him, murders Katie's parents and rapes her, kills his dad, and bombs his funeral.
- Mother Russia supposedly killed the other bodyguards of the Russian Prime Minister when they accused her at cheating at cards.
- In Super Crooks, the Bastard is considered the most terrifying super-villain on Earth with a story told of one guy making the mistake of trying to rip him off. Another villain might kill the guy. Another might go a step further and kill his family. The Bastard methodically tracks down and murders every single person this guy has ever been close to. Family, lovers, his drug dealer, his banker, right down to second grade classmates. Then he kills the guy.
- Earth All Along: The throneworld of King Morax's empire turns out to be a prehistoric Earth. Morax is less than pleased to learn that he will eventually lose power and Earth will devolve into a more primitive society.
- Expy Coexistence: As hinted at throughout previous Millarworld works, Jupiter's Legacy is revealed to be fictional in this universe, and is heavily implied to be a distorted recollection of the "true" version of the DC Universe that the Millarworld previously existed as (the trip to 1985 makes it obvious that the "world's greatest hero" was Superman, not the Utopian). The Magic Order summons the heroes from there via a dimensional portal and Dave observes that they were all heroes that he'd read about in his comics.
- Evil Parents Want Good Kids:
- The toy maker in Wanted had his wife and daughters fooled he was a regular and even Sickeningly Sweet and fastidiously proper toymaker and not a supervillain. Interestingly, he enjoyed the services of hookers in other dimensions.
- Subverted in Kick-Ass by Damon MacCready, a.k.a. Big Daddy, who despite looking like Ned Flanders, raises his little girl to be a ruthlessly efficient vigilante in order to exact revenge on John Genovese (not really revenge, he was just bored with his life and wanted his daughter to have an interesting life).
- I Just Want to Be Badass:
- In Kick-Ass, two characters become superheroes: the title character because he wants to help people... and in a straighter version of this trope, Big Daddy because he was frustrated with his marriage and thought his life was boring. He even creates a fake Back Story to enhance his new identity.
- This is the basic idea of Wanted, both the original comic and the movie adaptation. The protagonist is a loser guy who becomes a badass when he finds out he has a badass gene inherited from a father he never knew. The comic book (but not the movie) also attempts to deconstruct this trope by scolding the reader for identifying with the main character, who's essentially a violent sociopath.
- Lampshade Hanging: Kick-Ass, at one point, tries to traverse the New York City skyline, but finds that the buildings are too far apart, and notes that, in comics, said buildings seem to be much closer and less high...
- Lighter and Softer: The world becomes somewhat less crappy overtime, culminating in Big Game when the Fraternity is defeated and their grip on the world broken.
- Politically Incorrect Villain:
- Close to all of the villains in Wanted are this. The Future is definitely the worst though, as he is an unapologetic Nazi and misogynist.
- In The Secret Service, James Arnold gives horribly offensive nicknames for his disabled henchmen. For example his Dragon with leg prosthesis is nicknamed Gazelle.
- Retcon: Mark Millar had claimed through Word of God that Jupiter's Legacy was the superhero universe that the Fraternity had overwritten, with the Utopian being the template for which heroes like Superman and Superior were based on out of humanity's unconscious attempts to remember him. This series however seems to walk back on that: The Cowl seen in the opening pages is clearly not Jupiter's local Batman Parody Skyfox, and the Flying Brick that Bobbie, Crane, and the Chrononauts see in 1985 is a Lawyer-Friendly Cameo of Superman instead of the Utopian. Big Game seems to now claim (and confirm various Easter Eggs hinting at such throughout previous Millarworld books) that Jupiter's Legacy is nothing more than a Show Within a Show in this universe.
- Serial Escalation: The 'Verse began with Dave Lizewski as a bored teenager deciding to dress up as a superhero. Now, a cabal of supervillains is waging war with superheroes that include vampires, space heroes, secret agents, time travelers, billionaire playboy daredevils, and aliens.
- Show Within a Show: The way some of his Marvel work references DC Comics implies that in his interpretation of the Marvel Universe, The DCU exists as one of these.
- Superman Substitute;
- Wanted has Earth's first superhero who was implied to be Superman.
Word of God later retconned him to be the Utopian from Jupiter's Legacy. - The Utopian is his world's first and most famous superhero. The main difference between him and Supes is that the Utopian was a human Touched by Vorlons and his friends also got similar weaker powers at the same time.
- Superior is an In-universe one featuring in various comic books and movies who didn't become real until a child was granted a wish and wished to be him. Word of God says that Superman, Superior and all the other Superman Substitutes in the Millarworld were created by people who subconsciously remember the Utopian before the Fraternity wiped all superheroes from reality.
- Huck is a rare variation that's based on Clark Kent's life growing up on a farm and doesn't show his superhero adventures in a city.
- Wanted has Earth's first superhero who was implied to be Superman.
- This Loser Is You:
- Wanted has Wesley Gibson, an Eminem look-a-like who is saddled with a dead end job, and an annoying, cheating girlfriend, bullied by assorted townfolk, and in general is shown to be practically spineless in regards to his life. Of course, afterward he breaks the fourth wall to tell you that you suck even more than he does. The idea is that Gibson is one of the people making life actively worse for anyone who isn't a super-villain - and yet the structure of the story encourages you to root for him as the underdog hero. He's reminding you, metatextually, that he's the bad guy.
- Kick-Ass is not subtle about this. The story is about a pathetic, sometimes egotistical, American comic book nerd trying to be a superhero, and follows as he starts off getting his ass kicked, constantly humiliates himself and only manages by sheer luck and the intervention of the more successful heroes, Hit-Girl and Big Daddy. His crush only pays attention to him because she thinks he's gay, and when she finds out he's not, she tosses him aside, after he gets beat up by her boyfriend and left with a picture of her going down on said boyfriend for him to wake up to. The story is designed as a deconstruction on the teen superhero concept, but it crosses into this in how mean spirited it is in making the Dave as 'normal' as it can. His friends, who're also comic fans, aren't shown any better, and even Big Daddy, revealed to be a comic book fan himself instead of being an ex cop, is depicted as a pathetic loser who decided to become a superhero and train his daughter to be one after his marriage broke down.
- A True Story in My Universe:
- Wanted says the world used to be a Standard Superhero Setting until the villains teamed up and built a machine that altered reality, turning the superheroes into actors in movies and TV shows. Superhero media is written by people who subconsciously remember the old world. The superheroes are unnamed Lawyer Friendly Cameos of the DC heroes though Millar later said the Superman Substitute was the Utopian from Jupiter's Legacy.
- Ultimate Universe: He says most of his Millarworld comics are set in the same universe with Jupiter's Legacy and Supercrooks are set in a universe where The Fraternity never got rid of the superheroes.
