Time & Perspective Quote by Mark Millar

There’s a quiet brutality in Millar admitting he wrote as many proposals as scripts at the end of the ’90s. It’s not a humblebrag about hustle; it’s a snapshot of creative life under an industrial gatekeeping system where the real work happens before anyone lets you do the work. “Proposals” is the tell: not pages written for love or craft, but pitch documents engineered to survive editorial meetings, budgets, scheduling, and brand logic. He’s describing a job that’s half imagination, half bureaucracy, and he’s doing it in a way that makes the split feel normal, even inevitable.

The timing matters. 1998 and 1999 land in the era when comics and screen-adjacent writing were professionalizing fast, with IP becoming the currency that could travel across media. For a writer like Millar - ambitious, commercial-minded, and allergic to wasting momentum - proposals aren’t a side quest; they’re a strategy. You don’t just write a story, you write the argument for why the story deserves oxygen.

The subtext is both pragmatic and slightly mournful: the market doesn’t reward pure output, it rewards legibility. A proposal is storytelling pre-chewed into bullet points, stakes, and “why now.” Millar is implicitly pointing at the hidden tax on creativity: to get paid to write, you first have to write about writing, convincing other people you’re worth the risk.