http://www.newsarama.com/Chicago_07/Marvel/Millar_Hitch.html The comic book superstar pairing of writer Mark Millar and artist Bryan Hitch lives again, this time on Marvel's Fantastic Four..
No, not Ultimate Fantastic Four ... Not a large-scale FF limited series ... The monthly Marvel Universe Fantastic Four.
The duo take over the reins of the series in early 2008 with plans to return the series to the top of the Diamond sales charts, and by the sounds of things, they don't plan on leaving for a while...
And oh yeah, and they plan on it being monthly!
MM: Well, there are probably three reasons for this. One is that when you do a special project you can't really roll your sleeves up and operate on the book. You're essentially just borrowing the characters from the current writer and promising not to interfere with his plans. And there were some very fundamental things we wanted to do with the direction of the book which meant the main book or nothing. But as people who grew up with an enormous love for the book, there's something (and this will sound weird) very satisfying about flipping through your run of FF comic-books and seeing your run alongside the Byrne and Kirby issues. It feels nice to be part of the lineage.
Also, the Fantastic Four was billed as “The World's Greatest Comic Magazine” and it's been a while since it really lived up there in the top ten. Again, there's that little fanboy part of us that wants to put the book right up there on the front-lines of the Marvel Universe. Other than a few spikes for events of promotions, it's only sold around an average 45-50K these past ten years and we wanted to just put it up there with the Avengers and Spider-Man books again. They told us the Avengers characters were dead and we shouldn't do Ultimates before we started, but we knew it would work and we feel the same charge here. When you love something it's contagious. We want this to be the book everyone is reading again.
NRAMA: As no doubt frustrating as it likely is for you Bryan, we do have to ask about scheduling, since the FF is a series that has been monthly for Marvel’s entire history. From all indications it seems like you’ve been working on this for a while, how would you address reader’s concerns about the FF maintaining its monthly status when your’s and Mark’s run begins?
BH: I'm drawing it quicker. I've been working on it for about five months and am four issues and nine covers in. Mark is writing issue # 10 now so he's galloping nicely. It's actually getting quicker the more into it I get but it's important to note that Ultimates is the only thing I've done that went the way it did. Authority was three weeks an issue and that's what I expected to do on Ultimates; it came as a huge surprise to me that I couldn't do it. Then again there's about three times as much on the page in Ultimates.
Truth to tell, many of the problems with that book weren't with the physical side of drawing it, more the state I got myself into worrying about it. It's different on FF. I don't feel any pressure at all, in fact it's the most liberating work I've done in years.
