I thought, straight away, ‘It’s got to be here.’” It looked like what an old Hollywood studio would have looked like in 1921 or something, when there were no rules and everything just happened. At Netflix, in contrast, “they were literally building their own studio. “I suddenly realised they were celebrating the past,” he says. He recalls admiring the posters for favourite movies of the 40s and 50s plastered on the walls at one studio he visited, then stopping short. Other Millar creations, such as the Forrest Gump-esque superhero Huck, the supervillain-led Nemesis, and the superpowered family sagas Jupiter’s Circle and Jupiter’s Legacy have also been optioned. “We sold 1m copies of Kick-Ass on the back of the film.”) And Millarworld published several comics that were successes on screen, too: the thriller Wanted, superhero satire Kick-Ass and gentleman spy caper Kingsman: The Secret Service. (“A movie’s like a $100m advert for your work,” he says. Millar’s unashamed pursuit of Hollywood has divided opinion, but he’s always been open about writing comics that could attract movie deals.

Unlike the big studio publishers, here the writer – always Millar – and the artists would keep the rights to their own work and split all profits equally. It was while he was working at Marvel that Millar set up Millarworld. We sold 1m copies of Kick-Ass on the back of the film. A movie’s like a $100m advert for your work. His series The Ultimates formed the basis for the 2012 Marvel blockbuster The Avengers, while his story about an ageing Wolverine inspired the critically acclaimed 2017 film Logan. From working on Batman and Superman at DC, he went to Marvel, where he developed a cinematic style of writing that would be in demand later on. He worked on 2000AD, then went to DC Comics to write Swamp Thing, the title that had crystallised his ambitions years before. His first published comic was Saviour, a superhero satire about the second coming of Christ. At 13, he decided he was going to spend his life working on them, after reading Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing. Millar was about four when one of his five siblings in the small town of Coatbridge near Glasgow, where he still lives, bought him his first Spider-Man comic.

Betrayals and slights mean things, everything’s heightened with family.” You’ve got relationships that really mean something, that’s why I always have a mother or children as the protagonists. “There’s a patriarch with three children, and he’s not getting any younger. “The structure is basically King Lear, if that doesn’t sound too wanky,” Millar says of The Magic Order, which is drawn by Olivier Coipel.

Kick-Ass by Mark Millar