EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW: Comic Legend Mark Millar And Artist Per Berg Talk Vatican City

Millarworld has been producing an epic amount of content since Dark Horse Comics picked up the line last year, though perhaps the most exciting of all is the new series Vatican City by Mark Millar and Per Berg. It is a story set at the end of the world, where the last remnant of humanity is within the Vatican’s walls, staving off a horde of vampires.

The idea was originally introduced in The Magic Order Volume 3, where the characters there quickly explored a multiverse, which this incredible creative team has now built into a full, killer story.

Both Mark Millar and Per Berg took the time to speak with Fandom Pulse about their upcoming #1 issue, a 40-page book that will be out Wednesday, April 9th, in comic shops.

You both have very distinctive styles in art and writing. In a collaboration like with Vatican City, how do you bring your own unique style to the table and maintain the other’s distinctiveness? Do you alter the process at all, or does it flow naturally?

MM: I came up with Vatican City a few years ago, as I’ve mentioned before, but I didn’t think I was going to do it as a comic book. My job at Netflix is quite unusual in that after they bought my company they offered me a separate job to write sequels to the franchises they bought and also create a certain amount of new stories every year. Vatican City was one of the first ones I did, a really simple, self-contained scriptment, but I couldn’t really see it as a comic at first. Netflix let me turn a lot of these ideas, like Magic Order, into comics because they know I love the medium, but they’re actually created to be shows or movies. But there was something about this I always liked and I dropped a few pages of this world into The Magic Order and eventually I just really, really wanted to do a comic-book of it too. I’d been in love with Per’s art for a while and this just felt like a good fit. I’d seen him on Twitter and the great book he did with Richard Meyer and I was delighted when he said he’d find the time. I really think he’s one of the greatest new talents, my favourite new artist to have appeared in the past five or ten years. The way he looks at things is just amazing. I think he’s unlike anyone else.

PER: Mark loved a mad max fan comic I had done and encouraged me to work in that direction, which was all traditional inks, so that helped the look of the book a lot. Other than that he turned me loose. I asked him early on, 'Do you want me to send you thumbnails for approval, and then proceed to the final art?'. And he said, "Nope, I only work with the best so just do what you do." It's amazing that he said that, but also it made me extra nervous. I think I blacked-out the first 3 months of production in a cold-sweat just trying to make sure I delivered some quality pages. Markwrites with this iconic style utilizing contextually rich panels, usually only 4 panels per page... so the storytelling and clarity has to be on point and that was a big part of what I focused on.

Mark’s described this book as the most Catholic comic book ever. Other than it being set in Vatican City, what makes the book have Catholicness?