By Ayo
Jupiter’s Legacy, no. 1
Mark Millar, Frank Quitely
Millar World/Image Comics
April 2013
Look, Frank Quitely is the best superhero artist in the world. His use of space in his signature horizontal compositions is still understudied and overlooked. Nobody put out a better superhero comic this week because nobody is better than Frank Quitley.
But sweet heaven, this was also likely the most boring comic this week as well. As a debut issue this was about equivalent to the first track on a hip hop CD that features two and a half minutes of the rapper talking lazily to his friend over a good beat about something so vague that it fails to even make an impression. Feels like a waste of a good beat.
The Comics Journal’s Tucker Stone and Comics Alliance’s David Brothers already gave this comic as serious a looking as it deserves. This is the kind of work that gets produced when writers and artists are allowed to rest on their laurels and feed off of the fat of their past achievements. As the introduction of a new work, Jupiter’s Legacy is lazy. It is banking on the reader’s emotional investment., not the work at hand. But as a brand new story with new characters, a new world to explore, the only emotional investment of loyalty that a reader can have is an investment in the authors. Having enjoyed another work previously doesn’t make this project better than what appears on the page. On its own merits, Jupiter’s Legacy is just no good.
I’m sorry, Tucker Stone, for swiping your panel scan.
Wait, really? My mind is blanking right now but there’s gotta be some underground comics where it doesn’t end in OD, I’ve prolly written some stuff where it didn’t.
People should do a movie where the name of the drug that the characters take is just called “overdose.”
Totally! We should start calling an existing drug by that name, as if it’s new street-slang, and see if people start saying it.