Is Mark Millar going to be responsible for the next great superhero television experience?
Netflix has put up a lot of cred to find out, with a slate of projects they’ve been developing for production following their recent acquisition of Millar’s extensive body of comic titles. A bold move by two companies known for making bold moves that frequently pay off handsomely.
No reason to play small then. And that, they ain’t. First off the block is the series Jupiter’s Legacy, Millar’s modern American superhero fable that he and pop-sensation artist Frank Quitely first brought to the page to rousing acclaim, only seven years ago, in 2013. Now streaming it’s first season on the Netflix platform.
Because things move fast in the Millar-verse.
But we’re not here to talk about the television show. We’re here to talk about the books that started it all. In anticipation of the series, Image Comics recently released four volumes of Jupiter’s Legacy stories which Millar published between 2013 and 2017, with the help of Quitely and fellow artists Wilfredo Torres, Davide Gianfelice, and Chris Sprouse.
It’s a compendium that all comics fans should be reading now.
That’s not just because the books serve as the basis for the television series. They also fill in a lot of the uncertainty left unresolved at the end of the first season, with a story arc that is as timely today as it was in 2013. Though possibly somewhat differently than Millar may have first imagined.
The lead premise of Jupiter’s Legacy is pure old-school What-If riff, one that is a simple as it is chock full of potential: What would modern American society look like if it was populated with super-beings as revered and commercialized as our current landscape of media icons, reality tv stars, and American idols? And what would that community of elite super-scions do with all their gods-given, God-like power, if they became unmoored from the heroic values and principles that once defined the Greatest Generation of their forebears?
What indeed?
After all, the legacy of the world’s greatest American superhero team can be a lot to live up to. One can only imagine what someone with the world’s biggest daddy issues might do with too much power.
At least that was the blank page Millar and Quitely looked to fill in 2013. What they came up with was a story that turned the comics industry on its ear.
Millar has never been one to shy away from the power of shock and awe in his storytelling. Arguably, he’s done more to make that approach go mainstream than almost any other modern comics writer in the business today.
The original run of Jupiter’s Legacy stories not only relies on that technique, it leans into it, dropping us into a sequence of events that reads like nothing so much as picking up a story in the third scene of a Shakespearean tragedy. On steroids.
The subsequent shift in the balance of power, and all the consequences that follow, sets the scene for a final confrontation and a Battle Royale that plays out over two volumes of stories, (and apparently at least two seasons of the Netflix drama) while managing in the process to mirror much of our own recent political history with a somewhat eerie prescience.
Make of that what you will. But it certainly makes for a good morality play.
Sandwiched in between these two volumes of Millar and Quitely’s main story, are two additional volumes that Millar wrote as a larger historical window into the team that started it all, the hallowed Union of Justice.
The Utopian, Lady Liberty, Brain-Wave, Blue Bolt, the Flare, and Sky Fox were the greatest heroes of their time, a band of friends who together became the marvels of their age, and sired a new breed of supermen and superwomen that may or may not become the better angels their benefactors once dreamed of.
That backstory is itself an entirely unsubtle riff on the original 20th century iconic team of super-friends, the Justice League, (complete with their very own Hall of Justice), one that is nonetheless peppered throughout with the sort of very human foibles and scandals you’d expect from classic noir and beat pulp fiction.
Artists Torres, Gianfelice, and Sprouse complement Millar’s soap opera storytelling on these second two volumes with work that is appropriately clean, dynamic and straightforward. It’s not as flashy as Quitely’s hyper-nuanced style, but it’s not meant to be. The contrast keeps the two bodies of work distinct.
That said, I will caution first-time readers that this new four-volume collection presents the whole collection in chronological order, which is to say that the two volumes of back-story are bundled in the first two books.
That’s NOT how the series was first published, and I think it’s a mistake to publish them that way now. Far better I think to jump into the first story arc of the modern day run, just as Millar originally intended, for maximum effect.
That original run of stories by Millar and Quitely, is all in Volume 3 of the new collection. So my advice? Start there. Then if you want to dive into the back-stories of Volume 1 and Volume 2 before continuing on to the ending in Volume 4, by all means. That’s how they were originally published after all.
Of course, the television series only has one stylistic through-line, even if the narrative bounces around in time to encompass both eras of this sprawling American superhero story.
It wasn’t clear how Millar and the production staff were going to handle all the flashback sequences in the television series. Now we know that while the main story arc indeed begins in the present, the plot jumps around liberally in time to cover the full story. That can be a bit hard to follow on the screen. So go get the books and read the stories as they were first conceived. It can only help.
Whether or not Netflix and Millar have successfully created the vehicle they need to create a brand new universe of all-too-human super-hero storytelling to fill up the screens in your living room and smartphone, remains to be seen. But the story is out there now, and it’s primed to percolate through our psyche for the next two years to come at least. What we do with that, is up to us.
Just don’t expect Millar to pull any punches. Watch out world. Jupiter’s Legacy is about to take everything you know about super-heroes, and prove you wrong. Again.
And if we’re lucky, just maybe America will take the cue.
