Reborn is the story, first and foremost, of Bonnie, an elderly woman who dies peacefully only to find herself thrust into a swords-and-sorcery fantasy world where she’s rapidly pushed into a quest to find her husband and escape the grasp of the deadly Lord Golgotha. While it’s a book that opens with a pedestrian being shot in the face, seemingly at random, it rapidly transforms into sub-Hallmark Channel pablum, a rawly emotional fantasy about death and acceptance, told in brash heavy metal album covers. This is exactly what makes Reborn such an odd comic.

That’s all to say that even at his best, you kind of know what you’re getting when you pick up a Mark Millar comic there’s going to be a lot of violence, there’ll be some manner of supposedly shocking obscenity, usually said by a young girl, and you can probably spot some gratingly obvious but supposedly transgressive moment of genre awareness. These, however, are often the exception in his oeuvre of often shockingly amateurish, masturbatory fantasies. There are few writers, comics or otherwise, who prompt such an immediate, visceral, and divisive response as Mark Millar.Īfter coming up in the shadow of visionary Grant Morrison, the Scottish provocateur became more known for his obsession with adolescent violence, shocking misogyny, and an almost puckish desire to upset readers than any of his individual works.Īt his rare best, Millar’s transgressive desire to shock, offend, and shake up the staid superhero genre leads to moments like the marriage between gay heroes Midnighter and Apollo in The Authority, a portrait of the urbane, self-destructive evil of Lex Luthor in Adventures of Superman, or the timely satire of war-mongering, sociopathic government stooges in The Ultimates.

Reborn by mark millar