special needs school. The first comics that Millar read were the seminal 121st issue of The Amazing Spider-Man, which featured the death of Gwen Stacy, and a Superman book purchased by Bobby that day. Millar's interest in the medium was further cemented with the black-and-white reprints of other comics, purchased for him by his brothers, so much that he drew a spider web across his face with an indelible marker that his parents were unable to scrub off in time for his First Communion photo a week later. Millar's mother died of a heart attack at age 64, when Millar was 14, and his father died four years later, aged 65. Although Millar enjoyed drawing comics, he was not permitted to go to art school because his family frowned upon such endeavours as a waste of time for the academic Millar, who studied subjects like chemistry, physics and advanced maths. He initially planned to be a doctor, and subsequently decided that becoming an economist would be a viable alternate plan, but later decided that he "couldn't quite hack it" in that occupation. He attended Glasgow University to study politics and economics, but dropped out after his father's death left him without the money to pay his living expenses. In the mid-late 1970s, Millar appeared as a frequent guest on the long-running Scottish kids TV programme Glen Michael's Cartoon Cavalcade, for which he was a regular fan of the show at the time, on one occasion he was invited onto the show to talk about the history of comics and later stated in a interview with the Scottish newspaper Daily Record that Glen Michael's TV show was where he first discovered superheroes. Career 1980s–1990s work Millar was first inspired to become a comic book creator after meeting Alan Moore at a con in the mid-1980s. Years later, when an 18-year-old Millar interviewed Scottish comic book writer Grant Morrison for a fanzine, he told Morrison that he wanted to create comics as both a writer and an artist. Morrison, who then-recently returned to comics after spending most of the decade touring with his band The Mixers and had limited experience both of writing and drawing stories earlier in his career, suggested that Millar focus on one of those career paths, as it was very hard to be successful at both, which Millar cites as the best advice he has ever received. Soon