My experience with the writing of Mark Millar has been, shall we say, mixed. I read his Marvel event Civil War in trade and was swept up in the widescreen, action-packed morality tale. Not content to wait for future collections to see what happened next, I returned to the weekly comic buying habit for the first time in a decade. Soon after that I read his mini-series Marvel 1985, which remains my favorite of his work. Operating on both a smaller and larger scale than Civil War, 1985 is suffused an emotional warmth which, I would soon discover, is often absent from Millar’s writing.

Fantastic Four was one of the first titles I started buying post-Civil War, so the announcement that Millar was taking over the series excited me; the issues themselves disappointed. I read Old Man Logan and the first volume of Kick-Ass, thinking that both started strong with intriguing concepts only to ultimately collapse into gratuitous violence.

At this point I began to wonder if series like 1985 had been a fluke. I stopped pulling new titles by him.Then last year I started hearing loud buzz for Starlight, its fans proclaiming that it is not typical Mark Millar. I was curious. Recently I had the opportunity to read an advanced copy of the series trade, and was quite pleased to discover that its proponents were correct: Starlight is the best thing that Millar has written in years.
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