Mark Millar, the comic book writer who founded Millarworld, has announced his first project since he sold the company to streaming giant Netflix.
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Millar will team with Olivier Coipel (House of M, Thor) on a new series titled The Magic Order, a story that combines mob drama with fantasy.
The setup of The Magic Order involves five families of magicians who have been secretly protecting the world from unseen threats for generations. When they’re not playing at heroics, the families act as normal citizens in mundane society. Everything changes for these families when a new enemy emerges and begins to assassinate these magicians one at a time.
“I’m a great fan of grounding big concepts so everybody gets them,” Millar says in an interview with Entertainment Weekly. “My hero Richard Donner does this so brilliantly, giving us huge things like the Book of Revelation or Superman, but setting them in a world that looks like the one outside our window. My other hero Stan Lee is amazing at this too. He takes characters as weird as Spider-Man or Thor and comes in through the human angle, making these things about teen angst or two brothers who don’t get on. Something a mainstream audience can really connect with. Fantasy I think can be off-putting for people because it’s often missing a human angle, a realistic hook that makes it open to anyone. So my idea with The Magic Order was to take something that’s essentially about a secret order of good wizards who got rid of all the bad things hundreds of years ago but live quietly among us now with blue-collar jobs and ordinary domestic lives. They have this secret life, but to the outside world it’s all very normal and it makes the idea look more like The Sopranos than Lord of the Rings.
“It’s all about accessibility, and the big idea here is that these are the guys who keep the world as rational and normal as it feels to us now. These guys are out there cracking heads in the shadows so we can all sleep safely in our beds at night. That’s the deal and the ancient promise they made to mankind: five families across the world who take care of things whenever they’re needed. It’s R-rated adult fantasy. Something for the kids who grew up 10 or 20 years ago loving all-ages fantasy in cinema, but now wanting something a little tastier.”
The Magic Order will run for six issues and launches next spring.
