Mark Millar’s Kindergarten Heroes set for the big screen with writer Carter Blanchard

Last Updated on August 2, 2021

Today I learned that Mark Millar wrote a children’s book.

That said, this book is hitting the big screen after Carter Blanchard delivered the winning pitch for Fox. Millar wrote the book with Curtis Tiegs, who he met on the Millarworld boards. The idea was to create something for kids that were around 5 years of age, the ones who are just beginning their love of superheroes. As Millar put it in an interview with CBR in 2012, “Walk down the high street and you don’t see 25-year-old men with their faces painted like Spider-Man (well, not usually…). It’s the toddlers who are maybe most fanatical about this stuff. They love the cartoons and the movies, but tend not to pick up the comics. As we’ve seen with the all-ages comics at Marvel and DC, there’s a definite glass ceiling in terms of readership. The bulk of comic readers don’t feel they’re for them and little kids are unaware they’re even out there. So I’ve tried to reach out to this new audience in a different way.”

It’s definitely a great idea. You can explain to your kids, “Oh, Batman man fights bad guys.” They see him in movies, and see him doing exactly that but will they go out and pick up a comic book? Millar hopes that’s what will happen, “Wouldn’t it be great if kids discovered superhero comics after reading these books and went out and bought ‘Superman’ and ‘Spider-Man’ when they were a little older? There was a great tradition of very young kids comics in the UK to get readers started, and they graduated onto titles like ‘2000AD.'”

As you may have already guessed, the story of KINDERGARTEN HEROES is kind of self-self-explanitory, “All I’ll say is that it does what it says on the box, which is that this is the kindergarten where all the superheroes leave their toddlers when they go on their adventures. We never see the parents, so we can assume that these kids are the super-powered off-spring of all your favorite heroes. It’s very cute and their little adventures, in terms of tone, would be similar to Pixar. I’m trying to make it genuinely funny, genuinely exciting and genuinely dramatic when it needs to be. Pixar is pretty beat-perfect in terms of doing something that doesn’t alienate the adults or the kids and that’s what I’m trying to do here. I’d like my readers to buy this for their kids or little brothers and sisters, but at the same time really enjoy it themselves.”

Blachard will write the screenplay for the film. Simon Kinberg will produce, and there is a possibility that this will become a franchise. The book has yet to release in stores.