Mark Millar's One Man Event (2008-2009)

Writer(s): Mark Millar
Artist(s): Bryan Hitch, Tommy Lee Edwards, Steve McNiven et al.

Marvel 1985 #1 #2 #3 #4 #5 #6
Fantastic Four: World's Greatest #554 #555 #556 #557 #558 #559 #560 #561
Fantastic Four: The Master of Doom #562 #563 #564 #565 #566 #567 #568 #569
Old Man Logan #66 #67 #68 #69 #70 #71 #72 #1

Collecting Fantastic Four #554-#569, Marvel 1985, Wolverine #66-#72, Wolverine: Old Man Logan Giant Size Special #1

(Now, for those wondering how these stories connect, Millar reveals how in an interview back in early 2009 on IGN. Spoilers after the jump!)


IGN Comics: You'd mentioned before that your work in Fantastic Four, 1985 and Wolverine would all be linked in some fashion. Can you talk about that a bit – at least as much as you can?

Millar: Oh yeah, I'll just reveal everything. Actually when I started doing it, it was just a cheap marketing ploy. –laughs- And nobody is more surprised than me that these stories have genuinely tied in! –laughs- At first I was hoping the big books like Wolverine would prop up the smaller books like 1985. But it worked out really tight.

It was really important to me that everyone could understand every book without picking up the others. There's nothing more miserable than picking up a bunch of crap books you don't want to buy. I mean, the comic book industry for the last two years has felt like that. It's all a bunch of rubbish tie-ins to books you quite like and things like that, you know? So I wanted them to be quite individualistic but you would get something out of it if you bought all the books.

So here's how they tie in. 1985 is the origin of Clyde Wyncham. And Clyde is the guy who grows up to be the greatest super-villain of all time far into the future. He is back in the Master of Doom storyline in Fantastic Four. What he's done is he's become the master of all space and time and co-exists from the end of the universe to the beginning through multiple dimensions and so on. He's just the biggest badass, you know? So you have his earliest, embryonic state in 1985 and it kind of explains who he is.

So tell sell this in the most cynical way, 1985 is the origin of Dr. Doom's teacher as well as being a nice, little Stephen King superhero story, you know? And Wolverine: Old Man Logan ties into this because, without spoiling the end of 1985, the place where Clyde Wyncham is put at the end of 1985 is broken into in Old Man Logan. For people who've read the story, they know it's about the supervillains all getting together and wiping out the superheroes. So they open all the prisons and they discover this secret prison called "Clyde's Pit" which is where the worst supervillains are kept – the guys we've never heard about. And Clyde is the most dangerous supervillain of all, and he's freed in Old Man Logan. This is referred to in Fantastic Four.

So the whole thing is this big, intricate web. Each thing is self-contained but hopefully they make a cool, big story. It's my own little event. After Civil War I kind of wanted to do a one-man event.