Art & Creativity Quote by Mark Millar

A cold splash of industry truth dressed up as casual advice, Millar’s line is less complaint than warning label. “Animated books” is telling: it reduces comics to a format, a content pipeline, something that can be processed and repackaged. That phrasing carries the subtext that the Big Two (Marvel and DC) don’t primarily see creators as authors building durable works; they see them as labor feeding an IP machine. The insult isn’t shouted. It’s embedded in the business vocabulary.

The bluntness of “pay the lowest rates” and “forget about royalties” does two things at once. It demystifies the prestige of working for superhero royalty, and it punctures the romantic mythology that exposure leads to equity. The rhythm is almost conversational, but the message is transactional: you are trading time and talent for a page rate, not a stake. “Forget” isn’t pessimism; it’s a survival tactic. Don’t negotiate with a fantasy.

Context matters: Millar is a creator who successfully pivoted from work-for-hire comics into creator-owned properties engineered for adaptation (Kick-Ass, Kingsman). He knows the economics from both sides, and that’s what gives the quote its bite. It’s not anti-Marvel/DC snobbery so much as a map of incentives: if the company owns the characters and the future media upside, your upside is capped at the moment you deliver the pages.

The intent is almost managerial: stop confusing cultural impact with compensation. In a business built on billion-dollar universes, Millar’s cynicism lands because it’s not cynical enough. It’s accounting.