Jupiter's Legacy #3

[lordultimus]

"It all ties into this big science-fiction concept... But then you can knuckle it down to something even simpler: what if the world's coolest guy, like Superman, married the world's coolest woman, like Wonder Woman, and they had these f---ing awful children who would be like the Kardashians?" -- Mark Millar

Warning for gore.

Comments

[thanekos]

It'd be reductive to suggest Millar thought of this as " Kingdom Come, but a lot of the ' traditional heroes ' are also shit ".. but he had to've, at some point.

[repto]

Isn't that just Millar being Millar, though. "Hey, you know all those cool superheroes that you enjoy? Okay, but what if they were all gigantic assholes?"

[donnblake]

I assume Brandon's meant to look scraggly and/or scruffy, but the way his beard is drawn just makes him look kinda lumpy.

[super_fly]

Lumpy People is pretty much Quitely's style, as much as I like it.

[dcbanacek]

I'd be more impressed if Brandon had snapped Sheldon's neck and then told his corpse, "The first thing we should do to help our fellow man is to stop listening to OLD people who think they know what's best for us."

Inferring from what I've seen so far is that the teleporter with the Mega-Rod is the son of one of the villains... strange how he seems to come across better than the "heroes" do...

[themajesticmoose]

I read the scans of the first two issues and thought "Well this doesn't seem too bad are we sure this is Millar"

But no here we are

Just

HORRIBLE

[strejdaking]

I don't have problem with the violence, but the plot of the main book is pretty boring and underdeveloped. What he said: https://twitter.com/riteshwriter/status/1308504331654586368

[blueprintstyles]

Looking over these again They went to murder REAL quick. I mean, they could've confronted Sheldon as a group to say they wanted help in a different way. This makes seem like they were murderers in waiting the entire time. Powers or not they were raised by fundamentally good people, going by the prequel series.

[donnblake]

But I don't want to have a sincere discussion about the role of superhumans in public policy, I want to turn people into dinosaurs murder my overbearing father figure!

[themajesticmoose]

In a Mark Millar comic everyone is basically one stubbed toe away from burning down a city block and eating babies at any given time.

[tcampbell1000]

Yeah, this is really the bottom Jenga piece of the whole damn construction. Like, Walter is clearly evil, and I can just about buy that Brandon would snap, after a lifetime of his dad's judgmental Puritanism for which he was never going to be "good enough." But what's these sixty or so other "heroes'" excuse for straight-up murdering the world's greatest hero and heroine and their daughter? Don't bother answering, because there's really nothing to be said in defense of it that wouldn't make the speaker sound like a cynical jackass.

Also, guess last issue's "It's obvious you're the only one who could challenge him PHYSICALLY" was a complete and total lie: these guys would've been TOTALLY capable of kicking the Utopian into liquid form if they hadn't cleared out to give Brandon his Moment.

[strejdaking]

1. Rude? 2. On pages not shown here (I don't get why, the series has already been posted here), it's at least made clear most of said "heroes" are just bunch of decadent celebrities, who can't stand Utopian and are just in it for the publicity. Yeah, still kinda stretch from that to "gang up to murder him", but you could argue it was a choice between two patriarchs-one who kept comandeering them for being loser wastoids and one who wanted to make them the rulers of the world while selling it as them being heroes making the world better, and the latter convinced them it was necessary to kill the former.

[tcampbell1000]

Well, I only concluded it was dehumanizing to defend this development after trying to do it myself. I do my best to be fair, but the Trump Administration has exhausted my patience with overly mercenary views of humanity.

The early scenes of Jupiter's Legacy are a respectable hit job on then-current, still-relevant celebrity culture, but the leap from that to the Kardashians cutting Kendall Jenner's throat is as over the top as any idea Millar's ever produced. I think if you had to characterize early-oughts celebrities, you'd come up with descriptions like vapid and underdeveloped in moral character, not crazed murder hobos or sadistic ageists.

Again, it could've been believable if we'd focused more on the characters Millar actually cares about. There's really no need for most of the extras to be there: Walter and Brandon clearly could have done these hit jobs all by themselves after the nuclear trap went off. (You'd maybe need one or two mercenaries or psychos to engineer that trap and act as backup. Three, tops.)

I'm not sure most of these extras need to exist in the series at all, except to give Millar options for his later epic ambitions. But if you really need them as a backdrop, it'd be far more realistic to just cut Sheldon's mic with an EM pulse and have the others ignorant of the coup or conflicted enough to stay out of it. Hey, it's a family fight, and surely they won't actually hurt each other, right? Hitting each other to argue is just a superhero custom, like the way Italians talk with their hands. And then, later: Well, that was kind of fucked up, but we weren't there. I heard a rumor somewhere that Sheldon was abusing Brandon and the poor kid just couldn't take it any more. You saw how they talked to each other, I could believe it. Look, I'm just saying we shouldn't make too big a thing about this until we see whether Walter really can save the economy.

That's how evil deeds actually get done and go unpunished, through apathy, short-sighted selfishness, and deference to authority far more than psychopathy all the way down. And it's those former traits that are relevant to the celebrity-culture thing.

But of course, leaving those other guys out would mean there wouldn't be as much goddamn SPECTACLE. Superheroes killing each other just isn't enough any more, so sure, let's try superhero mob violence. No need for nuance, the explanation is that everyone's a fucker!

(I spotted a wiki somewhere that insisted every murder-"hero" here was under Walter's psychic influence. I suspect the TV series will make that idea more of a factor. But good luck proving that convincingly from the comic's text.)

[strejdaking]

I ain't American, but you gotta admit, most people who changed their mind on humanity after Trump Administration didn't become more positive about it. I've always thought it was a stretch, just thought you were little too harsh.

[tcampbell1000]

I hear you, and I'm not upset with you.

An overly mercenary view of humanity was an essential part of the Trump coalition. He wouldn't have been elected or stayed out of prison this long without it. That alone would be reason enough for me to loathe it.

[strejdaking]

Again, not my place, but that sounds like pretty much that exact opposite of the way I see people talk about it and look back on it. That overly optimistic view of humanity is what kept him in power and made people see his voters as reasonable and reachable.

[tcampbell1000]

The cynicism on the Republican side is what I'm primarily referring to there, the belief that all politicians-- all people, really-- are corrupt the second they get a taste of power, so what do "scandals" really matter any more? All that matters is whether your guy plays on your team or not. Alternatively, if you listen to enough Fox News exclusively, every last Democrat is a demon, so any bad news about our guy must be demon talk.

On the side of sanity, failure to understand that mindset led many including me to underestimate the nature of Trump's support for a while. It got comically repetitive how often some of us thought that okay, this time, this scandal would be the one to bring him down. But in their defense, that is how politics in America worked until relatively recently, and it's too early to be sure whether Trump's scandal immunity is specific to him or not. There aren't many politicians who led into their career with 30-odd years of self-promotion as a "yuge business success," 15 of them on a hit TV show. But also, we live in a polarized age that's seen similar decades of Fox News and more recent wingnut bloggers offering up alternative facts for the gluten/reality-intolerant. That brainwashing isn't going to be undone in one moment, and its strength will vary from person to person. For some it won't be undone at all, just as there were OG Nazis and Nixonites who went to their graves convinced their leader was the one good man brought down by this fallen world.

But just because something is hard doesn't mean you give up. And I think some observers who embraced cynical defeatism after Trump did more to enable him, and whoever comes after him, than those who were all "la la la, don't worry, someone's gonna say 'enough' to all this ANY DAY NOW." The world hurt them, so they decided to change their beliefs to avoid getting hurt again, but sometimes working for a better world means risking a punch in the gut.

[zachbeacon]

*Scrolling*

*Scrolling*

SWORDS!

THE FUCK?!