In the same month, Marvel released books where Northstar was killed a further two times (in the Ultimate Universe and X-Men: The End). JG: Also, during your run on Wolverine 'Enemy of the State', the title character killed Northstar, the first openly gay superhero. If it doesn't come naturally it shouldn't be a part of the story. I hate it when you see a group and they have their Hispanic, their gay guy, their black guy and so on. If a character pops into my head as a gay guy or a blue eyed guy or a red-head that's the way I write him. MM: I just never think in those terms when writing a story.

Is it simply a case that it hasn't been relevant to any of your projects since? He didn't officially come out until the end of Brian K Vaughan's run on Ultimate X-Men to my knowledge.

The biggest I can think of is Ultimate Colossus, and that was pretty much just subtext when you wrote him. JG: Aside from those two characters, you don't often touch on gay issues since. Nobody there wanted a man who looked like Batman kissing a man who looked like Superman, but that's exactly what Warren gave them when he created the book (laughs). Naturally, I suppose they were just fearful of their jobs. They're custodians of America's icons and part of a massive multinational. They had their edgy crime and horror books, but they didn't like to see controversy and superheroes mixed in the same way. It had become this runaway success when everything else was collapsing, which made it especially hard for them, but it just wasn't stuff they wanted to see in a superhero comic. Some rumours seem to suggest that many of the content issues involved Apollo and Midnighter, is this true? JG: There always been a lot of rumours that DC was quite uncomfortable with a lot of the content in The Authority, to the point that the book was censored a lot. The team had to look after an orphan and these two characters were the only couple on the team. The adoption of the baby was again just played very naturally. They were more likely to talk about what was on telly that night or what they should have for dinner than whether gay marriage laws should be enacted in California. Heterosexuals don't sit around talking about the heterosexual experience so I wanted to make this very matter of fact and real-life.

The Apollo and Midnighter were gay and my plan was never to make a big deal of it. Mark Millar: I always think it's a mistake to write a story around an issue, but if it flows naturally from the characters that's fine. Was that part of the reason you wrote all that with them? That there were so little visible gay issues in comics that you went all the Not only were they open with their sexuality, but they got a gay marriage and adopted a child together, exceptionally progressive, especially for comic books. Joe Glass: You quite famously wrote the out gay couple Apollo and Midnighter in The Authority.

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