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1/14/2012 8:59 AM 

This September, "Nemesis 2" will ship to comic shops, and as Millar tells it, the story both picks right up from the first volume and reinvents the concept. "The sequel is an entirely different beast from the first story," he said. "It opens up the world and expands upon everything we've seen before with new leads and an entirely new set-up. 'Nemesis' was always intended to be a 12-issue story with three four-issue series. Each one is interlinked and builds, but they're also quite self-contained and work as stories in their own right. The only character who returns from the first volume is the old guy on the beach on the last page of the last issue. You realize that the Nemesis idea, this concept of dressing up and being a super-villain, is basically a holiday for rich guys. A few times a year, these guys take a few weeks away from their multi-national companies and spend a bunch of money to feast upon the poor. It's the 1% having fun messing up the lives of the 99%."

"In historical context, we're similar to where we were in the Victorian Age where the masses feared the aristocracy, these men who seemed above the law and who, in some cases, determined how their workers were even going to vote. These fears emerged in pop culture with books like 'Dracula' -- the idea of a count feasting on the poor, a blood-sucker in the most literal way, and this reflected the revolutionary vibe sweeping across Europe and Russia in particular at the time. In a similar way, I think that attitude has returned now with the gap between rich and poor being wider than it has been for generations. After 80 or 90 years of benevolent capitalism where people like Bruce Wayne or Tony Stark would be viewed as heroes, we now regard these guys a little more suspiciously. How exactly did they make this money and how do they sleep at night in their massive homes when people are sleeping rough on the other side of their electric fence? Can they justify importing 500 designer cowls from Japan when some people can't feed their families in the neighborhoods they're protecting? In reality, they probably wouldn't be very nice at all. Nemesis is taking that idea to a logical conclusion and just being honest about it. This is about rich men putting on masks and capes and getting a kick out of beating up poor people."

On the opposite side of the Millarworld spinoff fence comes "Hit-Girl" whose May debut bridges ideas from the two previous volumes of "Kick-Ass." "How does Hit-Girl take center stage? It's very, very simple actually. Dave just breaks a few fingers," Millar said while sharing early pages from the final issue of "Kick-Ass 2." "If you go out and pretend to be a superhero and actually get in a fight, well if you punched someone and broke your hand you'd be useless as a superhero for a while. I had a friends at school who broke his hand with a single punch, so it's a real thing that happens every once in a while. It's not like Batman where you can take a lot of hits and just show up next night and be exactly as cool as you were the night before. So I thought it'd be funny if Kick-Ass punched someone and broke his hand, and he was just out of action for eight weeks. It's as simple as that and what would really happen sometimes.

"In the story, Kick-Ass breaks his hand on a mission, and Hit-Girl is out on her own," he said, digging into the plot and its creative history. "This story takes place between 'Kick-Ass 1' and 'Kick-Ass 2.' There were loads of ideas I had that didn't fit in either book, so this was actually planned to come out last year because initially we were going to use a different artist for it and have this running at the same time. We got a great artist called Leandro Fernandez, who I'm a huge fan of. He drew one page, and when the page came in, it was so beautiful, but because it wasn't drawn by Johnny Romita, I felt it was strange. It's different if you're drawing Spider-Man or Superman because those guys have been though so many writers and artists. But if something's creator-owned and you see it drawn by someone else, it feels weird. And I said to Leandro, 'Don't be offended or anything, but how would you feel if we went back to Johnny?' And he said, 'Don't worry. I feel as if I'd taken his gig off him anyway.' And Johnny is a total gentleman because he said, 'To be honest, I was disappointed I wasn't doing it because I love these characters, but I didn't want to say.' So they were both absolutely brilliant and Johnny came back to the project, Leandro moving on with no hard feelings and totally understanding. Leandro and I are going to get together in the future and do something, and Johnny gets to do this story between the two books, which is great because I can do all the stories I didn't have room for. There's plans for two Hit-Girl volumes and these take place between the individual Kick-Ass chapters"

Thanks to CBR for the words and images!

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