#I really wanted to do the big drawing justice yet I am a bit torn whether or not I like it

[mitamicah]

I am now 29 which is fitting since like Jere I am also turning into a very obvious Bojan boy x'D

This is my little birthday present to myself featuring memories around Bojan from the Malmö gig on March 15 2024 :D

All sketches (and more) will be posted in it's own post as well ^V^

[davidmann95]

I think you read these but I don’t think you’ve ever made a post about them specifically so what are your thoughts on Jupiter’s Legacy/Jupiter’s Circle? Any interesting comparisons between Utopian and Superman you took away?

I’m going to level with you: I have mixed feelings on those books when they do not especially merit them.

I was, once upon a time, in the exact right time, place, and demographic to think Mark Millar’s comics were the shit, and this hit juuuuuuust at the tail end of that. It doesn’t hurt that it’s the other end of the lynchpin of Millarworld as a shared universe with Wanted, because of all Millar’s sounds-cool-in-the-abstract big ideas, the world he ultimately built might be the biggest and abstractly coolest of all. “Superheroes USED to be real, but then the villains beat them and took over the world and fooled us all into accepting what we know as the ‘real world’, but their grip loosened (because of what went down in Wanted) and now weird things are starting to leak back in” is I’ll maintain to my dying day a rad idea for a shared universe with tons of room for development in all sorts of directions, even if as usual it doesn’t live up to the logline. And Jupiter is the Earth-2 to all that, where the heroes stuck around and eventually grew out of control.

In practice, the comic’s not very good. I believe Millar when he says he wants it to be his Watchmen, and in a certain sense I believe he’s right, just not in the sense he intends: it’s all his interests mixed together at the height of his...stylization, his real-world superhero fixation and love for Hollywood conventions and his kernel of sincere unvarnished love for old-school cape-and-tights adventures, all mingling in a kind of Kingdom Come meets Civil War mashup. There’s still little good moments, still cool ideas, still bits of the stuff that leave me inordinately nostalgic for the guy’s output at his peak, but I think the most telling thing is that a character quote in a promotional ad was “Is that why you hate me, dad? Because I’m the only thing you ever failed at?” and in the actual comic it was utterly mangled into “Is this why you’re always yelling at me, man? Am I the one thing in your perfect life you worry you maybe failed at?” - Millar doing his Millar thing wins out over telling the story in the best way possible every time. Meanwhile Quitely is trying his absolute damndest (except for the last page of #3, which he clearly had to rush out the door, which sucks because it’s ostensibly a huge emotional moment) and still pulling incredible storytelling tricks, but also this ate up 5 years of his invaluable time. Glad he’ll be able to cash out big time, but still.

Jupiter’s Circle meanwhile, while a prequel created purely as a stalling tactic to give Quitely time on the main book, actually has its moments. It’s still a Millar comic, and the ending involves an incredibly gross ‘twist’ that bars me from seriously recommending it, yet it’s also the last thing of his where I got the sense that he was really trying to accomplish something storytelling-wise rather than pinning together notions and setpieces in lieu of an actual formal pitch document. As much as ‘Mark Millar writes a comic about the not-Justice League being torn apart by domestic and internal troubles against the backdrop of the 1960s’ does pretty much everything you’d expect it to do in a negative sense too, there are real little moments of poignancy and heartbreak and wonder that remind you that once upon a time, he did some really good stories that were the springboard to *gestures broadly*. And it’s Wilfredo Torres drawing it with some filler by Chris Sprouse, so it’s comparably gorgeous to its big brother, plus there’s a scene where not-Superman is visibly uncomfortable having to be in a room with Ayn Rand. Speaking of whom, since you asked, the Utopian actually is in the context of the full story a solid tragic take on a Superman gone wrong, a ‘classic’ version who was on the verge of becoming a truly transformative figure for a new era who by betrayal, misunderstanding, and terrible circumstance was cowed into remaining a conservative guardian of the status quo.

All-in-all, much as it’s about what you’d expect from Mark Millar’s Grand Opus, there are bits and pieces of it that leave me interested. Maybe it’s just his initial interviews where he gives a sense of grand scope to it as a Star Wars/Lord of the Rings-esque classical sweeping epic for the superhero genre (specifically promising it was something far bigger than what it really ended up being) that even if I knew back then was bullshit still sounded cool, or the hints of something REALLY big coming that never fully paid off, but there are enough interesting ideas, good scenes, and potentially promising character dynamics that I’m sincerely interested what the Netflix adaptation will be able to do with it, and the theoretically upcoming trilogy-capper Jupiter’s Requiem set decades down the road will be the first comic of his in a number of years I’ll buy, even as it’s also in all likelihood the last. What can I say, I’m a completionist.