Dark Horse will publish writer Mark Millar’s The Magic Order series, the story of a family of magicians battling supernatural evils in a real-world setting, in a two-in-one library edition format, with the first volume set to be released on January 14, 2025. The publisher also announced new editions of the third and fourth volumes in the series, due out this October 9 and December 11, respectively. A Netflix series is in the works.
Millar is the cocreator, with Bryan Hitch, of Marvel’s The Ultimates, and his writing credits include Marvel’s crossover event Civil War and DC’s the Authority. He is also the creator of the Millarworld, a shared universe of original comics, including Kick-Ass, Jupiter’s Legacy, and Kingsman: Secret Service, many of which have been developed as films and television series. In 2017, he sold the rights to the Millarworld to Netflix and went to work for the network as a senior executive. He originally created The Magic Order as a live-action series, then developed it into a comic. “It’s kind of the reverse of what I used to do when we created comics which become movies,” he told PW. “Now I create franchises and try to translate the best ones into comic books.”
Image Comics originally published The Magic Order series and collected it into five volumes. In December 2023, Millar announced that Dark Horse would be the new publisher of all his Millarworld comics, including both new titles and new editions of existing ones, and Dark Horse has already announced new editions of the first two volumes in the series.
The library edition will bring together volumes one and two of The Magic Order as a hardcover with an 8” x 12.875” trim size. “I’ve always made sure we pay better than Marvel or DC, so we have an unparalleled line-up of artists, and if you’re a hardcore reader, as I am, you want those pages as big as possible,” Millar said. “This is just the perfect way to showcase the level of talent we’re working with.”
Millar spoke with PW by email about The Magic Order and his plans for rolling out his older and newer work with Dark Horse. This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.
Since Dark Horse is publishing both your new and your previous work, this seems like an opportunity to present the Millarworld stories in a new way. What are your plans?
Just for fun, I’ve slightly rethought the way I release my work, and instead of doing that dribble of comics every month, I’m quite excited by the idea of occasional hurricanes. That is, disappearing for a little while and then mass releasing five titles at once. A friend of mine said she never heads to the store unless there’s a bunch of things she wants to buy, and I like the idea of people who enjoy my books leaving with an armful. I’m actually a pretty slow writer compared to my peers, producing less than half the number of books a typical guy in my line of work gets through, so this is a cunning way of giving the illusion of crowding the shelves. It also means that, if you’re in the store for three of the books, you might pick up the other two.
Why did you choose to launch the reprints with the first trade paperback of The Magic Order and the Dark Horse Library Edition program with The Wanted and Big Game?
Dark Horse is an exceptional publisher with an enormous reach, especially in the mainstream bookstore market. We wanted to take full advantage of this and really just put our best foot forward. Wanted, Big Game, and The Magic Order are among our biggest ever hits, produced with the greatest artists I’ve ever worked with and boasting some of the stories I’m most happy with creatively. The opportunity to present them in these gigantic library-edition hardcovers was just too good to pass up. I had a carpenter come in and build new cabinets and shelves in my office to accommodate these big beasts. That’s how excited I am. I’m literally having my office rebuilt in anticipation!
What was your original inspiration for this world, and how have you tweaked it along the way?
I love juxtaposing two very different things in a story. When I did Superman: Red Son, I took an American icon and hammered the iconography into the ideological opposite, telling the Superman story from the other side of the world and through the prism of Stalin’s Soviet Union. Kick-Ass is a superhero story where the lead character doesn’t have a single super-power. Kingsman is about spies and beautiful clothes and expensive cars, but starring a kid from a [housing] estate like the one I grew up on suddenly in this world of tremendous privilege (which I guess was much like my own journey to America).
So when I started a magical story, I didn’t want to take the Gormenghast route or make this like Narnia, with ethereal beings and beautiful faeries and all the typical imagery we’ve seen in a century of these archetypes. I loved the idea of flipping it and making it look like The Sopranos. The idea of something as gritty as The Wire, where the subject matter is high fantasy, just really appealed to me. It also feels like an entry point for people who don’t normally read this kind of material. Game of Thrones did this very wellin its first season. My wife isn’t into genre material at all, but she’s a massive, massive history buff and so she was tricked into watching this show which looks, to all intents and purposes, like the English War of the Roses. Then suddenly the final episode has a dragon hatching from an egg. That’s what I wanted to do here: use the HBO crime show color palette, but you’re two eps in before you realize you’re in Tolkien meets Tarantino.
How did you strike a balance between your characters’ magical powers and the limitations that keep them from being omnipotent?
That’s a really good question. When you’re dealing with magic, almost anything is possible, and so it’s easy to lose the stakes. But if you make the stakes the human drama, then no matter how crazy it gets, the whole thing is relatable. The basic premise of The Magic Order is that this secret society is the reason you’ve never seen a ghost. All the old horror movies and mythical monsters were true, but this secret cabal of wizards who live among us have driven them all back into their shadows and allow us to blissfully live our lives in ignorance.
To make this concept more relatable, I made it a family drama. The lead character, Leonard Moonstone, is an older guy who’s dying and he’s worried about who, among his wayward children, will have the discipline and experience to keep the world safe when he’s gone. So the drama comes from the main interaction between him and his children as much as all the various forces around the world out to destroy him. I learned this from Stan Lee. He might be writing a story about Norse Gods fighting in Asgard, but it’s still about two quarreling half-brothers and their relationship with their father at the crux of it. The best fantasy or superhero or science fiction story always has a human heart.
Why did you choose to have different artists for each volume, and how did that affect your writing?
Really just expediency, to be honest. All the artists I love tend to take a while, and so I write the scripts at once and have them all drawing at the same time. On one of my books, an artist I worship took almost 4 years to draw 27 pages, so to give a perfectionist hundreds of pages over multiple volumes is difficult when you’re operating at this level. Six issues per volume by the same artist meant I didn’t have to do that horrible thing comics did in the past, with fill-in artists completing other people’s stories. It also meant I could work with some amazing people I hadn’t worked with before from around the world.
Will there be more new Magic Order stories?
No, this was always a five-volume story. I created a spin off series to get going if the show hits big, and I’d like to do this as a comic book at some point, but I’m juggling too many other things at the moment, and it would be years before I ever got around to it. But this five-volume story is about Leonard and Cordelia Moonstone and their incredible family and what happens when people use black magic even to do something good. To help other people. And the terrible price Cordelia pays. It has a beginning, a middle, and volume five is the end. I’ve done this job since I was 19 and I'm lucky enough to have a certain level of success in various media, but there’s nothing I’ve done which has pleased me as much as The Magic Order. When we have people over to the house for the first time and they ask me what I do this is the book I always give them. I’m really proud of it.
