From superhero to super zero: Veep, Succession creators turn on Marvel

Normal text sizeLarger text sizeVery large text sizeGiven Armando Iannucci’s track record for skewering the pompous – his past works include the English political satires The Thick of it (for TV) and In the Loop (movie), the US political satire Veep, the dark Soviet tragicomedy The Death of Stalin, and every media watcher’s favourite, Succession – you might imagine he comes at the world of superhero movie making as a fully fledged cynic. But you’d be wrong – or at least, not entirely right.“I was a Marvel fan as a kid. I spent all my pocket money on Marvel comics, I had all the first editions and whatever, and then when I went to university my mum threw them all out because she just thought, ‘well, they’re comics, he won’t want those’,” he says in his delightfully gentle Scottish brogue.Somewhere along the line he let this shady aspect of his past slip, and Marvel Comics got in touch with the offer to write for them. “So I’ve done a Spider-Man, I’ve…