Super Crooks revolves around a group of super-villains, led by small-time crook Jonny Bolt, as they travel the world embarking on a few major heists before settling into retirement. The super-powered thieves will have to contend with the superheroes sent their way, namely Jupiter Legacy‘s Union of Justice.
Ahead of the show’s premiere, Screen Rant spoke exclusively with Super Crooks comic book creator Mark Millar to discuss adapting the source material for the anime genre, the ongoing development of the live-action series, and more.
Screen Rant: I know Supercrooks has been around for some time, but there have been multiple attempts to adapt it in the past, how did the plan for an anime come to mind?
Mark Millar: Well, you know, it’s funny actually, very early on it looked like we were going to make a movie of it and then it laid dormant for years until we sold the company to Netflix. So originally, the secret origin of the project is the Kick Ass movie had just come out and studios were saying to me, “Do you got anything else,” and I was like, “Yeah!” I’d really been thinking about this for a little while, about how there’s no villain crime projects in super fiction. It’s really weird when you think about it, there’s so many hero projects, but virtually nothing to do with criminals, and especially at the time when Iron Man and Thor and all these things were all coming out.
But no villains and yet we love The Godfather, we love The Sopranos, we love Ocean’s 11 and there’s so many subgenres of crime and yet nothing with costumes and powers. I thought that’d be really kind of cool, so I created this comic with Leinil Francis Yu and I thought, “Well, this could be cool.” It looked like I was setting it up as a movie, I brought in a friend of mine Nacho Vigalondo, and he and I even wrote a very rough draft of a screenplay. I don’t speak Spanish, he doesn’t speak great English, but we somehow cobbled the screenplay together. But we never got it off the ground, that just didn’t happen, but the comic came out, it was very popular and did well.
It just kind of laid there for a few years, nothing really happened with it as it was Kingsman and everything that people were interested in. But then when we sold the company to Netflix, one of the first projects they jumped on was Supercrooks. They said, “That could be really fun,” and instead of going the conventional route, where it looks like a Marvel movie and everything, they said, “Why don’t we try a Japanese anime version of this?” It was completely unexpected, but my God, that was such a fun idea, I was all over it.
Given that this was only a four-issue run, what was that like for you to build upon the world you had already created to fill out this series?
Mark Millar: It was actually awesome because whenever you’re doing a comic, you have to cut so much down to fit into the format because you get four panels a page, four issues, 22 pages an issue; you lose so much stuff, you have to just give hints of things because you don’t have room to do a scene and to be able to just sit back and breathe. The big mistake would have been to stretch the four issues over the 13 episodes, that would have been the most boring approach, especially in animation, where you want a lot of visual stimulation. So what I suggested to the guys was we do the miniseries at the end, make that like the final three episodes, and then I plotted out the other nine or 10 episodes with – I wouldn’t even say backstory.
What I did there was come up with two or three other adventures that I rolled together and then led up to that thing, so it doesn’t feel like preamble, it feels like it’s moving and I had no idea how it was gonna work out. I hoped for the best and Die Satō wrote the screenplay and did a wonderful job. Motonobu Hori, who directed it, is a master, he’s a young guy, he’s relatively new, but my God. Visually, there’s some amazing stuff, like the underwater sequence, there’s some great-looking moments, and the zombies on the bikes. I think you’ll like the ending, it wraps up really nicely, you get to the book by about episode 10 or something, you’ll start to see this stuff.
So then what were some of the creative challenges for you in finding that way to merge this world with the expanded backstory as well as with Jupiter’s Legacy, especially since the comics came out before Jupiter?
Mark Millar: It’s funny because although they exist within the same world, I like the idea of a universe that coexisted without referencing too much of it. Like the way that Spider-Man lives in the same world as the Hulk, but you don’t see them together all the time. I like the idea that these guys need to have superheroes who are a problem for them out there somewhere, but we don’t want them to interact as such, because then it becomes a little convoluted. So it saved me coming up with another bunch of heroes really, I had the Jupiter’s Legacy characters out there, so that works out really nicely.
We’ll do the same with the live-action show, as well, whenever we the American version of the series. To do something that’s just entirely about the criminals just feels a little fresher, a little bit different, and it’s not even like Venom or Suicide Squad or something where they’re kind of hero criminals, these guys will steal from you, they’re out to make money, and I’ve never seen anything like that before, which is really exciting.
So throughout your writing, you’ve found ways to walk a tightrope between sympathetic and apathetic antagonists, such as the Kingsman series, what’s that like for you walking that fine line between those very drastic ends of the spectrum?
Mark Millar: Alan Moore, who along with Frank Miller was my favorite writer growing up, said, “Always forgive your villains.” Because nobody sits and cackles and thinks they’re evil, the villain always has a plan that he thinks is gonna be good for everybody, or certainly good for his friends. With Kingsman, the Samuel L. Jackson character thought he was saving the planet by wiping out 90 percent of it, because the other 10 percent will survive, as opposed to the 100 percent for the incoming ecological catastrophe. Similarly, these guys are doing it because they want to help each other, one of them’s in trouble, they need to make some cash, they’re up against a really bad guy.
I think that’s always the trick, too, if you have somebody who’s worse than your character, that really helps because there’s an awful guy that they’re going to be killed by unless they go and do this big one last job. But it’s funny, I’m rewatching The Sopranos, my wife and I got COVID a couple of weeks back and we were stuck in the house just watching The Sopranos while the kids were in school and it’s amazing how likable you can make people doing bad things. Every now and then, you remember that The Sopranos are terrible people, but you really loved them as well, don’t you?
Ocean’s 11 is probably the most direct comparison for Super Crooks, where these are guys you came to hang out with, they seem quite nice and quite fun, but ultimately they are breaking the law and committing a crime and because we’re all doing jobs, we can admire guys who make cash overnight by robbing Fort Knox.
You mentioned Ocean’s 11 as a direct comparison for this show, but as much as I see it, I also see a lot of like Great Pretender in this as well, where it’s this anime world of heists. What were some of the biggest inspirations for you for both the source material and fleshing out the anime?
Mark Millar: For the comic side of it, for me it was all the crime movies I ever loved growing up, Ocean’s 11 is the most obvious comparison, but I love The Sting, I love all of those great movies. Anime-wise, I’m always amazed that this show wasn’t bigger, but what I always have in my head as the pinnacle of anime is Battle of the Planets or Gatchaman as it was known in some places.
But that’s what made me so excited about doing this as an anime because that was my favorite cartoon growing up, I didn’t even know it was Japanese, I saw it when I was really young and I just thought it was an American show and I was like, “Why aren’t all American shows this cool? You know, why are the other American shows just a little bit cheap looking compared to this?” Then I realized that it was Japanese and that’s what began my love affair with anime and then everybody got into it by the time Akira came along and now my children watch more and read more Japanese stuff than they do American stuff.
An intersting thing about this show is having it start off with redesigns for the characters before transitioning back to those of the comics. What was it like finding the right animation studio to bring your characters and this world to life?
Mark Millar: Our Japanese team, Netflix Japan, brought in Studio Bones, they get all the credit for that. Studio Bones are like God’s gift, they’re the best. So the minute I heard Studio Bones, I was like, “Okay, this is going to be amazing, this is going to be really good, so I can just sit back and let them do their work.” The designs of the characters were done 10 years previous in the comic book, so I think what they did was tweak it and give it more of a 2021 look instead of a 2011 look.
But Leinil Yu, my co-creator, was very involved, actually, with the guys and especially a lot of the new characters that were created for the first nine episodes with the new material, so Leinil and I worked on designs for the new characters. There was a visual consistency as well, but nobody knows their stuff like Studio Bones. When that stuff was coming back, it was just a total joy. The Japanese emails come in about 7 AM. my time, so just when I’m getting the children up for school, and I would maybe see a little sequence or a little design and it was just heartwarming every time. As soon as I saw something coming in from Japan, I was like, “Oh, this is gonna be cool. It’ll be great.”
So was there anything that Netflix was hesitant to adapt from the comics or did they give full creative freedom for you and the rest of the team?
Mark Millar: Netflix is awesome, it’s one of the reasons I sold the company to Netflix the way Marvel sold to Disney in 2017. My artists were my partners in the company and a lot of them just retired, they were like, “Thanks for the cash, I’m off on holiday now.” I took a week off because I love the ethos of Netflix, I really like the people. When we were having negotiations, other studios had come in and were betting for us and everything, but as soon as I met the Netflix guys, I was like, “These guys are great, this is perfect.”
I love the creative liberalism of the place, you know, it just felt more like university or college or something rather than a corporation, it just feels like a bunch of people having a good time. I’ve never felt there was a hand on my shoulder and somebody come and say, “Hey, you can’t do this.” So like the underwater sequence, nobody said, “Oh, this is too much. This is too silly,” or whatever. I love that, it’s very creatively liberating to just do what you want and hope it works.
You mentioned the live-action show earlier and I’m curious how that’s coming along in development?
Mark Millar: It’s going great, obviously we’re bound by massive secrecy. It was one of those things, actually, that I think when people saw the animated stuff starting to come in because we started seeing the first four or five episodes, everybody was like, “Holy s**t, this is great fun, this looks really great, we should just do an American live-action version of this too.” That was made public back in June and I don’t think there’s been anything we’ve been able to say since, but all I’ll say is I’m super excited about this.
It’s funny, somebody said to me, “Will it not be weird to have the same story again?” I was like, “Spider-Man is a cartoon and also a television show and a movie and everything in live-action. We’ll just tell other stories, we’re not going to tell the same story like three times or anything.” There’s just so much room to explore here, we can have a ball with it.
So it will be both a retelling and have new material for live-action in comparison to the anime?
Mark Millar: Oh, yeah. I think it would be a huge mistake to just tell the same story again. It’s like the Avengers, imagine that the Avengers movie was the exact same story, you’d be disappointed. I think that we want to expand this world, I’ve already written a sequel to the comic and I’m planning a third one as well, so we’re planning to tell a lot of stories with these characters.
That’s very exciting to hear, I can’t wait to when that starts finally coming about. I’m also curious, I think it was a couple of years ago that a third Kick-Ass film was announced to be in development, potentially with Aaron and Chloe coming back, have you heard any word on where that might be at or know anything about it?
Mark Millar: You know, it’s funny, occasionally something pops up about a third Kick-Ass, but it’s never true. What happens is, I think, one of the original actors is being interviewed about another movie and they’ll be asked, “Is there another Kick-Ass” and they’ll say, “Well, I don’t know maybe” and then it becomes a headline, “Maybe Another Kick-Ass Is Coming.” But in reality, we’ve literally never had a conversation about it.
I talk to Matthew Vaughn three times a week, Matthew is one of my best friends, and we’ve no plans because I’m over at Netflix and he has deals with Apple and Kick-Ass is Universal. So there’s definitely no plans, maybe at some point in the future, we do have one last story to tell, which is the big finale storyline. I kind of like the idea of that as well, because practically we can come back a little later to all the characters in different places, so there’s a potential story there at some point. But I pray that nobody reads this and mistakes that for us saying Kick-Ass 3 is in the works because there’s 100 percent no plans to do it at the moment.
Well there you go, that clears it up for everybody. For my final question, we’ve got The King’s Man coming up next month, I’ve been hooked to that series since the first movie came out as well as the comics, so I’m curious what that’s been like for you working with Matthew to expand the narrative scope of this world for film as you guys have?
Mark Millar: Well, it’s kind of funny actually, because I’m at Netflix, I only work on Netflix properties. I still co-own Kingsman and Kick-Ass, because they’re elsewhere, they’re not part of the Netflix deal. So I didn’t work on it, I’m an executive producer, which means they have to pay me because I’m the co-owner, but I didn’t work on it.
I’ve obviously seen it, I’ve watched it a few times, but I didn’t write one line of dialogue for anything. It’s a shame because Matthew and I are super close, we love working together, but we’re at different studios, so we can so hopefully one day get to do something again. All we do before filming is we phone each other a few things and then we just gossip.
Super Crooks is now streaming on Netflix.