Author: Graeme McMillan

I feel like to be effective with the reader you need to surprise them with the formalism. You need to give them what they’re expecting and then gently introduce something that’s different, and then you can gradually blow their mind, (laughs) instead of just tossing a bunch of mysterious lines at the reader or whatever. I’ll always give the artist the benefit of the doubt that there’s probably something smart going on, but if I don’t know what’s going on, then, for me, it’s not successful, it’s not inspiring. But I don’t think it was right to call that “empty.” I am interested in a lot of formalist work. I could easily see myself making even weirder, unreadable comics, and I guess I’ve dabbled in that, but I’m really afraid of going too far down that road. I’m sure we would both get lost. For some cartoonists that’s what they want to do and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with it. Also, once I finally understand what they’re actually doing I’m usually like, “oh this is pretty brilliant.”

Yes, that’s right: one of the characters from Detroit is called Chevy. Another is called “Baseball,” because—well, I don’t know. It’s American? Or he’d watched The Wire and noticed that one of the characters was called Bubbles and thought maybe it was something similar? It’s not important, because Mark Millar is telling you how bad things are in the city, y’all. Like, he’s literally telling you, with characters offering laughably heavy exposition that not only doesn’t read like anything any real person would ever say, but of course makes the characters sound like every other character Mark Millar has written regardless of culture, location or any other factor that could possibly differentiate them.