The Secret Service comic sets out its stall early. In Switzerland, a kidnapped Mark Hamill is quizzed about his thoughts on the Star Wars prequels. He’s rescued by a dashing British secret service agent, who shoots the kidnappers, flings Hamill on to a snowmobile and takes him on a mountain chase, decapitating bad guys along the way. With James Bond panache, the pair hurtle off a cliff with a Union Jack parachute. Which fails to open. Mark Hamill is dead. Then the action switches to Peckham.
This opening, as I discover over two hours in Mark Millar’s favourite Soho pub, says much about the forever excitable 45-year-old Glaswegian, who seems to thrive on being impossibly busy. He arrives in a whirlwind, flying in from another meeting; he has two hours before shooting back to Scotland and wants to cram in the pints. We’re joined by Secret Service artist Dave Gibbons, the affable 65-year-old who’s drawn for Alan Moore (on Watchmen) and Frank Miller (on Give Me Liberty). Mutual fans for years, Millar and Gibbons finally teamed up for this, their council house homage to old school Bond.
Millar was a writer for DC and Marvel Comics before becoming kingpin of his own empire, churning out a slew of titles ready-made for cinematic adaptation (Kick-Ass, Wanted, and more to come). He needed a homegrown artist for The Secret Service: only a Brit would be able to accurately communicate the nuances of the story, which finds a troubled Peckham council estate kid recruited by his uncle for an aristocratic rogue spy organisation. As with Kick-Ass, it has now been turned into a film, Kingsman: The Secret Service, by director Matthew Vaughn, thanks to another pub session. This time, both were involved from conception.
Vaughn had briefly been on the cards to direct Casino Royale, and over beers one afternoon, Millar asked him what he would have done with it. Moaning about the spy genre’s newfound gravitas, the pair pledged to do something fun, Millar recalls, “and Matthew said, ‘There’s something cool about that Bond Begins idea, the origins of a superspy.’ And I was telling him about a James Bond retrospective the Guardian had done which I’d thought was really interesting. It included the story of Terence Young, the director of Dr No, taking Sean Connery out and turning him into a gentleman.”
Vaughn dreamed up an orphaned Eton student who wants to become a Bond-type, but Millar wanted to bring it home, and wrote about a hoodie getting trained for counter-terrorism. The boy, Eggsy, doesn’t fit in with the other recruits, and initially has a hard time. “I don’t want to go back to the estate and I don’t want to live on benefits,” he says, on the verge of quitting, “but it’s the only place I don’t get the piss taken out of me for being poor.”
“I grew up on a housing estate, and the reason I really wanted to create Eggsy is because I was seeing so many demonised housing estate characters,” says Millar. “My experience growing up on a housing estate is that it wasn’t people who didn’t want to work, or who were vile or disgusting; it was people who had a piano in their front room, or were teachers, but who couldn’t afford to buy a place. It wasn’t the way you see housing estates portrayed in Channel 4 dramas, middle-class people writing about disgusting archetypes.”
Adapting it for cinema, Vaughn (who, having been educated at Stowe, experienced a very different upbringing) felt similarly, wanting a film that “showed that everyone deserves a chance”, although he changed Eggsy’s mentor from his uncle to a family friend. “My Fair Lady wouldn’t have worked if Audrey Hepburn was Rex Harrison’s niece,” he explained last year. “There’s no journey to go on.” In the comic, though, keeping it in the family had been important to Millar. “The uncle is also from the estate and inspires the nephew to do the same journey,” he says. “Dave and I talked early on about the notion of the upwardly mobile working-class hero.”
“And it rings true,” adds Gibbons. “I lived on a council estate in Hertfordshire. My mum came from the east end of London and she did everything she could to get out of that poor background – and she succeeded. Being poor doesn’t necessarily mean anything about you as people, it just means you’re poor. But there is that class thing in England, that you’re somehow a different breed because you haven’t got as much money. Secret Service shows how Eggsy, by his own strength of character, wins through.”
Having fun was equally important as any social message, which is why Bond looms so large in The Secret Service’s make-up – although the pair can’t agree on their favourite iteration. Millar loves Roger Moore’s 007, quips and all. Connery fan Gibbons does not. Millar has little time for Daniel Craig’s take, dismayed at the sight of Bond “having a cry” in the shower after he’s killed someone. Whereas Gibbons admits that he likes Craig’s Bond – “because he looks like he could have been a squaddie”.
Vaughn’s film, co-written by him and Jane Goldman (they previously adapted Millar’s Kick-Ass together), is more overtly comedic than the comic: gaudier, brasher, more lurid. The megalomaniac villain, a geeky Harvard entrepreneur on paper, is now a loud, lisping Samuel L Jackson, whom Millar was delighted to finally meet. In The Ultimates, Millar’s 2002 take on the Avengers for Marvel, Nick Fury was drawn as Jackson; the actor was subsequently cast as Fury in the films, and thanked Millar when they met on Secret Service: “He said, ‘That was a great nine-picture deal you got me!’”
Much of the Avengers movie was influenced by Millar’s Ultimates, just as the next film in the Captain America series will draw from Millar’s Civil War comics. Having been a gun for hire at Marvel, he makes no money from the studio’s films, but doesn’t mind.
“When I see Civil War becoming Captain America 3 I don’t get mad, I just think, Well, that was a step towards me building the audience that I could take over to Kick-Ass. Kick-Ass would have been a tiny book if I’d never done those years at Marvel – probably never a movie – and Secret Service would never have happened. And, weirdly, a lot of people say, ‘Oh, do you just do these so they become films?’ But I do stuff I’m into rather than what I think might sell. Having a little girl [in Kick-Ass] dressed as Robin saying the word ‘cunt’, and in the same book to have a superhero whose opening scene has him masturbating at the internet… In my mind, I was thinking, ‘This is just pure enjoyment!’”
Millar, on borrowed time, springs up. “Gentlemen, a pleasure,” he says, before taking a final swig and hurrying off, dangerously late to meet his family. “I ran the entire length of the airport drunk to catch the plane tonight PUSHING A PRAM,” he tweets later. “It wasn’t pretty.” He loved it, though.
Kingsman: The Secret Service is in cinemas from Thu. The comic book is out now
• The picture caption on this article was amended on 26 January 2015 to correct Taron Egerton’s name.
